What excellent company you are!

I have been devoted to your podcast for over a year; it could be improved only by being more frequent. Every book I have ordered from you has been a delight; nothing disappoints. I receive your emails with pleasure, and that’s saying a lot. Slightly Foxed is a source of content . . . ’
K. Nichols, Washington, USA

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Travelling with Swift

Travelling with Swift

Among quite a few things Gulliver’s Travels has in common with Alice in Wonderland, one in particular would have surprised their authors: each jumped nimbly across the boundary of their assumed readership. But they did so from different sides of the fence. Carroll’s child’s fantasy, spun during a picnic afternoon on the river, generated an entire academic industry for serious-minded adults; Swift, on the other hand, had ground out a bitter, hard-hitting satire on bad government, intellectual pretension and moral hubris, only to have it co-opted by children in their fascination for little people and giants.
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A Garden Litany

A Garden Litany

From about the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, anyone who could afford it owned a ‘book of hours’ and kept it close at hand for daily use. It contained the prayers of the divine offices to be said at appointed hours, as well as psalms, lists of saints and a calendar, often tailored to the particular place in which it was used. My diary, the only book I use many times a day, is a paltry thing beside these medieval books, some of which are made visually beautiful with illuminations, and all of which are conceptually beautiful in their weaving of the hours of each day with the arc of the whole year.
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The Mark of Cain

For me as a teenager, reading voraciously on the Natal sugar farm that was then my home, what gave Herman Charles Bosman an edge over other writers was that he was a murderer. That he was also one of a handful of South African writers who could confidently be called ‘major’ seemed incidental. From my adolescent perspective, lounging in a rattan chair on the veranda, with the sea of sugarcane swaying in the distance, it was his infamy that was beguiling.
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Romance of the Road

Romance of the Road

For anyone interested in places and their associations And So to Bath (1940) is a gem. Writing at the end of the 1930s under the shadow of war and in a succession of stages along the road’s hundred miles, Roberts conjures up a fascinating historical panorama from prehistoric times to Rome, the Plantagenets, the Tudors and Stuarts, the cultural glories (and social misdemeanours) of Georgian England and the Victorian prosperity and reforms that followed it, through to a philistine twentieth century which he laments. With a magpie’s zeal Roberts has gathered it all for us. For occasional fellow travellers he has the scholarly and spinsterly Miss Whissett, and Rudolf, an enthusiastic young Austrian student of English literature whose companionship may have held more than a passing charm for the bachelor author.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st December 2010

Slightly Foxed Issue 28: From the Editors

Predictably perhaps, given the season, it’s all go here at Slightly Foxed, what with dispatching the new book bags (for which there’s been a gratifying demand – hurry while stocks last!), taking orders and sending off copies of the quarterly to new subscribers. Then, of course, there’s fulfilling requests for Slightly Foxed Editions, forwarding orders for slipcases (also very popular at this time of year), chatting on the phone to those of you who ring us with enquiries and suggestions (always welcome), not to mention all the stuffing and franking of envelopes that goes with a small business like ours.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

Casting Out Fear

Man’s Search for Meaning has apparently sold more than 10 million copies and been published in 24 languages. It is, according to the Library of Congress, one of the ‘ten most influential books in the United States’. When you are happy, E. F. Benson or some other undemanding text is enough; when you torture yourself, you need to find ways of coping. Frankl’s book is unlike any other Holocaust memoir I have read. From the darkest degradation he brings hope. He finds meaning amid the meaningless. It would be an exaggeration to say that his book saved my life – but it did help me find meaning.
SF magazine subscribers only
Lighting a Candle for Poetry 

Lighting a Candle for Poetry 

When Jenny Swann’s mother died and left her a little money, she wanted to do something with it that her intelligent, well-read mother would have liked. So she started publishing poetry – not large chunks of it between traditional hard covers, but poetry in small, tempting, bite-size helpings, attractive to those who already love poetry, and easily digestible by those who don’t normally read it. The latter were the people she particularly wanted to reach. She hoped that discovering a poem they enjoyed might tickle their taste buds and lead them on to more of the poet’s work.
SF magazine subscribers only

To Hell and Back

Do you know the novels of Dan Rhodes? I ask because his books would appeal, I believe, to many readers. But he avoids journalism, does not belong to any literary groups or contemporary schools of writing and is very much an individual novelist. He neither pursues fame nor patronizes his readers. What he believes is what you get: sensitivity, humour, sadness and devastating shock. Sometimes I have been so saddened, so shocked, that I have stopped reading and put the book aside. But before long I am compelled to pick it up again and read on. And what I have read has found a place in my imagination.
SF magazine subscribers only
Gateway to the East

Gateway to the East

Grunty Fen has long been a source of mystery. For years it lurked in the dusty lumber-room of memory, unvisited and all but forgotten, its faint miasma lingering slightly, if unpleasantly, until all that was left was the name, only the name. Like Adelstrop, you might think, as immortalized by Edward Thomas; though until recently, all the two places had in common was that once, long ago and for a short time only, each boasted a small, branch-line railway station.
SF magazine subscribers only

Distance & Desire

Close Range collects eleven of Proulx’s short stories, all set at various points in the previous century on the ‘dangerous and indifferent ground’ of the author’s home state of Wyoming. It is a book echoing with the voices of hard-rolling, rusty-trucked ranching communities, inhabited by men and women who plod and plough and geld and herd for a living on isolated dots of farmsteads and in one-street towns. The characters don’t talk much, though occasionally they might talk too much: like a river in spate, this is when they tend to do most damage.
SF magazine subscribers only

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