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Nella Last’s War | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Nella Last’s War | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 60: Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 In 1937 the social research group Mass Observation launched a project to record the lives of ordinary people in Britain by recruiting 500 volunteer diarists. One of these was Nella Last, a housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness with a husband and two grown-up sons, one a trainee tax-inspector and one in the army. So far, so seemingly ordinary, but there was nothing ordinary about Nella. She left us an unrivalled account of life in wartime Britain that is not only a piece of social history but also the portrait of a woman you feel could have run the country, given half a chance.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Autumn 2022

We received a cheering email from Eduardo Ballester, a subscriber based on the south coast of Uruguay, back in 2019 which detailed plans to open a bookshop and a wish to stock Slightly Foxed. We jumped at the chance of our magazine and books finding readers in such a far-flung location, and eagerly anticipated the launch of Rizoma in La Juanita, José Ignacio a year later. It is always a thrill to see photos of our publications in such a beautiful setting. Please read on to hear more about Rizoma from Eduardo, pick up a book recommendation or two and cast your eyes over the striking photographs of the librería.
Stockists
‘Every offering is a true gem’ | New this Autumn from Slightly Foxed

‘Every offering is a true gem’ | New this Autumn from Slightly Foxed

Greetings, dear readers. We’re delighted to announce that the new Autumn issue of Slightly Foxed (No. 75) has now left the printing press at Smith Settle and will start to arrive with subscribers in the UK very soon and elsewhere over the next few weeks. It ranges far and wide in the usual eclectic manner: Galen O’Hanlon goes to the seaside with R. C. Sherriff • Ysenda Maxtone Graham enjoys a housewife’s wartime diaries • Christopher Rush meets Miss Jean Brodie in her prime • David Fleming goes monster hunting in Loch Ness • Sue Quinn celebrates Florence White’s English cooking • Adam Sisman faces a Martian invasion with H. G. Wells, and much more besides . . . With it, as usual, you’ll find a print copy of our latest Readers’ Catalogue, listing new books, our backlist, seasonal reading from other publishers’ bookshelves and a selection of offers and bundles. We hope it will provide plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track this autumn.
Episode 44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

Episode 44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

The writer Jean Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, her haunting prequel to Jane Eyre, yet her own life would have made for an equally compelling novel. Miranda Seymour, author of the definitive Jean Rhys biography I Used to Live Here Once, joins the Slightly Foxed team to follow Rhys’s often rackety life and shine light on her writing. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica, she dreamed of being an actress. And she did play many roles over the years: raconteur, recluse, wife (three times), grieving mother, enthusiastic drinker . . . But her most important role was that of a writer. We begin in the Caribbean with Smile Please, Rhys’s unfinished autobiography of her early years, where we meet a white creole girl who feels like an outsider. This feeling lingers, whether she is living in squalid London, on Paris’s Left Bank or in rural Devon. The women in her novels feel it too: Anna adrift in London in Voyage in the Dark, Julia leaving Paris in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Antoinette bound for Mr Rochester’s attic in Wide Sargasso Sea.
60 minutes
Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Hay and Kathryn Sutherland join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson’s life and work at St Paul’s Churchyard, the heart of England’s book trade since medieval times. We listen to the conversation around Johnson’s dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld’s books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison.
60 minutes
A Sort of Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

A Sort of Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Graham Greene once said that writing A Sort of Life, this memoir of his early life, ‘was in the nature of a psychoanalysis. I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.’ Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels. There can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer. We’re delighted to report that this classic memoir will be available to readers again. We first published it in our series of Slightly Foxed Editions more than a decade ago, and it proved so popular that it soon sold out. However, we are now reissuing it in a handsome hardback Plain Foxed Edition.
Comrade-in-Suds | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Comrade-in-Suds | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Warm wishes from SF HQ, where we’re clattering through the archive and plunging into the world of the plongeur with Christopher Robbins and George Orwell. Many of you may know the wonderful writing and colourful life of Christopher Robbins from his comic masterpiece, The Empress of Ireland (Slightly Foxed Edition No. 51). However, before he befriended the outrageous Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst, as documented in that delicious memoir, he lived in Copenhagen, took a job as a scullion and found a copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. The book ‘seemed to be written by a soul mate, a letter from one unpublished writer and dishwasher to another.’ 
26th August 2022

Slightly Foxed Subscribers’ Writing Competition

We feel it’s time for another of our Writer’s Competitions. We’ve greatly benefited from them in the past, finding, predictably, that among our readers there are some very good writers. The competition is open to all current Slightly Foxed subscribers. The winner will receive a prize of £250 and the piece will be published in a future issue of the magazine. All entries should reach us by 15 January 2023.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Beside the Seaside

Beside the Seaside

There is something timeless about the British seaside holiday. When I was a child we’d visit my grandparents, who had a beach hut at Studland on the Dorset coast. I would spend happy afternoons playing elaborate games in the sand, interrupted only by Granny leaping from the beach hut in her skirted bathing suit, calling out to me: ‘Galey darling, we are going for a swim!’ This would fill me with terror: I had still not yet learnt to swim. ‘Nonsense!’ she’d say, diving in. When I refused to go further than mid-shin, she’d put a thumb to her nose and surge off in a no-nonsense breaststroke. This daily ordeal taught me that a family holiday by the sea is not a straightforwardly happy affair: there are always, as my mum would say, good bits and bad bits.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Dream that Failed

The Dream that Failed

Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one of the first women in Russia to be allowed to qualify. Early in her life the family moved to Kiev, where Nadezhda attended school and then studied art. But she is famous not as an artist – she never pursued her career – but as the wife, and widow, of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom she met in Kiev in 1919 and married soon after; and for the two-volume memoir she wrote clandestinely in the 1960s, remembering her life with her husband and reflecting on the ‘catastrophe’, as she calls it, that had overtaken them and their friends, acquaintances and contemporaries, and their homeland, since the Bolsheviks seized power.
SF magazine subscribers only

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