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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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Asking the Right Questions

Asking the Right Questions

Aspiring young writers of fiction wish to be stylish. For many of them style is more essential than content, perhaps more important than sincerity. They want their prose to be inimitable, like Conrad’s or Hemingway’s, so that readers might identify their authorship from a single paragraph. As a young man, I was certainly like that, even though fiction didn’t turn out to be my thing. And of course I preferred to read novels by writers who themselves had a pronounced style.
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Episode 17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

Episode 17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

Dame Margaret Drabble joins us at the Slightly Foxed table as we celebrate her life in writing. From taking up her pen in the 1960s as a young mother alone in her kitchen to feeling part of a movement with Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and Edna O’Brien, to editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature without the help of a computer and eschewing the Booker Prize, Margaret Drabble sees writing as both an illness and a trade, finding black humour in ageing and joy in jigsaw puzzles along the way. And we uncover whatever happened to the elusive novelist Elizabeth Jenkins in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.
44 minutes
4th November 2019

‘I’ve only just received my first issue, and my “to-read” list has already become much longer.’

‘An attractive flyer slipped out from the pages and grabbed my attention. It was about Slightly Foxed, a British quarterly literary magazine “for literary nonconformists.” I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced love at first sight, but this came close. I was hooked even before I made it to the Slightly Foxed website . . . I’ve only just received my first issue, and my “to-read” list has already become much longer.’
- Serendipities | West Coast Editorial Associates Blog
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Indexing on the Mekong

I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often a hot topic of conversation) that every amateur indexer has his or her own way of working. Since our joint IT expertise would shame most 10-year-olds and certainly does not extend to using a computer’s indexing facility, my husband and I use pencil and paper. Tried and tested over the course of twenty-five indexes of varying lengths and complexity, this old-fogeyish no-tech method has served us well, but never more so than when compiling the index to Sowing the Wind, John’s twentieth - century history of the Middle East.

The Salesman Only Rings Once

I hunted for his books as well as for the miscellanies and magazines that featured his work. Though his entertaining, much-quoted Memoirs of the Forties soon reappeared in paperback, the rest of his surprisingly extensive output was hard to obtain. Due to their scarcity, his books commanded prices way beyond what I could afford. When I mentioned this to a flatmate who had access to a well-stocked reference library, my friend offered to smuggle out the ones I wanted. The first was the novel Of Love and Hunger, handed over to me at a furtive rendezvous. Before returning it a fortnight later, I photocopied the entire book. Confronted by a stack of smudgily duplicated pages, I felt like a Soviet dissident poring over a samizdat volume.
SF magazine subscribers only

Marriage Lines

It is 8 a.m. on a September Sunday in New Delhi. The garden below is still fresh and green before the heat of the day, and pigeons bill and coo on the air-conditioning unit outside the bedroom window. There is a discreet knock at the door, and a tray of ‘bed tea’ is silently placed beside us, accompanied by the morning papers. As I sip (tea with hot milk – an unfamiliar taste), I turn to my favourite section of the Hindustan Times, the ten pages of ‘Matrimonials’.
SF magazine subscribers only

Revelling with Ruskin

John Ruskin’s Praeterita is one of the most exhilarating books I know, and I often go back to it. For most of his life the great art-critic-cum-sage was writing books to educate people. Once, when a reader told him how much he enjoyed his books, Ruskin answered, ‘I don’t care whether you enjoyed them. Did they do you any good?’ But at the end of his life, when he feared he was going mad, he felt he must abandon all the religious and aesthetic and social controversy of his life, and write a book that just recalled the happiness of his youth. The result was Praeterita – ‘past things’.
SF magazine subscribers only

False Bottoms

Once met, I rarely dislike a person. But the idea of a person often fills me with dislike and even abhorrence. So it was with Wyndham Lewis. I never met him but I might easily have done so, since I often begged J. R. Ackerley, the brilliant literary editor of The Listener and a close friend of us both, to effect an introduction. But Ackerley, always oddly fearful that, if he brought any two of his friends together, he might lose both of them, did nothing.
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Well-salted

It is laconic and simple, non-romantic in that Slocum refuses to be a lone hero struggling against the terrifying sea. Rather, he is at home in the ocean wilderness, insisting that ‘the wonderful sea charmed me from the first’. Spray is his companion as much as a boat: ‘The Spray enjoyed many civilities while she rode at anchor.’ Revisiting Sailing Alone after more than thirty years, I was reminded of Slocum’s trick of appearing as a self-effacing guest, reading and cooking while the trusty Spray gets on with the job of sailing, holding her course with the wheel secured.
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