We are honoured and excited to be bringing you what can only be described as a hotly anticipated novel : Dedalus, by Chris McCabe.
The debut novel of a respected and much-loved poet; a sequel to the lodestar of Modernist writing; causing a stir among Joyceans and universities before it was even signed. The firstfruits of this novel… but I will share these with you later. For now :
“Friday’s children would be fattening like seals across the sand, on their way to class. Black liquorice teeth. Loving and giving under the whalefeed of the clouds. He had to teach.”
Friday 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up in a Dublin Martello tower, hungover but with winnings in the pocket of his borrowed trousers. Dedalus goes about his day. Settling scores and debts. Pursued by the ghosts of his mother, Hamlet, and now a man called Leopold Bloom who has woken up with plans for him. The young poet weaves hopes and ideas into burning wings of ambition. Can he elude death in the passages of books?
McCabe’s iconoclastic tribute to James Joyce’s masterpiece gives right-of-reply to his self-portrait, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen and Bloom, cut from Joyce’s ego, become cultural types pasted into Digital Age storytelling.
“Parts of this book will remain with me, and pollute my reading of Hamlet and Ulysses, forever. I also add it to my personal library of Great Books About Dead Fathers.”
Max Porter, Author of Grief is the Thing with FeathersBLOOMSDAY BOOK LAUNCH:
FREE entry
5pm – 7pm
Saturday 16th June 2018Lock-keeper’s Cottage Graduate Centre
(nr. Mile End Lock)
Queen Mary University of London
London
E1 4PD
Nearest Tube Mile EndJoin us for a can of Forty Foot beer 😉 music, and an interactive reading : you choose which path we take as we dip into the book. You can turn up on the day, but email us (RSVP here) to be added to the guest list and receive updates.
We are delighted to be hosted by Queen Mary University of London Department of English : The London home of Joyce scholarship and Ping’s alma mater, where she studied Ulysses and first introduced it to David. Without this introduction editing this book would have been impossible. QMUL offer cutting edge courses in Modernist Literature and Creative Writing. This is the place to be.
Order your PRESALE copy here, and it will arrive in all its gorgeousness (yellow translucent cover!) before Bloomsday:
Chris McCabe is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Speculatrix (Penned in the Margins). Pharmapoetica, with Maria Vlotides, was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award and his plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in Liverpool and London. His non-fiction series, searching for a great lost poet in one of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries, begins with In the Catacombs: a Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery (selected as an LRB Bookshop book of the year) and Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery. He co-edited, with Victoria Bean, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015).
