The Dead Queen of Bohemia

Waterstones 11

jennifagan — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:09:52 +0000

The Panopticon

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Format:	Hardback 256 pages

101 days until publication

Synopsis

Pa`nop´ti`con ( noun). A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen.

Anais Hendricks, 15, is in the back of a police car, headed for The Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can’t remember the events that led her here, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and there is blood on Anais’ school uniform.

Smart, funny and fierce, Anais is a counter-culture outlaw, a bohemian philosopher in sailor shorts and a pillbox hat. She is also a child who has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met.

The residents of the Panopticon form intense bonds, heightened by their place on the periphery, and Anais finds herself part of an ad-hoc family there. Much more suspicious are the social workers, especially Helen, who is about to leave her job for an elephant sanctuary in India but is determined to force Anais to confront the circumstances of her birth before she goes.

Looking up at the watchtower that looms over the residents, Anais knows her fate: she is part of an experiment, she always was, it’s a given, a liberty – a fact. And the experiment is closing in.

In language dazzling, energetic and pure, The Panopticon introduces us to a heartbreaking young heroine and an incredibly assured and outstanding new voice in fiction.

Book details

Published
03/05/2012

Publisher
William Heinemann Ltd

ISBN
9780434021772

The Random House Group News

jennifagan — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:02:17 +0000

20JAN

Women dominate Waterstones 11 List of Future Stars

Jenni Fagan

This year’s Waterstones 11, the major initiative created to uncover the best in debut fiction from around the world, is dominated by female talent, including three Random House Group authors.

Announced on Thursday at Waterstones’ flagship store, the list is seen as an indicator of potential prize contenders and those expected to go on to achieve critical and commercial success. On the list are Heinemann author Jenni Fagan, Transworld author Rachel Joyce and Vintage author Grace McCleen.

The list in full (in alphabetical order):

1. The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (William Heinemann)
2. Absolution by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic)
3. Shelter by Frances Greenslade (Virago)
4. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Fourth Estate)
5. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (Headline Review)
6. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
7. The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen (Chatto & Windus)
8. Signs of Life by Anna Raverat (Picador)
9. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Virago)
10. The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (Simon & Schuster)
11. Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles (Harper Press)

Waterstones’ Managing Director, James Daunt, said:

“There is a singular excitement to the discovery of a new writer of rare talent. For us booksellers, the process of introducing and guiding readers to the very best new work is one of the most important roles we perform. This year’s 11 are once again a marvellous selection. It is hard to believe these are debut novels, so assured and alive the writing.”

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

“Everything one could hope for in a debut novel; a strong, distinctive heroine, moments that make you laugh and the deft touch of a writer who can leave you with a lump in your throat.” – Mark Burgess, Fiction Team, Waterstones

A Waterproof Swan Staring Into The Wombs of Horses

jennifagan — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:33:05 +0000

I have been uber absent this year, finishing my novel, working on a new one, taking my baby to see the moon and explaining to him why the sky is blue. His repertoire of lullabies includes mostly just songs I like, so he bops along to the Cramps, or old sixties stuff, and Nina Simone, Tim Buckley, Sigur Ros, Glasvegas, Nirvana, early Blondie. Of course The Wheels on The Bus Go Round — is always popular too. My debut novel The Panopticon is now in its final edit stages and has changed so much throughout this whole process, and through writing it, I’ve changed as well. I am beyond excited that The Panopticon will be published by Heinemann, on May 3rd, 2012. I have lots more news to blog about it, but I will leave that until January. So much happened this year, having the baby of course, moving country, working on my Masters, reading at Edinburgh Festival, and more recently at Neu Reekie! Neu Reekie is a v.cool monthly event on in Edinburgh, check it out if you can. Other than that I am thinking of my dissertation on works from the periphery, and what does it mean to defy convention and is it even possible to create solely on your own terms? The problem is that the unconventional often become conventional as soon as expectation is placed upon it. Who knows. Not the Ninky Nonk. I am ending this year without one of my oldest, and closest friends as well, and all I can do is have gratitude for the times we shared. So I raise my cup of tea to all those loved, and vow to walk along all the beaches of ever, most especially at dawn. Here’s a poem for all you kitchen sink bohemians, I wrote it recently after listening to Neruda. Also, the lovely Daniel Johnstone to serenade all Santa’s gnomes J xx

Poem After Listening to Neruda

What we want, it so happens, we are.

I am sick,

a waterproof swan staring into the wombs of horses.

I am the still wool,

I am the elevator’s spectacles.

You — are how nature is separated,

and it so happens I am sick, and you are fingernails, hair and shadow.

A giant hand — so marvellous.

On the stair (where he killed a man with a balloon in his ear) my green knife.

A stretched out sleep,

breathing.

Everyday,

a wounded wheel.

Television

reflected

in my windows. Hideous.

Come on chicken, hang over the houses I hate, be a coffee pot!

Venom is umbilical,

bye bye grandma — under the house,

buzzing gas again.

Send out a kite, a kite to catch,

it will fly by your window, go on — look out now, it won’t destroy you.

Forget everything.

The park-light (is gold) and the people are beginning to point,

the sky — is opening.

Look out now, it won’t destroy you.

Dwang 3, An Artisan Anthology from Tangerine Press

jennifagan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:43:46 +0000

tangerine press: outsider poetry : prose : graphics in handbound limited editions.Dear people’s of the little planet, the next anthology from Tangerine Press is due out soon, I have some poems in there and the company is truly divine. If you have not encountered Tangerine Press before, then you are missing out on some of the most immaculate artisan publishing around. There are many books worth buying from TP – I keep mine in a vault, guarded by a gin soaked gun-toting troglodyte. So, don’t be square all you Daddy O’s, go take a peek through the hole in the wall.

Previously unpublished poetry, prose and graphics. Published May 2011. Poetry from: Billy Childish, Ntozake Shange, Kevin Williamson, Charles Plymell, Salena Godden, Geoff Hattersley, Ronald Baatz, K.M. Dersley, Adrian Manning, Gerald Nicosia, Douglas Blazek, Jenni Fagan, K.V. Skene, David Barker, Steve Ely, Joseph Ridgwell, Hosho McCreesh, Ian Seed, Tim Wells, Richard Krech, Paul Harrison. Also, a chapter from an erotic novel by Johnny Goldcunt, translated by Sabine D’Estree.

Prose: News From Nowhere: six original pieces by Will Self.

Graphics: dark, disturbing b&w images by artist Jase Daniels. Also, a rare image from R. Crumb.

Special section: As Close As It Gets by US poet Fred Voss. Includes new poems, a critical essay by Alan Dent (editor of The Penniless Press) and an in-depth, exclusive interview with Mr. Voss by Jules Smith, author of Art, Survival and So Forth: The Poetry of Charles Bukowski (Wrecking Ball Press, 2000). Also ‘comments’ from, amongst others, the likes of Gerald Locklin, Joan Jobe Smith and Martin Bax of the legendary Ambit.

General information: 104 pages. Large format, approx. 7″/175mm wide x 250mm/10″ tall. Handbound at the Tangerine Press workshop, using acid-free papers and boards, conservation glue, hemp cord; distinctive Tangerine logo stamped onto the front cover in orange ink (numbered copies) and black ink (lettered copies); 3-colour title page. There are 74 numbered and 26 lettered copies available for sale. Body text set in Baskerville Old Face–three other classic fonts are used throughout the journal.
ISBN 978-0-9553402-8-4

All 100 copies have been signed by the poet Fred Voss.

Now, let Can serenade you with Mother Sky …

Flying Down the Yellow Brick Road

jennifagan — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:32:49 +0000

I saw End of The Rainbow at Trafalgar Studios the other day. It’s a play about the last few months of Judy Garland’s life. The theatre is like a small cinema and they sell Revels and beer. Tracie Bennett as Garland makes the play, and the sets, the songs. Also the band that materialise behind a glass stage and accompany her through classic Garland tunes. Over the Rainbow, of course, is in there. Bennett can really deliver a line, and to see the grown up Dorothy drunk, always itching for tablets she’d hide in her shoes, under carpets, or down the back of the sofa, was tragic. It was also humane and quite often totally hilarious, because Judy Garland was a funny woman. She was a spiky, nervous, neurotic, several hundred miles an hour nut! When she climbs up on a table in her hotel and threatens to jump (so the hotel manager will stop hassling her for money) she says, ‘This’ll work, nobody wants to see Dorothy splatted all over their red carpet!’ Her husbands are a waste of space, her managers, agents, all hanging off the fame and fortune of a golden goose. In the play she has only a few close friends, mainly her long term accompanist, Anthony, an old gay guy who wants her to come and live with him in Brighton so he can look after her. She seems to consider it as she knows she’ll die soon, but not really. At the end nobody could save her. That live fast, die young punk ethos was manifest in her swagger, it’s there when she tells her fifth husband to ‘suck my cock,’ and reminisces on the role that made her ‘Skip down the yellow brick road? I was so fucking high I flew down it!’ When she goes, at the end, it’s quick and sad. Other than that the script didn’t hold up too well, but it didn’t really need it, great one liners and the truth of an addiction that would not let go, provide enough on their own. Here is Eva Cassidy, singing Over the Rainbow.

Other than that, this year has changed from the last. I’ve a new novel and the old one is getting sent out to publishers. I return to the waiting game that is words and the world. Well, really I return to the words because the world is flighty and waiting bores me. My poetry collection is 3AM Poetry Book of the Year which is uber cool. I’ve not done any readings for a while, I probably will later on in the year. The Marquis de Ridgwell is immersed in his new novel The Jago, which I think (when I can steal a look) is a stunning novel. That whole era in London is an amazing time to document and I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing. Other than that, the new generation’s arrival is imminent, may they always upstage the last! Onwards, onwards. Watch out for those flying monkeys, the wheelies are grabbing hold of the back of cars and racing each other down the M4. Like the sign says, the Universe is closed – but we can always take the rainbow. Salut, salut, salut Jxx

The Dead Queen of Bohemia Wins Poetry Book of the Year at 3AM

jennifagan — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:01:57 +0000

Dear peoples of the new decade,

I just found out that my recent poetry collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia, is Poetry Book of the Year at the discerning 3AM Magazine stable. I am keeping some most excellent company, see below for winners of the other categories, all well worth checking out. I’m now going to celebrate with a cup of tea and a waltz with Gringo so shimmy sideways, polish the moon and kick against the pricks always! The angels of fire are sleeping, and it is time we dreamt their dreams.

Jxxx

3:AM Awards 2010

3:AM POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010
Jenni Fagan’s The Dead Queen of Bohemia (Blackheath Books)

3:AM NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2010

Tom McCarthy’s C (Jonathan Cape)

3:AM NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010
Owen Hatherley’s A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso)

3:AM ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2010
Jon Savage’s Black Hole (Domino)

3:AM FILM OF THE YEAR 2010
Robinson in Ruins, dir. Patrick Keiller

3:AM MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2010
Nude

3:AM PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR 2010
Melville House (interview with Dennis Loy Johnson)

3:AM WEBSITE OF THE YEAR
> kill author

3:AM BLOGS OF THE YEAR 2010
A Journey Round My Skull
Dangerous Minds

Monkey Reviews The Dead Queen of Bohemia

jennifagan — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:06:21 +0000

THE DEAD QUEEN OF BOHEMIA by JENNI FAGAN

An ex-girlfriend had a tatty book that gathered dust in my old flat. It was called How Poetry Works. I flicked through it a few times but it could’ve been a computer manual from the 1980s for all the sense it made to me. I don’t know how poetry works. I don’t know how computers work either. I couldn’t care less; as long as they do. Music’s the same. Ray Davies onArenathe other week got all tetchy about documentary makers wanting to over-analyze artists when people “either like the song or they don’t”.I like Jenni Fagan’s poems. They live at the dark end of the street, across the tracks, on the outskirts of town in a world inhabited by junkies, winos, weirdoes and whores. And they’re only the harmless ones. Fagan doesn’t romanticize them but is empowered by her own experiences and wears them proudly like a rusting pin badge rescued from the rain. Out of the human wreckage come phrases like “…the schizophrenic knew fifteen different ways to bring Satan through a crack in the wall like a great vagina of doom” that instantly leave their words stamped in the brain. But there are two sides of every coin and on the flip of Jenni’s feisty confrontations are glimpses of vulnerability and tenderness.

They work for me. They should work for you too.

The Dead Queen of Bohemia by Jenni Fagan is published by Blackheath Books, priced £7.50.

Blackheath Books Website.

posted by monkey at 12:07

labels: blackheath books, dead queen of bohemia, jenni fagan, urchin belle

The Dead Queen of Bohemia

jennifagan — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:10:46 +0000

It gives us great pleasure to announce the publication of ‘The Dead Queen of Bohemia’ by Jenni Fagan.

The Dead Queen of Bohemia is Jenni Fagan’s extraordinary follow up to her debut collection Urchin Belle, released last year on Blackheath Books. This new collection of poems, explores the peripheries of life with an unpretentious, lyrical brutality.

The Dead Queen of Bohemia pays homage to 17th Century Chinese poetry, pornography in a Scottish caravan park, murder, first time sex in a hotel room, armed robbery, Elvis, native Indians, underage prostitution, coal mines and factories. Fights in wastelands, squirrels in the walls, bazookas, corpses, wife beaters, gang bangs and a white fox. There are dildos, moons, Eskimos, finest Bolivian, witches and stilettos, the ripped out heart of a Victorian debutante, quietude, despair and voodoo.

Fingerprints and butterflies; the covers of Fagan’s books mirror the contrasting defiance and fragility of her poems. Poems that document a disconnected fractured existence and what happens when there are no second chances.

It is available in a limited edition of 100 signed & numbered copies and a special hardback collectors edition of 26 signed & lettered (A-Z) copies.

Available to purchase now from the website Shop.

This was a Blackheath announcement …

Pushcart Nomination by Red Fez & Durable Goods

jennifagan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:49:58 +0000

I have recently been nominated for the Pushcart Anthology by Red Fez, a small press based in the USA who have published several of my poems. To check out a few previews from my new collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia, please click here – Red Fez, poem The Devil Didn’t Mark You, Those Marks Came From the Man

Here is No Stars Pension in Downtown Cairo, taken from my debut collection Urchin Belle. This is the poem which received the nomination. Below that I’ve posted a few photos from The Berlin Pension, an amazing old building I stayed in, in downtown Cairo. I adored it. It was smelly, decayed, romantically decrepit and showed all the wear and tear of a city in decline since the last revolution. I wanted to move in, live there and write my book. Anyway, here’s the poem and pics, see if you can see the heart that someone had drawn, in the dirt on the wall.

No Stars Pension in Downtown Cairo

The cat yowls at us,
hackles
like a matted
fur collar coat.

It will die in this heat.

Room 453 is ours,
an off green,
shower cubicle in the corner
curtained by lace
that once was white.

Someone has drawn
a heart, in the dirt on the wall.

Tinfoil holds the air conditioner
together, I lay on the bed
think of heroin
an’ cerise,
an angel with dirty feet
in the photograph you take.

Keys in art deco wardrobes
wear dust
an inch thick.

Higher still a gap
gapes into a grin as I sleep.

Down scurry scarab beetles
blues an greens,
through bare
floorboards,
out cracks in the walls.

Cairo has seen this before.

They are here for you and I,
come to pick our bones
clean
of a love
we will soon,
no longer know.

I also received a nomination by Durable Goods, a handmade zine published by Aleathia Drehmer in the US. She is also in the sought after issue 27, as is the Marquis De Ridgwell. Now — here is Woody Guthrie to tell all you fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do ….

Poetry Scotland

jennifagan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:33:17 +0000

I have a poem in Poetry Scotland’s Open Mouse, it’s called For Wang Wei. It is inspired by Wang Wei, an 8th century High Tang chinese poet. Wang Wei was also a painter and musician. I love the way he paints nature in words, check out my homage to him below, or better still, check out some of his work yourself.

Poetry Scotland