Dostoyevsky Wannabe: Digital Readings

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James Davies

James Davies reads an excerpt from his recent novel The Wood Pigeons

James Davies is the author of two novels — The Wood Pigeons (Dostoevsky Wannabe) & the psychedelic adventure When Two Are in Love or As I Came To Behind Frank’s Transporter (published by Crater and written in collaboration with Philip Terry). The short story The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton, a rewrite of the first page of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, came out recently from Ma Bibliothèque. He is also a poet whose most recent collection is the pamphlet Forty-Four Poems and a Volta published by Red Ceilings Press. His other books of poetry include stack (Carcanet) and Plants (Reality Street). Find out more at www.jamesdaviespoetry.com

Maria Sledmere

Maria Sledmere reads a selection of her poems from recent and forthcoming pamphlets. These are lyric works that engage with the temporal, affective and medial disorientations of life in a time of ecological and otherwise breakdown, felt at the level of the everyday.

Readings in order:A collage of photos including a black and white photo of Maria, a colour photo of one of her pamphlets, and a colour image of the Dostoyevsky Wannabe website

‘Sugar Pill’

‘Laminaria’

‘Jolene’

‘Mint Green Card’

‘Espeon’

‘Insomnia Song’

‘Unplugged in New York’

 Maria Sledmere is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and member of A+E Collective. Her recent publications include infra•structure – with Katy Lewis Hood (Broken Sleep) and Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press). Maria co-edited, with Rhian Williams, the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene, forthcoming from Dostoyevsky Wannabe.

Emma BollandPhoto of cover of Over, In, and Under by Emma Bolland

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer ‘who works experimentally with literatures, translations, script and screenwriting, text, space, performance, drawing, and the moving image. This includes an investigation of the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between modes of writing, reading and speaking’.

— Derek Horton

Selected publications

  • ‘Words Take Wing‘, in The Brixton Review of Books, Issue 10, Summer 2020.
  • ‘The Golden Peacock: an Incident of Fiction‘, in Roland Barthes’s Party,(ed. The Roland Barthes Reading Group, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020). “If the Roland Barthes Reading Group were a church, I would be a member of its congregation”, Anne Boyer. author of The Undying and Garments against Women.
  • Over, In, and Under(monograph, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). “I find the transformation that takes place and the tenor of the resulting text, remarkable’. Peter Riley in The Fortnightly Review. “These hybrid-texts have carried me into some of the chasms of hilarity and terror over which the cultural artefacts they address are precariously suspended.” Joanna Walsh, author of Hotel and up.

Selected forthcoming in 2020:

  • ‘Subjects of the Gaze: script development as performance‘, co-authored with Louise Sawtell, inScript Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives, eds Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
  • ‘Fictions: Disrupting an Orthodox Real’, co-authored with Elizabeth Chakrabarty, in Imagined Spaces, (eds. Gail Low and Kirsty Young, Dundee: Voyages Out, 2020
  • ‘Am / Thought / Always‘, inZahir: Eclipse and Desire,  Christian Pattrachini, Zeno Press, 2020.
  • ‘Psycho Haiku Hypertrophy‘, in To Set a Bell Ringing, ed. The Roland Barthes Reading Group, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020.