Blog | Swan River Press

Ghost Story of a Novelist

18 November 2020

Mrs. Katharine Tynan relates a Weird Tale—May Be a Coincidence.

“This Society shall be called the ‘Chit-Chat Club’, and consist of Members of the University, and have for its object the promotion of rational conversation.” “Preface” to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat by Robert Lloyd Parry This rule, the first in the founding charter of the Chit-Chat, was not always strictly observed during the thirty-seven years of the club’s existence. It’s true that membership was only ever drawn from undergraduates and staff of Cambridge University, but the name was subject to variation, and it was for an evening of supernatural storytelling rather than rational conversation that the Chit-Chat has earned its …

Swan River Press Paperbacks

21 September 2020

So we’ve decided to publish a line of paperbacks. Yes, I know, we’re as shocked as you are. But this new publishing stream only has emerged after much consideration and planning. Our long-time readers will know Swan River Press primarily focuses on limited edition hardbacks. Sometimes these print runs disappear quickly, leaving some readers paying large sums for second-hand copies. Similarly, it is unfair to our authors to allow their works to languish out of print. We hope, also, that these paperbacks will help new readers find our books. And so we’ve decided to reissue as paperbacks a selection of …

The Green Book 16

23 August 2020

Here we are, after a brief hiatus, with the continued serialisation of the Guide to Irish Writers of Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, which I am co-editing with my long-time collaborator Jim Rockhill.

The Long Reach of Green Shadows: Ray Bradbury’s Memories of Ireland

22 August 2020

Ray Bradbury Introduction Bradbury’s work has been with me my entire life. I suspect my earliest encounter with his writing was through the television anthology series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-92); “The Banshee” was then, as now, one of my favourite episodes: Peter O’Toole starring as cocksure director, Charles Martin Smith as the precocious writer, terrified—like me, then as now—of what wailed in the grounds outside the big house. In middle school I read The Martian Chronicles, and my head cracked open with a sense of wonder for the Red Planet and beyond. I spent my adolescence scouring second-hand bookshops …

Uncertainties 4: A Chat with Timothy J. Jarvis

10 August 2020

Conducted by Lynda E. Rucker Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. His first novel, The Wanderer, was published by Perfect Edge Books in 2014. His short fiction has appeared in The Flower Book, The Shadow Booth Volume 1, The Scarlet Soul, The Far Tower, Murder Ballads, and Uncertainties 1, among other places. He also writes criticism and reviews, and is co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen. Lynda: E. Rucker: First, I want to say how much I enjoyed this volume of Uncertainties! …

In Deep League: A Conversation with B. Catling

7 July 2020

Portrait of B. Catling’s “Candleye” by David Tolley Conducted by Timothy J. Jarvis Peopled with richly drawn Dickensian grotesques and filled with bizarre and comical incident, Munky is as compelling as it is antic. Catling transports the reader to an interwar England in the throes of change. Part bizarre ghost story, part whimsical farce, part idiosyncratic literary experiment, it could be described as P. G. Wodehouse collaborating with Raymond Roussel, with a dash of M. R. James, if it weren’t so uniquely its own thing. B. Catling, RA, was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor, filmmaker, …

Thoughts on “Lucifer and the Child” by Albert Power

10 June 2020

Those sensitive to mild spoilers may wish to avert their eyes. – Ed. In a ‘blurb’ for its new edition of Ethel Mannin’s novel Lucifer and the Child, the Swan River Press claims that this book was for many years on the list of ‘banned books’ in Ireland. If so, it was with good cause. This is a book that glamorises the Devil, irreligion and pursuit of the path of wickedness. It is an insidious book. It draws one in. It is a book that exerts a quiet and ensorcelling, but not a wholesome, power. Like Jenny Flower herself, it …

The Green Book 15

30 May 2020

Consider this issue a special anthology issue, and an eclectic one at that. There is little to tie these pieces together, save for the fact each author grew from the soil of the same island at the edge of Europe, which is to say they are all Irish by birth.

The Green Book 14

29 May 2020

EDITOR’S NOTE We encounter and enjoy authors mostly through their writing, forgetting sometimes that there are personalities behind their words, some astonishingly well-known in their time, often now relegated to small press rediscoveries. With sufficient spans of years, these authors and their personalities pass out of memory, becoming less familiar to us as people and more so as names on title pages. But it is important to remember that these authors lived and worked, had careers and relationships; some of them died while relatively unknown, others were widely celebrated for their creations. With this in mind, I’ve decided to focus …

Thoughts on Small Press #6—Deluge of Submissions

13 April 2020

Earlier this year, our friends over at Tartarus Press announced a call for submissions for their forthcoming 30th anniversary anthology. (Wow! Thirty years!!) The submissions window ran from 10 January until 10 April—a clean three months. Editor Rosalie Parker said on Twitter the other day that in that time, she received over five hundred stories. Five. Hundred. Stories. Yikes! In a previous “Thoughts on Small Press #2—What to Publish?”, I briefly talk about submissions. I mention that I’m generally not open for submissions, fearing I would be unable to handle the deluge. Looking at what Rosalie Parker has to sift …

Thoughts on Small Press #5—Don’t Cut Corners

6 April 2020

My involvements with small presses have so far been only as a customer, and I’ve yet to have a really bad experience in dealing with any of them—just the occasional delay in shipment, usually for production reasons. Maybe I’ve been lucky, or I just have good taste in small presses. 🙂 The most annoying issue I’ve had with some small presses (not SRP) is poor proofreading and typography. I’ve seen books where the text was obviously scanned and OCR’d but never proofread at all, with errors on nearly every page, sometimes making it difficult to be sure what the author …