Books published by Penniless Press Publications

It's difficult to get away from Paris when writing about art, and several reviews in this collection inevitably refer to the city, though not only for art but also for the cafés, cabarets and other locations where artists and writers met to socialise. Paris wasn't the only place where such activity happened, so London, Berlin, New York, and several other cities also come into view. As a background to what went on artistically in Paris there is a review of a book dealing with the "vice, crime and poverty" which shows that it was all there while the painters and poets and their patrons carried on their conversation. This isn't to single out Paris for its perversities, and the review of writing from nineteenth century Prague shows that prostitution and its perils thrived there. As before, I've taken the liberty of including a handful of short prose pieces. They're not stories, in the strict sense of the word, and perhaps "sketches" best describes them?

Brian Kilcoyne finds it difficult to cope with the death of his mother. His father is an alcoholic and he doesn't get on with his brother. He leaves his farm in Loughrea to go to college in Dublin, splitting up with his childhood sweetheart as he does so. They leave their relationship open with the possibility of continuing it in the future. He travels to Europe and America while trying to decide on his future. Romance and diaspora create conflicts in him before he returns to a changed Ireland What's he going to do with his future? Can he re-kindle his relationship with his girlfriend? Is his father going to re-marry? Will small-town mentalities force him to leave Galway again?

In an editorial to issue 9 the magazine's place and purpose was defined: "Voices" we believe has a function to play among the literary journals. It is not a vehicle for established writers. It is a means of dialogue between writer, of working class origin and/or of socialist tendency and the workers and socialists to whom they address themselves.

THE AUTHOR of this book (1907?1944) was perhaps the greatest poet of the Holocaust, a Jewish Catholic convert who fell victim to a mass murder of Jews perpetrated by the regular Hungarian Army under stan-dard orders. The crime took place towards the end of the Second World War when the Allied victory was already obvious. Some of the poems were recovered from the grave. Today, the poems are treasured as some of the most flawless modern additions to their country?s rich poetic heritage. They have gone some way towards teaching tolerance to new generations in the treatment of their racial, religious and ethnic minorities. Unlike many others, Radn?ti had plenty of opportunities to escape forced labour and death at the hands of the Nazis. He was at the height of his literary powers when he chose to enter the storm, eyes open and notebook in hand, deliberately seeking to transform the horror into po-etry.

Urban living involves a daily onslaught of advertisements, corporate art, and mass-mediated popular culture. As oppressive and alienating as this spectacle may be, its very ubiquity offers plentiful opportunities for semiotic jiu-jitsu and creative disruption. Subversive and marginalized ideas can spread contagiously by reappropriating artifacts drawn from popular media and injecting them with radical connotations.This technique is known as d?tournement. Popularized by Guy Debord and the Situationists, the term is borrowed from French and roughly translates to ?overturning? or ?derailment.? D?tournement appropriates and alters an existing media artifact, one that the intended audience is already familiar with, in order to give it a new, subversive meaning.

'Ken Champion used to craft elegant narrative verse before turning his considerable talent to the prose form, effortlessly turning out the kind of clever, drily comic literary novels that tend to invite praise. Times change, however, and for his latest novel Champion has changed gear to accommodate the conspicuously angry mood of the moment. Further sharpening an increasingly political style, THE POLITICOS is his most engaged piece of writing yet; using a twin-track narrative to confront the major issues of the age, taking in class, ideology, immigration, identity and alienation. And as befits a seasoned portraitist of a changing London, he neatly captures the shifting landscape and language of the city he so clearly loves, embracing the personal as well as the political in an epic novel that makes us think, laugh, shout out loud and cry. Expect to be tantalised, teased, challenged; even shocked as Champion turns his withering gaze on troubled times.