Counting down to launch

Fordes Bar is the only boozing establishment in New Zealand with its own political library, so it's always been a good place to celebrate May Day, the traditional festive day of the labour movement and the left. This year Fordes Bar will be a doubly attractive place to drink on May the first, because it's hosting the launch of two brand new Titus Books.

There'll be music, speeches, finger food, and - if you beat Richard Taylor to the table - free wine from six-thirty, as Titus celebrates the arrival of David Lyndon Brown's Skin Hunger and Ted Jenner's Writers in Residence and other captive fauna.

For many readers of this blog, David Lyndon Brown will need no introduction. His brutally beautiful 2007 novel Marked Men was launched in spectacular fashion, and prompted an extended debate at this blog. Like Marked Men and Brown’s book of short stories Calling The Fish, Skin Hunger explores a seedy but loveable Auckland of crumbling Bohemian villas, underfurnished apartments, twenty-four hour bars, and dodgy nightclubs in spare but nevertheless lyrical language.

Ted Jenner is one of the more enigmatic figures in contemporary New Zealand literature. He has lived overseas for most of the last three and a half decades, teaching Classics at universities and schools and producing poems, translations, and scholarly articles in his spare time. Before he returned to New Zealand a couple of years ago, Jenner spent almost a decade in Malawi, and wrote a series of accounts of the country for the Kiwi literary journal brief. Since his return Jenner has been busy preparing a selection of a his writing from the past thirty years for publication: the result is a book that is full of time and space.

There's more information about next Friday night's event on this flyer (click to enlarge it), which also features Ted Jenner's concrete poem 'Heidegger's Instep'.