Great news for David Frankel who will see his chapbook, The Hours of Our Lady published by Salò Press early next year. Salò Press are “an independent micro-publisher focusing on poetry & prose of an experimental / weird / surreal / cerebral nature.”
The Hours of Our Lady has a couple of tantalising, pre-publication reviews on its Salò Press website listing. Author of Gigantic, Ashley Stokes, says: “David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour.” While David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow, says: “In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.”
Congratulations to David. We really look forward to seeing The Hours of Our Lady next year. It is available to pre-order here: https://www.salopress.com/store/the-hours-of-our-lady/
David Frankel was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize with his story, Sink Rate. It is published in our volume 14 anthology by Tangent Books. https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/shop/bristol-short-story-prize-volume-14