Announcing the publication of Assemblage & Other Miseries, a collection of short fiction by Evan Findlay Hay — cover, design, and publishing by some bloke named Chris Page.

‘Full-on fictions for dissentient constituents’ goes the book’s strapline, and which, according to the blurb, delivers ‘a tragic tale for every night of a wretched working week.’ But the wretchedness, as is necessary with despair, is alchemised into humour — not the kind you would find from Full House or Michael McIntyre, and so much better for it.

I’ve known Evan for more decades than I care to count: since the manic, drug-fugged days of Dig Magazine, to which we were both contributing in the 80s, in London — and who doesn’t remember Dig Magazine or the drugs? We’ve managed to stay in touch and even shared the effluvia of our work- and life-addled brains as we’ve compared the experience of our time and spirits being flushed down the corporate-capitalist drain.

We thought it would take a few weeks to put this publication out — that was in May, so it has taken five months. It is a project that has, to be honest, consumed way too much of the time I ought to have spent on cutting the lawn, scraping the crap off the kitchen and earning a living. But it was time well spent: at the end, Evan has some of his stories etched indelibly in stone for posterity, and the local police were pleased I was too distracted to bother the frozen chicken in the local convenience stores.

The characters you see on the cover of Assemblage are manikins from 19th century German anatomy books. As soon as I saw their glowing wholesome faces beaming with the supererogatory glow of being opened to display their viscera for the edification of the general population, of being created for the furtherance of the humanistic project without genitals of their own, they seemed perfect analogues for the people in Evan’s stories, which are, as it were, an assemblage of disassembled people and lives.

The moustaches and self-sacrifice invited memories of the older books on the family bookshelf with their runkled, distressed, age-stained jackets and so I applied an antique effect to the cover of this book. We chose groundwood paper for the interior, which, aside from being supposedly environmentally better, has a rougher texture that I hope will evoke the older generation of books the cover references; so the materials used in the making of the paperback thus become a creative element in themselves. I’m feeling a bit smug about that, and I’m feeling very proud of the way the book has turned out.

So, there it is — HERE it is — Assemblage & Other Miseries by Evan Findlay Hay, in paperback and ebook!

Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HP237T36

paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HP791223

Psipook: https://psipook.com/psi-books/assemblage-other-miseries/

Above: promotional images for Assemblage & Other Miseries