The
Anti-Austerity Anthology brings together some of the best
active indie authors in a collection of original poetry, prose and
more. It is an angry book. It should be
What
does the word “austerity” mean to you? In its most generic form,
of course, it just means plainness, simplicity, an absence of the
superfluous. When I was younger, it had a more specific meaning;
“austerity” clothes or furniture were those made during and
especially after the war, when there was a scarcity of materials and
skilled labour. Today, however, it has taken on another meaning –
an economic policy that seeks to reduce budget deficits at all costs,
through raising money and through not spending it. It’s a policy
that has been widely adopted, especially in Britain, since the 2008
crash.
(Cover design by Chris Harrison) |
On
the face of it, this is reasonable. Every country has finite
resources. But not everyone agrees that austerity is the way to
conserve them. It’s not what Roosevelt did in the 1930s, when he
raided the coffers in order to get men back to work; do that and
they’ll pay taxes instead of being a charge on the public purse.
Whether that’s a better idea than austerity is a big argument, and
best left for another time. But the key point about austerity, for
me, is that successive British governments have sought to reduce the
deficit not by raising taxes from those who can afford to pay, but by
cutting social support to the poor, the jobless and those who for
health reasons cannot work.
The
way this hits people was the subject of Ken Loach’s recent film, I,
Daniel Blake.
Loach was not joking. According to the food-bank charity the Trussell
Trust, there
were 1,332,952
emergency food supplies delivered by food bank charities to people in
the UK between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018. Britain
had the world’s 24th
highest
per capita income in 2017 (according to the World Bank; the IMF and
the CIA
World Factbook
put it a little lower). So there’s no excuse for this. As Steve
Topple
writes in the Foreword
to the The
Anti-Austerity
Anthology:
“In reality, austerity
is
much more than just a policy and a word no one had really heard of
until 2010. It’s a cover for an ideological position. One that has
its roots in the very structures of society we see around us.” Yep.
Now
we’ve gathered together some of the very best indie authors, in the
Anthology.
The proceeds will go to foodbank charities. It’s our way of
fighting back.
*
I
first heard of the Anthology
back in 2016, when writer Rupert
Dreyfus
asked if I would like to contribute. I
had come across Dreyfus the previous year, when I read and very much
liked his debut novel Spark.
In it, a young finance professional becomes disaffected and decides
to use his IT skills to blow up the entire system. It’s a
fast-moving little thriller, definitely political, but also very
funny. It is especially memorable for Vinnie Sloan, one of the great
comic creations of all time – a foul-mouthed
posh git who makes his living from internet scams while ingesting
unpleasant substances.
In 2015 Dreyfus followed on with a satirical short-story
collection, The
Rebel’s Sketchbook,
which
I described
in
a review
as one of the few
books can make you laugh and vomit at the same time. His latest,
Broke,
a savage take on austerity, will be out soon. Dreyfus is
a fiercely contemporary writer; his preoccupations are austerity,
Trump, the NHS – in fact much of what’s in the news today. And
yet he’s also
part of a very
English tradition of bawdy dissent that stretches back through
Gillray, Hogarth, John Wilkes and into the stews of Elizabethan
London.
George W. and Laura Bush meet food-bank volunteers in Washington |
Dreyfus
knows plenty of radical indie writers and poets, and the Anthology
began to take shape. But it was a lot of work, and in 2017 he roped
in Harry
Whitewolf
and myself as co-editors. He
chose well in Whitewolf, who is a creative professional but also a
startlingly original radical poet. He
styles himself as a Beat poet but is actually something unique in his
own right, writing repetitive, rhythmic, barbed poems that fall,
every now and then, into unexpected humour or tenderness. He is a
talented illustrator and cartoonist, and
has also ventured into travel writing – with
two books describing anarchic journeys of self-discovery, in Egypt
and in South America.
He’s
certainly political, as seen in his poem Short
and Long Division,
from his collection Two Beat Newbie:
Me and my neighbour hated each other.
Our street hated the next street, so me and my
neighbour would then stick together.
...Our country hated another country, so our counties would then stick together.
Me and my neighbour hated each other.
Our street hated the next street, so me and my
neighbour would then stick together.
...Our country hated another country, so our counties would then stick together.
Whitewolf
has a wide frame of reference, citing influences as diverse as
Milton, John Cooper Clarke and Baudelaire (another of his
collections, New Beat Newbie,
contains a short but elegant tribute to the last-named, Ragmen).
But his style is very much his own.
*
I
already
knew, and liked, a number of the writers in this book. They included
poets M.J.
Black
and Andy
Carrington
– like Whitewolf, they’re hard-hitting and political. Steve
Topple is a frequent contributor to the online news site The
Canary,
where’s he’s called the Department of Work and Pensions to
account for some of what they’ve done to people in the name of
austerity.
Amongst the prose writers, I’m a fan of Rebecca
Gransden,
who is less overtly political and
yet deeply subversive; her strange
and beautiful books anemogram.
(sic)
and Rusticles
strongly
repay close reading. The
one US contributor is Riya
Anne Polcastro;
I already knew her work but only slightly, and
will now read more.
Her piece here packs a serious punch. Ruth
F. Hunt
let us use a powerful extract from her 2015
novel The
Single Feather,
about austerity and disability. Mary
Papastavrou,
who contributed a dystopian
short
story, Maria
Jumps,
is
also
the
author of a strange and compulsive novel of ideas, How
to Sew Pieces of Cloud Together;
like Gransden’s work, it rewards a close read and is very
subversive.
Come on, admit you want the job |
Leo
X. Robertson
is the author of much short fiction with a horror bent, but also a
couple of novels – one of which, the wonderful Findesferas,
weaves
together Paraguayan
history, science fiction and Guaraní mythology to create a novel
that, despite being quite short, has an epic quality.
Jay
Spencer Green
contributed Green’s
Vacuous Vacancies,
a series of career opportunities that are scattered through the
Anthology; do check them out (come on, you’ve always fancied a post
as a Witchfinder, haven’t you?). He’s the author of several
books, including the outrageous satire
Breakfast
at Cannibal Joe’s.
Last
but not least, Dreyfus, Whitewolf and I have also contributed.
In my case, it’s a preachy essay on the roots of austerity. The
other two have deployed their satirical wit.
Other
contributors
I didn’t know. There’s
a witty short story from Chris
Harrison,
for instance; he’s
the author of a series of original vampire novels with a twist
(the
TotenUniverse).
We owe him especial thanks as he also
did the excellent cover for the Anthology.
When
not writing, he’s a landscape architect. Bradford
Middleton
is a poet and
short-story writer who
sometimes
looks at the dark side of life; he’s
published widely, and
not just in Britain. So
has
Bristol-born
writer Matthew
Duggan,
whose
work has appeared in a number of periodicals; his
first collection,
Dystopia
38.10,
was
published in 2015.
Guy Brewer is another new one on me; besides
writing poetry, he also undertakes union work.
(I
especially liked his poem Choking
Fumes and Smoke-Filled Skies).
Connor
Young, from Brighton, gave us a Poem
for the Brighton Homeless
(Ed
gets his head kicked in as he sleeps/By
pale blue shirted West Street creeps).
Ford
Dagenham
is an unusual poet with a nice line on everyday hypocrisies – this
comes out well in his contributions here.
We
hope you like the Anti-Austerity
Anthology.
It was a lot of work by a lot of people. But the proceeds will be
going to food banks. And anyway, this all matters. We can’t go on
as we are. At the end of the book, we quote Plutarch, who wrote over
2,000 years ago that: “An
imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment
of all republics.” Let’s
not put that to the test.
You
can buy the Anti-Austerity Anthology here
(or in the US, here),
as an ebook or paperback – or order the paperback from from any
bookshop using the ISBN 978-1724577962.
Mike
Robbins's essay Such
Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies was
published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other
online retailers, or through bookshops
(ISBN 978-0-9978815-0-9,
ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)
Follow
Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19),
on Facebook or
on Goodreads
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