To all FoA friends and followers:
May the power of books keep us safe!
Friends of Alice (FoA) Publishing
is an independent publishing venture
based in West London
Friends of Alice Publishing is about:
experimental writing… new voices… multilingualism and multiculturalism... interdisciplinary arts… inclusiveness and diversity… genre-bending…
critical thinking... transforming knowledge… groundbreaking projects… promoting creativity… advocating bibliodiversity… gender-neutrality… commitment to the environment…
…and last but certainly not least, FoA is about being curiouser and curiouser…
FRIENDS OF ALICE PUBLISHING is a Registered Trademark
Friends of Alice Publishing aims:
-
to publish pioneering literature
-
to publish texts in translation
-
to publish authors unknown, bereft, diverse, distinctive, unclassifiable
-
to serve the most outstanding poetry and prose
-
to serve our multicultural and multilingual world
-
to serve the imagination
&
POETRY
'Dolorem Ipsum' by Isabel del Rio is a collection of poetry at a time of pain and loss. A brief text by Cicero has become the basis of all printed books: a blueprint, a guiding light, the path to lead us exactly where we need to be. From what our destiny has become to the mind games we have to play with ourselves in order to survive; from losing our sense of belonging to the turmoil that this pandemic has created; not forgetting love poems and apocryphal stories to take us through to the next stage, if there ever is one; with a quick succession of 'flatliner' poems and aphoristic triptychs, interspersed with comments on language and a few pieces of advice for these trying times.
156 pages
Available to purchase via Amazon
An anthology of Latin American poets currently living in the UK. The book includes both the original poems in Spanish and the translation into English, as well as an extensive study on the translation of contemporary Latin American poetry and the various anthologies that have been published so far in the English-spearking world.
Edited by Enrique D. Zattara
Translated by Isabel del Rio
Cover designed by Oscar Grillo
287 pages
Available to purchase via Amazon
The new 'Vo(i)ces' book is now out! A joint publication by Friends of Alice Publishing and the prestigious Victorina Press, the book includes the winning and shortlisted entries of the Victorina Press Poetry Award 2018, Voices-Voces. Edited by Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes and Isabel del Rio, the book includes translations by Isabel and a most beautiful cover by artist and musician, Valentina Montoya Martinez.
119 pages
Available to purchase via Amazon
A poet reminisces about the city of her birth, with stories and memories brought to life from both her past and the city’s past: a city at war; a declaration ending hostilities; the imaginary demise of the city’s magnificent art collection; forbidden books and student demonstrations; a breech birth and a funeral cortège; sex as it was, but also as it is not; memorable films and favourite pets; the fear of hell and the promise of heaven; an outdated and ill-fated way of life; words looking to be set to music, or scripted as prose, or moulded into poetry, or adapted to the demands of the times, with idiomatic speech taming our wildest dreams. Thus, a retelling of the past becomes the foretelling of the future.
A book in memory of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War by Isabel del Rio.
With silvertone photography by the author
126 pages
'Caught Light' by David Russomano is a far-reaching collection of poetry with one toe in the foreign, another in the familiar, and an impossible third dipped way out into the mythical and surreal. Both lyrical and experimental in turn, this diverse work delivers everything from the honest revelations of youth and fatherhood to subtle invocations of environmentalism and revolution. Running through it all, a strong thread of fresh concrete imagery holds it together.
With artwork by the author.
154 pages
Selected by the National Poetry Library in 2021 for inclusion in their collection!
'Fifty Ruba'iyat' by Rumi includes versions of the poems produced by Wlodek Fenrych, and based on translations from Farsi by poets Ziba Karbassi and Bashir Sarkhavaz. Jalal ad-D'n Muhammad Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, scholar and Sufi mystic. They say that one can get drunk on Rumi –certainly, the Sufi imagery in the poetry and its reggae-like rhythm have an intoxicating effect. Does one need to be a Persian-speaker to experience it? Here is a taster for English-speakers.
With original calligraphy by Morteza Salehi. Cover photograph by Wlodek Fenrych: Rumi's tomb in Konya, Turkey.
154 pages
‘Are You Alive Now?’ Find out in Michael Wyndham’s debut poetry collection. Discover a cast of characters, such as medieval ‘bad boy’ poet Francois Villon, celebrity rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun or the ghosts of famous Le Palais dancehall haunting 21st century Hammersmith, London.
With colour illustrations by Sally Wyndham.
114 pages
Selected by the National Poetry Library in 2021 for inclusion in their collection!
Available to purchase via Amazon
'Ataraxy' by Isabel del Rio is a collection of sonnets on love, death and other fixations. Some are written in despair, others in hope. Some might make you want to get out and fight, others to throw in the towel. For we are also made of moments, maniacal and euphoric, or dejected and disheartened. We are all things; and as such, we write about all things.
With silvertone photography by the author.
154 pages
'The Moon at the End of my Street' by Isabel del Rio is a collection of factual and fictional performance poetry. From the non-existent seas covering the Moon to the landmark events of the future Lunar Republic, from the Spring Moon to the Moon's dark side, from the chrysanthemum Moon to the Moon of horses, from the milk Moon to the moon of awakening, from moonrise to moonset...
With B&W photography by the author.
132 pages
FICTION / MEMOIR
Artist and writer Jude Cowan Montague's debut book at FoA is a modern-day fairy tale. A captivating biographical story about the difficulties of sustaining a relationship in the face of mental breakdown and social upheavals: love, marriage, the birth of a baby, trying to find an identity in the London of the 90s, and the brave attempts to lead a beautiful life despite all.
With illustrations by the author
194 pages
Available to purchase via the Book Depository
Could it be a novel written like a film-script? Or is it a film-script written like a novel? In 10 parts and 77 takes, ‘Dissent’ is the first book of the space opera series 'Planet in Peril' by Isabel del Rio, for young adults and adults alike, written by Isabel del Rio. The book's heroine is an Alice of the future, but her Wonderland is no place to dream. Her journey of discovery takes her across a bleak dystopian ecosystem, making her challenge what she is and question everything she so desperately wants.
360 pages
Twenty-four stories on Paradise and Hell by Isabel del Rio. The inadequacies of Paradise. The anxieties in Hell. From android love stories, to dissections of historical events, from a life lived far too mindfully to the dilemmas posed by working in Hell itself. If you are lucky, you can get to choose between Hell and Paradise. But because they have co-existed for so long, you may not be able to distinguish between the two of them anymore...
295 pages
‘A Woman Alone: fragments of a memoir’ is Isabel del Rio's autobiography, written in English with quotes and excerpts in Spanish. It includes the fragmented story of a life lived between two countries, two languages, two cultures. With the spectre of the Spanish Civil War hovering over many of the recollections in the book, the memoir tells the journey from a chequered past in a fascist dictatorship to a hopeful if challenging future where the protagonist affirms her identity both as a woman and as a writer.
The book includes several photographs, mostly by the author.
288 pages - Third Edition
Available to purchase via Amazon UK as paperback and in Kindle format
Available to purchase via Amazon Spain
Pioneering writing to serve the imagination
