London Magazine: Selected Stories 1961-2001.
Editor, Jeremy Worman with an introduction by William Boyd.
Help back a new collection of brilliant stories from Alan Ross’s London Magazine by pledging to my crowd funding campaign. Alan, the gifted editor of this literary and arts journal for forty years, died in 2001. He was also a poet, cricket correspondent for The Observer, reviewer and traveller. In the Second World War he served as a naval intelligence wireless operator on arctic convoys. In the late 1950s he became friends with Ian Fleming, whose last James Bond novel The Man with the Golden Gun includes a character called ‘Commander Ross’. No one knew better than Alan what makes a good short story. Among those he published for the first time were Graham Swift and William Boyd. Harold Pinter, William Burroughs, Nadime Gordimer, William Trevor, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and many other fascinating writers were also published there and are brought together for the first time in this collection. This publication is essential reading for anyone interested in London’s literary life – but it can’t happen without your help. I owe a particular debt to Alan, since my first short story was published by him in the London Magazine. Support my crowd-funding campaign so that he at last gets the recognition he deserves, and you can enjoy these memorable stories. What do you get if you pledge? A beautiful book at the very least, but there are various other rewards (see Unbound website). Every subscribers’ name goes in the back of every edition; once the funding target is reached, Unbound publish a special book for you – but if there are not enough subscribers, all money is refunded. Unbound has been going for five years and is a success story. One of their writers, Paul Kingsmith, was long listed for the Man Booker 2014 Prize and Bookseller Book of the Year. Jonathan Meades and Erica Wagner have recently published with Unbound. ‘The Good Immigrant’ by Nikesh Shukla was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week last month, and has just won the Reader’s Choice Prize for the Books Are My Bag Awards. So please – spread the word – and pledge!