Notice Board
News: December 2011
With the festive season upon us and with the release of two new publications – our Winter 2011 issue (no. 32) and Dodie Smith’s Look Back With Love (SFE no. 16) – life in the Slightly Foxed office couldn’t be busier, and merrier. Thank you for your many cheery phone calls and cards. We wish you all a very happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year.
Christmas Crossword
Here’s our third literary crossword, designed for those inevitable moments during the festive season when you really can’t think what else to do, and if you can, you’re too exhausted to get up and do it.
You can print and post or scan and email us your completed crossword. Entries should reach us no later than 14 January and the first correct one to be drawn out of a hat will receive a free annual subscription to Slightly Foxed.
News: November 2011
The autumn chill is well and truly here, despite last month’s unexpected Indian summer. In the office, having received our first shipment of Slightly Foxed mugs, we’re now preparing for the arrival of a new paperback edition of our hugely popular Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. Thank you all for your continued support.
News: October 2011
We hope you’re all enjoying your copies of Slightly Foxed no. 31 and, for those of you who collect our Slightly Foxed Editions, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. There has been a flurry of activity in the office since these new publications were released early last month, with website orders, telephone calls and heaps of post pouring in every day. Thank you very much for your continued support. We hope that, with the chill of autumn approaching, Slightly Foxed continues to be a heart-warming companion.
Young Writers' Competition 2011-’12
THIS COMPETITION HAS NOW CLOSED. WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED ONLINE 1ST MARCH AND IN THE SUMMER ISSUE OF SLIGHTLY FOXED.
We believe that good writing comes from good reading: in celebration of young readers we’re delighted to announce the Slightly Foxed Young Writers’ Competition.
Writing for Slightly Foxed is rather different from writing for other book pages and periodicals. First of all, the books we feature aren’t the latest publications or big sellers. We’re interested in books – fiction or non-fiction, sometimes out of print – that have somehow slipped from notice but which have meant something to the people who write about them. They don’t have to be ‘classics’, just good reads, we’re not snobbish – we’ve had a piece on Georgette Heyer as well as one on Homer.
Slightly Foxed covers all genres of fiction and non-fiction including poetry and short story collections – we even once published a piece on the literary operating instructions for The British Seagull Outboard Motor. We also regularly have pieces on libraries, bookshops, printing, binding and all sorts of other bookish things.
Our pieces are personal – not standing-back-and-making-a-judgement kind of pieces, but ones that communicate the contributor’s own interest in and enthusiasm for the book. We hate lit. crit. speak and love clear, unpretentious writing. Above all we want to hear your voice and share your experience of finding and reading the book you choose, whether it’s humorous or sad.
We have a wide cross-section of contributors – some you will probably already have heard of and others you won’t – people who write well but whose occupations have nothing to do with the literary world. We hope you’ll soon be joining them.
First Prize
£250 prize money
Publication of article in Slightly Foxed, Summer 2012
One-year subscription to Slightly Foxed
Slightly Foxed Book Bag
The Chambers Dictionary, 12th Edition
Runner-Up Prize x 2
One-year subscription to Slightly Foxed
Publication of article on Slightly Foxed website
Slightly Foxed Book Bag
The Chambers Dictionary, 12th Edition
Submission Requirements and How to Enter
1,000-2,000 word article on a favourite book published within the last 26 years, and not yet featured in Slightly Foxed
NB An up-to-date index can be found here: An Index to Slightly Foxed and a selection of previously published articles here: A Taste of Slightly Foxed
Articles can cover all genres of fiction and non-fiction including poetry and short story collections
Entrants must be 26 or under
Entries to be submitted in Word Doc format to youngwriters@foxedquarterly.com
Competition opens 8th October 2011
Deadline 15th January 2012. Winner to be announced 1st March 2012
Young Readers’ Rates
Our new subscription rates for those aged 26 and under mean that you can now take out a year’s subscription to Slightly Foxed for the same price as a theatre ticket, or a night in the pub.
UK price: £26 / EU: £34/ USA & Rest of World: £38
Full-rate subscriptions are £36 to the UK, £44 to Europe and £48 to the USA & Rest of World so it’s quite a saving, but if it’s still too much of a squeeze, it’s a perfect present request for an aunt or uncle, godparent or grandparent.
If you are one of the aforementioned, or any other present buyer, you’re very welcome to buy a gift subscription for a Young Reader. Just add the subscription to your basket, and complete the checkout form for a gift order.
GO TO SUBSCRIPTIONS PAGE . . .
To celebrate young readers, we’re running a young writers’ competition. More details . . .
News: September 2011
Very soon, subscribers will be receiving their copies of Slightly Foxed no. 31 which features an enchanting cover mosaic of a white moon by Robert Field. And to all of those who’ve very kindly pre-ordered Slightly Foxed Edition no. 15, Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, your books will also be on their way soon. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on these new titles, and we hope you’ll find them equally enjoyable. So, from all of us at SF, happy autumn reading . . .
News: August 2011
This month we’re bracing ourselves for a flurry of activity in the early autumn, with the publication of Slightly Foxed no. 31 and our 15th Slightly Foxed Edition in the first week of September. As a result, the office in Clerkenwell has become a hive of activity. Our new database is up and running, and Chudleigh the cocker spaniel, back from a sabbatical in Devon, is doing his best to help out. We hope you enjoy this month’s news.
News: July 2011
This month we’re celebrating the centenary of the novelist, poet and illustrator Mervyn Peake (1911–68) whose life and work have already received considerable praise in the pages of Slightly Foxed.
The RSL/Booker Masterclass 2011
Our friends at the Royal Society of Literature (in collaboration with the Booker Prize Foundation) are holding a series of masterclasses during 2011.
Forthcoming masterclasses will be given by two Fellows of the RSL: William Boyd, who has been previously shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Candia McWilliam, a former judge of the prize.
The masterclasses are open to members of the RSL, and to members of the public, to established writers and to beginners. Each class will be for a maximum of 14 people. Classes last three hours and cost £30.
Autumn booking details:
Booking closes on 15 August
Saturday 24 September
Candia McWilliam
Memory and Imagination
Stockbridge Library, Edinburgh
Saturday 5 November
William Boyd
Adapting words for the screen
Somerset House, London
Applications (full name and which class you are applying for) should be made to Rachel Page, rachel@rslit.org or 020 7845 4677
News: June 2011
June marks the arrival of two new publications: Frances Wood’s Hand-grenade Practice in Peking (SF Edition no. 14), bound in imperial yellow cloth with red endpapers, and Slightly Foxed issue no. 30, featuring a delightful beach hut cover illustration by Emily Burningham. As a result, the office has been bustling with activity (which usually involves book-shuffling, ribbon-tying, coffee runs and the not-always-helpful assistance of Chudleigh and Coco, our two office dogs).
News: May 2011
Welcome to our first email newsletter. We plan to send a newsletter out each month and we do hope you’ll enjoy it
Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road
The Gloucester Road Bookshop really is now Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road and we’re delighted with its new look. We hope you’ll be able to pay the shop a visit very soon and see for yourself, but here’s a preview . . .
It’s Official . . .
A gift subscription to Slightly Foxed is (according to the Daily Telegraph’s ultimate gift guide 2009) one of the top ten gifts ‘for him’! We think a subscription to SF makes a great gift for any book lover really but we’re very pleased to be mentioned.
Exotic Subscribers
Businesslike people sometimes ask us about our ‘reader profile’ – who, they wonder, would be a ‘typical Slightly Foxed subscriber’. We find this impossible to answer, except to say that you all clearly love reading and have shown yourselves to be an exceptionally nice bunch of people – courteous, generous, loyal, and with a telling turn of phrase, judging by your letters. What we do know is that you are spread far and wide, and during the dark, rainy days of last summer, as we posted off copies of the latest issue, we wondered rather longingly about the warm and exotic places in which you might be reading it. So we sent some of you who live overseas a note, asking you to send us a postcard describing your favourite surroundings for reading Slightly Foxed.
One interesting fact that emerged was that many of you read it in the bath – whether it’s a bathtub in Boston, Beijing or the Balearics. ‘How I wish I could say I sit on my patio facing south, or in my pergola facing north while enjoying SF,’ wrote a reader from Mexico. ‘The awful truth is, I read it in the bathroom, facing nothing.’ ‘I didn’t think I had a favourite reading spot,’ writes another from Austria, ‘but I’ve just found my latest issue, squeezed between a basket of plastic ducks and the tooth mugs, and realized that of course I do. What greater luxury could there be than a hot bath and Slightly Foxed (especially when the children are asleep)?’
Others waxed more lyrical. ‘I usually read SF in my Sydney garden, watched by the green parrots in my wattle tree,’ writes one Australian subscriber, while another reads his ‘on lazy Sundays, in my comfy old bed, in a house full of books, on a limestone hill, overlooking the town of Fremantle with the breezy blue Indian Ocean in the background.’ And a subscriber in Athens reads SF in a little house ‘tucked beneath the Hill of Nymphs, a few hundred metres to the north-west of the Acropolis’ or lying in the shade of a carob tree near the spot where Pericles lies buried.
An Indian subscriber enjoys Slightly Foxed on a balcony above the teeming streets of Mumbai, while a fellow SFer reads on a bench under a spreading tree overlooking the hills in Brazil’s high central savannas. Yet another snatches a few quiet minutes with her latest copy in a Brussels café over a cup of mint tea while she waits for her 5-year-old son to finish his music lesson. And a dealer in rare books in Milan paints a touching picture of himself taking Slightly Foxed out of his drawer and reading it in the troglodytic circumstances in which he works, ‘in a little recess, ten feet underground, in a library’, surrounded by towering bookshelves.
Whiling away the 45-minute ferry crossing to the mainland from the Outer Hebrides with SF, waiting for its ‘erratic arrival (due to weather conditions)’ on Alderney in winter – it’s thrilling to think of all the different circumstances in which people enjoy Slightly Foxed, and these were just a few of the many postcards we received. Thank you all for taking the trouble to reply.
