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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Jude Cook |Anne Enright |Nikesh Shukla |Leo Robson |Sarah Moss
Jude Cook, author and publisher of Conduit BooksIn Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the languid Lord Henry announces: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”I’m not so sure. During the days after the announcement of my new small press, Conduit Books, the conversation about the balance and representation of women and men in publishing roared back into life.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
msn.com | Jude Cook
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Jude Cook
While successful songwriting partnerships abound, literary fiction created by two or more authors is rare, and short stories produced by two hands are unicorns. Step forward plucky micro-press Scratch Books, which has set out to rectify this situation. Duets is a volume of co-written short stories by some of the genre’s best current practitioners. The results are startling, occasionally baffling, but never less than thrilling.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Jude Cook
Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Sebastian Shakespeare |philanthropyBy Jude Cook |Jude Cook
“Some things are more important than staying in power,” Joe Biden just told the United Nations, and the General Assembly broke into sustained applause. Biden left the stage clasping his hand to his chest, so touched that he had so touched the crowd. “It’s your people that matter the most,” said Biden. “Never forget we are here to serve the people. Not the other way around.” It says quite a lot about the state of modern political leadership that such remarks are construed as moving insight.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Jude Cook
“Everyone knew Francie and Francie knew everyone. He was at the centre of everything and he knew everything.” So the long-serving IRA man Francie Begley is described by slippery politician Máirtín O’Cuilleanáin in Austin Duffy’s riveting and gritty Troubles novel, Cross. Set in 1994, in the months before the provisional ceasefire, the book takes its title from the fictional northern Irish border town of Cross, an outpost in “so-called bandit country ... this hotbed of republicanism”.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Jude Cook
The remote coastal or island location has become something of a cliche in recent literary fiction, often giving a novel an off-the-peg windswept atmosphere while isolating its frequently solitary protagonist for the purpose of unhealthy introspection. Elizabeth O’Connor’s evocative and haunting debut seeks to do something different with the formula, exploring the larger themes of social inequality, tradition versus modernisation, and female emancipation between the wars.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
judecook.substack.com | Jude Cook
Épater La Bourgeoisie: Hanif Kureishi and The NothingWhen a cherished artist disappoints one with their new book, the feeling is at once strangely sour-sweet and inescapably personal. Sour, because one had hoped for so much more; sweet, because one is confident the affronting new work is a merely a momentary blip, and that the sure course towards artistic greatness and literary immortality will be resumed with the next novel. And personal, because, well how could it be otherwise?
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
msn.com | Jude Cook
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Jude Cook
Toby Lloyd’s slow burn of a debut novel is in the tradition of the pentagonal family saga, a subgenre that might include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Add to this formula the elements of religious mysticism, ethnicity (in this case Jewishness), and an exploration of the ethics around using family as material for literature, and you should have a truly combustible mix. The five members of the Rosenthal clan are as different and conflicted as Franzen’s Lamberts.
