Phoenix Ark are delighted to announce the publication of the Co-edition of The Sight and Fell, for the first time to eBook. To thank Phoenix readers that eBook, the new US editions of The Sight and Firebringer, and the new thriller The Godhead Game, will all be available for free download on June 21st, the longest day.
Coming soon…The Terror Time Spies
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under Adult Fiction, Childrens Books, Fantasy, Free Story
There are painting works in the office, shiny new bookshelves and that intimate business of rearranging all the stories, histories and reference works too. It made me think how sad these last few years have been, and how what to one writer happened in America was perhaps the death knell of a whole generation. Especially since it coincided almost eerily with a world banking crisis. It is a delight to hear people talking with passion about their Kindles or readers, about all they can access so quickly and above all about discovering a passion for stories and reading itself. But Phoenix Ark are rather older school and have been a reluctant bride in the e World.
Books are not just the stories inside them, they are like people, personalities and their physical entities contain memory and experience in themselves. Sometimes that is very personal, from annotations, to rediscovered postcards popped inside, from special pages turned down, to well remembered gifts. Those memories can be as happy or as painful as that business of doing your tax returns after a split up, and recalling last year’s cost. But physical books are of course also things of enormous work, thought and beauty. They are stamped by the people who got together to create them, from author to editor to designer and artists, and most specifically carry the mark of their particular moment, and then their successive reinterpretation by future generations, if they survive. Will that not all be lost in the swilling multiverse, where actually words are now also representations of numbers and binary code on a screen?
So, seeking advice from Amazon recently about their own printing facility Createspace, it was with a great deal of ennui that we heard a bullish, however helpful and friendly, American voice urging us toward eBooks publishing, rather than print. Declaring too that last year Borders were forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Amazon created a monster with the specific intention, if you read reports from the US Author’s Guild, of dominating bookselling, then dominating the new platforms and wiping out rivals. Capitalism may take no prisoners, and big publishers are increasingly ruthless too, driving profits with series and bestsellers, but if Amazon cannot see that the closure of Borders is a cultural tragedy, then they have no idea what it is about at all, and that is certainly not just money. A bookshop, a physical space, like a good library, is as much about the joy of interacting, browsing, discovery and allowing all those true things it is about, namely life out there, from flirting to arguing to having an adventure. For authors too there are many negatives about the supposed ‘Democratisation’ of ‘print’ possibility, because culture, real shared culture, takes excellence and is not just some kind of endless white noise.
Perhaps this is just a moment. Perhaps somehow bookshops, Independent and Chain, will resurface, when we are all glutted with eBooks and wonder what happened to human beings, when everyone on earth is working for the machine in a gigantic call centre. The quality of what people read is vital, so champion the story in the E World, but as for those wonderful things on shelves too, the book is dead, long live the book!
DCD
Filed under Uncategorized
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce the publication to Kindle of the US editions of Fire Bringer and The Sight by David Clement-Davies which were originally published by Penguin in America, in what was effectively a breach of contract, and part of the extraordinary disrespect to authors going on everywhere now.
There are slight variations in the US and UK editions, so we are pleased to say we can offer Phoenix Readers free copies on five days in the next three months. The first free download will be announced shortly. The new Co-edition of The Sight and Fell will be available soon.
PA Press
Filed under Uncategorized
Coming Soon: Partly prompted by the searches on here and by the actions of Oxford lawyers attempting to threaten a writer, David Clement-Davies has decided to serialise all the events, so called privacies, actions, lies and misrepresentations that occurred at Abrams in New York, over four years. It makes for very astonishing reading.
PA PRESS
Filed under Uncategorized
There is a great deal written about it on the internet, including sites dedicated to the so called Mayan prophecy and the end of the world. That has been calculated as 21st December 2012, so just six months to go, although another caulcuation would place it on the 23rd. The Winter Solstice was of course a hugely significant time, not only to the Mayans. It stems from a reading of the Mayan Long Count Calendar and a stele in Honduras, the ‘6th Monument’. That relates to the end of the 13th Baktun, Baktun’s being extended lengths of time, where one scholar has interpreted the incomplete inscription as reading Then it shall happen, the darkness. There are also references to the Mayan Monkey God Bolon Yokte Ku.
David Clement-Davies does not pretend to be a Mayan scholar, but his new thriller The Godhead Game incorporates many of the real theories about this year and the end of the Long Count, to discuss contemporary beliefs and fears, in our increasing Age of Anxiety. Another theory is that it does not represent any kind of catastrophe at all, but the beginning of a new age of Man and even a new spiritual age. Perhaps that is what the story is really about, Mankind waking up to one another again and nature all around us, good and bad.
He started the book some time ago, researching at the British Museum, and was especially interested in real totemic Crystal Skulls, that exist in various museums around the world, and in private collector’s hands. Some may be Aztec, Mayan and Toltec. But then the Spielburg film Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls came out and the project was shelved, until now. A huge fan of the Indiana Jones stories, he found the use of the skulls less than satisfying. So this is his take, crafting an adventure that incorporates both a physical contest and a strange mind game, with the search for a skull that could destroy the universe itself! Full of philisophical ideas, it posits the existence of a mysterious and deadly Council, and a group called the Imaginati. So the Games begin – A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies. “Read it, perphaps before it’s too late to read anything at all,” he jokes, with a grin like a Crystal Skull.
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Environment, Thrillers
Also available on Utube at http://youtu.be/Z62x9mzO5NA
THE GODHEAD GAME by David Clement-Davies will be available FREE to Phoenix Ark readers on five days running up to December 21st, 2012, to be announced shortly.
PHOENIX ARK PRESS
Filed under Uncategorized
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce a price cut on the thriller Ice,the first novel by the historical crime writer Dominic Sands, under our adult Thumbmarks Imprint and exclusively to Kindle, available at Amazon.
Ice is an extraordinary little novel, beginning in the year of 1632, when the peasants go into the high mountains above Rome, to gather ice for the Prince’s miraculous new work of art and science; an Ice House. So begins the strange testament of Michele Pisiano and the story of his obsession with Lorenzo Barberini, in a tale of love, art, murder, witchcraft, faith, male pain and a dark secret at the very heart of the Ice House itself. The Phoenix founder believes it has a touch of John Fowles’ The Magus.
Filed under Uncategorized
Also available on Utube at http://youtu.be/Z62x9mzO5NA
Filed under Adult Fiction, America and the UK, Books, Environment, Science, Thrillers
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of The Terror Time Spies by David Clement-Davies. The first in a thrilling adventure series about the soon to be famous Pimple Club, based on rumours of a daring English aristocrat, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and set during the French Revolution’s horrifying reign of terror.
It is Henry Bonespair’s birthday and he has been given a very strange present, a beautiful watch, while he and his tomboy sister Spike, in their wild little gang called The Rat Catchers, prepare to make a dangerous journey with their father to Revolutionary Paris. But the trip is cancelled, as fear and horror mount abroad, so when pretty French émigré Juliette St Honore is kidnapped by French Spies, there is nothing for it but to form a brand new gang, go to Paris, rescue Juliette from the jaws of the Guillotine and defeat the Frenchies themselves! Little do the daring Pimpernel Club know that Henry’s watch conceals not only a grave English spy secret, but can also open a doorway into some very strange and exciting worlds indeed. Perhaps through time itself.
Coming this July
Filed under Childrens Books, Young Adult
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce the coming edition of The Sight and Fell in a single eBook. It will be available on Amazon some time in June.
Filed under Uncategorized
Phoenix Ark's Blog 