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John Ash

@john-ash.bsky.social

Literary agent at CAA, submissions to UKBookSubmissions@caa.com

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Maris Kreizman@maris.bsky.social · last mo.

I wrote about a frustrating, brilliant novel that deals with how devoid of connections and curiosity the world has become, and then, fittingly, I wrote (again) about how AI is ruining the book publishing industry. www.themarisreview.com/the-maris-re...

The Maris Review, vol 116

The theme of the week is how AI is making the world (more) stupid What I read this week The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams What to do with this frustrating, brilliant novel! I almost wanted to t...

themarisreview.com

James Bailey@drjamesbailey.bsky.social · last mo.

I’m in The Times today! I've written about Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, obeying your own 'queer dictatorial sense’, and scaring yourself to death while writing. Scarier still, I've just taken off my cap to find I’ve been left with a hairstyle reminiscent of Dido in her early-00s heyday.

Me, holding a copy of The Times, featuring an article with the headline ‘Rereading: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark’. My hair is flicking out to the side.
Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 3mo ago

i think about this all the time, but pratchett published 3 flops before he even /started/ discworld, the first two of which are considered a bit rough around the edges, and then (having been given time and money to hone his craft) he writes about 20 masterpieces in a row

D.D. Miriade@ddmiriade.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The Devil and Mrs. Gooch by Oliver Darkshire is one of those wonderfully clever novels where a line slips past you at first, your brain catches up a second later, and suddenly you’re laughing out loud. It’s delightfully unusual and strange in the best way. #booksky

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Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It's US paperback day for Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil! My grotty, half-mad, confusing little fantasy novel which has led people to email me asking what the ending means, an element I will not be explaining because the book is in fact the explanation

it's the cover of Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil. there's a note underneath with a joke on it but it's quite wordy, not funny enough to repeat, and my fingers are tiredA page from Isabella Nagg "A Spell of Finding" which again is quite long and I promise you no-one else is reading it so you aren't missing outa mostly blank page announcing an excerpt from The Devil and Mrs Gooch
James Bailey@drjamesbailey.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark is BOOK OF THE WEEK in The Times, and it's frankly outrageous that a small marching band hasn't trundled into my house to make some little celebratory parps in my honour 😤

A photo of me, holding up a copy of The Times which features a review of my book, accompanied by the headline: ‘A genius with claws - the picaresque life of Muriel Spark’
James Bailey@drjamesbailey.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Lovely review of LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK in The Scotsman, which picks up on everything I wanted the book to be: 🐈‍⬛ The opposite of a dry, door-stopper biography 🐈‍⬛ Genre-agnostic 🐈‍⬛ Full of mystery ‘A shapeshifting biography for a shapeshifting subject' - dreamy!

For someone who wrote biographies of writers early on in her career, Muriel Spark grew to be suspicious of the genre. As she warned American academic Dorothea Walker in 1988, "A number of biographical pieces already written about me are completely wrong, sometimes pure inventions."In his new book about Spark ("as sly, nimble and elegant as her own work" claims his publisher, raising the bar ridiculously high), James Bailey consigns biography's normal rules to the footnotes and opts for inventiveness instead. So here, for example, is the the young Muriel, playing with her two dolls, Red Rosie and Queen, at her family's dining table: "Delicately, Muriel tilts an empty teacup to Queenie's closed lips, signifying the doll's frosty contempt for her jealous companion." Or here she is again, this time aged 39 and writing The Comforters, and he imagines her opening a bottle sent to her by Graham Greene, "she might have tilted the glass this way and that, watching as the wine took on the curves and contours of its new vessel: one shape becoming another." What can one say? She might have done both these things. Then again, she might not. Does it matter? It would if Bailey had completely made up his facts, but he hasn't: he is being inventive not inventing. Graham Greene did indeed send Spark money along with cases of wine when she was at her lowest ebb in the mid-1950s (on condition that she didn't pray for him), and her dolls Red Rosie and Queenie made their literary debut in Spark's 1992 memoir Curriculum Vitae. READ MORE: Nocturnes by Susan Tomes review: 'ingenious and astute' These are, of course, the tiniest details in a spectacularly large life whose story is, as Bailey notes "every bit as strange, slippery and rife with contradictions as those she wrote", and which ranges from a happy Edinburgh childhood to marital misery in Rhodesia to black propaganda work in wartime London to literary superstardom in New York, and a contented old age in a Tuscan rectory. In telling it, Bailey's approach isn't a conventional "life" so much as a hybrid of literary criticism, personal appreciation and a novel ("A late summer evening. St John's Wood at sunset. A London sky the hue of a bloodshot eye. She walks slowly, several steps behind the woman she met on the…Provided it is properly researched - which, with its 25-page bibliography Bailey's book certainly is, even if Dan Gunn's excellent Letters of Muriel Spark Vol 1 arrived too late last year to make the cut - I have no problem with this. There's no reason a shapeshifting author shouldn't have a shapeshifting book written about her. No reason it shouldn't zoom forwards and back across her life at whiplash speed, because that is the way our minds work and the way Spark's fiction did too. It might even, 20 years after her death (the actual anniversary is 13 April spread the word to a more literature-averse generation. READ MORE: The Edge of Revolution by David Torrance review: 'balanced and solidly researched' Last year, in her wildly apophenic biography Electric Spark, Frances Wilson wrote about how she "felt, on every page, her control of my hand" as she tried to puzzle out the convoluted paths of Spark's fiction and (in the words of her book's blurb) "crack her code". Bailey, by contrast, both delights in and accepts Spark's elusiveness. "Just when we think we have the measure of her," he writes, "she slinks out of sight. She reemerges with a new way of writing from a desk in another part of the world... It is this lifelong slipperiness, this sense of perpetual reinvention that I seek to capture." By and large he does, though I don't think he would object if I gave the last word to Dame Muriel. "There's nothing I can tell the public about my life that can clarify my books," she once told Harding Lemay, her US editor at Knopf, when he asked her for publicity material. "It's rather the books that clarify my life." Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, by James Bailey, Sceptre,
James Bailey@drjamesbailey.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Really big news! Author copies of my book are here, and they're gorgeous. The colours! The chunkiness! The big glossy cat on the front! LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK is out in 2 weeks. Go pre-order it; it'll make a beautiful addition to your living space. I’m just saying…

Selfie of me, holding a copy of Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. Book cover is orange-red with a picture of Muriel Spark holding a black cat.
Drew Broussard@drewsof.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This book rules, I need you all to buy it and read it (and ISABELLA NAGG while you're at it) so that Oliver's publisher(s) continues to offer him money for more books in the series, as it should by all rights/in a just world become a book-a-year-ish millennial's Discworldesque.

Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I have my hands on proofs of my next book 📕 in which the devil (evil/bisexual/furry) falls for an eight foot tall villainous businesswoman and gets stomped all over. The Devil and Mrs Gooch is out in May 👀

author holding a copy of The Devil and Mrs Gooch
Lynne M. Meyer | coffee-fueled and available for hire@lynnemeyer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I just finished an ARC of The Devil and Mrs Gooch, and let me tell you: It’s INCREDIBLE. If you’re a fan of the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett, this book is definitely going to be your jam. Longer review coming soon! #BookSky 💙📚

Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 11mo ago

some exciting news: another book! announcing The Devil and Mrs Gooch, a fantasy in which our capricious friend The Devil falls head over hoof for dread entrepreneur Gwendolyn Gooch, and her latest diabolical scheme: the rented apartment. expect torrid results. releasing USA May 2026 from W.W. Norton

cover for The Devil and Mrs Gooch, by Oliver Darkshire, featuring a woman in a flaming ballgown leading a caprine devil by a leash, who stares up at her in adoration. Marked "Household Gramarye Book 2"
Matthew@fineplan.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Darkshire's THE DEVIL AND MRS GOOCH revisits the world of Isabella Nagg, taking evil businesswoman Gooch to the city for a scheme involving kidnapped hobs, predatory rental practices, and a lovestruck Devil. Complete with copious footnotes and marginalia from a set of Household Gramarye. 🤩 #ewgc

The Devil and Mrs. Gooch: A Novel Oliver Darkshire
John Self@john-self.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"What is it that makes some books stick in the mind while others drift into vague memory? One factor must be a unique, strong concept. And so it is with Eradication, or as I think of it, the one about a man on an island with 4,000 goats and a gun." Me on Jonathan Miles's springy, visceral novel:

One man on an island — plus 4,000 goats and a gun

In Jonathan Miles’s dark comedy Eradication, things go awry for a mysterious man on a pest control mission. It’s not often you wish a novel was longer

thetimes.com

Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 7mo ago

bookstore chains are hibernating in february, you must seize advantage of their weakness and raid their caves before they grow strong again in the summer months and begin hunting livestock near the mountain villages www.waterstones.com/book/isabell...

Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire | Waterstones

Buy Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.

waterstones.com

Oliver Darkshire@deathbybadger.bsky.social · 7mo ago

the UK paperback for Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, which some people have called "why" and "a fantasy book? I thought I raised a doctor or a lawyer" and "I only like the talking donkey, the rest is garbage" is out in paperback in june! and today it's 25% off (link ⬇️)

screengrab from waterstones UK for Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil