Coming in 2025 ...
Our pre-order subscription scheme enables readers to support Grand Iota and receive copies of our new titles before publication. Pre-order subscribers have the option to have their name printed in the back of the books.
Our 2025 offer featuring new books by Sharon Kivland and Ken Edwards – Almanach and Grech – was successful in attracting 59 subscribers. Thank you, good people! Your names will be included in the books, now in production, and you will be receiving your advance copies this month (January 2025).
We will shortly be making each book available for sale individually, exclusively from this site, in advance of publication in March.
SHARON KIVLAND is an artist and writer, and also an editor and publisher under the imprint MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Her previous books include Abécédaire (2022) and A Lover’s Discourse/Un discours amoreux (2017), which was shortlisted for the Bob Calle Prix de livre d’artiste. A series of 120 drawings that accompany Almanach entitled ‘The Bloody Radicals’, will be exhibited at ZAK, Zittadelle Spandau, Berlin, in September 2025. She lives in London and rural France.
"Sharon Kivland’s wonderful Almanach is a joyous reanimation of the French Republican Calendar, rich in the sensory knowledge that comes from passionate attention to materials and materiality. It weaves the names and seasons of the historical text into a daily texture of incident and interaction, making them the filter for a perspective on contemporary global events, which are keenly observed through a history of unfinished revolutionary potential. A non-native terroir, where roots are for supporting others rather than fixing to a spot, is the terrain of a generous sociality extending beyond the human and into the vibrant temporalities of plants and animals. This radical porosity between times, places, and species sustains political hope at a moment when it is much needed."
– ZOË SKOULDING
ALMANACH
A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar
Sharon Kivland
(Cover illustrations by the author)
“The year of Almanach is structured by the French Republican calendar and interrupted by other systems of time-managing mnemonics that have sought to perfect people in their own image.The resulting jump-cuts from images of plants and agricultural implements to the gory fates of saints and tips for making the best use of one’s time prove fertile ground for the growth of meditations, speculations, and memories that are thought-provoking, often funny and seem
determined not to let anyone, author included, off the hook. Kivland also considers how non-humans experience time and, through her relation of the tasks involved in gardening and food production, foregrounds how carrying these out ‘at the right time’ is becoming harder due to climate change....” – BRIDGET PENNEY
“[This book] is a durational delight. Moving across its pages I feel the days passing, the seasons, time moving and also blurring, plus a strange desire to pluck out certain sentences and embroider them onto silk screens. I suppose this is because while Almanach is a book about time it is also absolutely a book about a place: this field, this house, this wine, these figs.Truly it is a delicious, tactile, heady thing.”
– DANIELLE DUTTON
"To be carried about and read as a companion throughout the year, Almanach is a visionary grafting of the furtive, fertile, metamorphosis of things both personal and nonhuman onto the political; global conflicts, violence against women. As she documents a continuous activity of living inside a revolutionary time where saints, rose de Berne tomatoes coiled around spiralled tuteurs, Rosa Luxemburg, archives, wounds, hens, abundance of all kinds, mortality, and ‘women’s work’ constellate a coexistence of temporal intersections without bourgeois taming, Sharon Kivland allows us to hold the conjunction of opposites in resistance, always in service to the work that extends outside books. I felt great joy on encountering this candid, uncompromising work; how we might move through this world, where being is a state of interanimation – to animate mutually." – LUCY MERCER
978-1-874400-93-5
314pp 3 MARCH 2025
KEN EDWARDS has written four previous novels, three books of non-generic prose and a memoir. His Collected Poems was published in 2020. Between 1993-2016 he ran the small press Reality Street and he is now a partner in Grand Iota. He lives on the south coast of England, where he plays bass guitar with the band Afrit Nebula.
GRECH
Ken Edwards
(Cover image by Elaine Edwards)
An elderly homeless man living on the edge of a beach discourses at length on philosophy, poetry and science (hinting he may have once been a private detective). But his history remains mysterious, and he goes by a different name depending on whom he is talking to. He seems obsessed by someone in his past named Grech whom he appears to blame for the chain of events leading to his current misfortune, but the stories don’t quite add up....
COMMENTS ON KEN EDWARDS’ PREVIOUS NOVELS
“And here we touch one of the most moving aspects of this novel: a sense of distance and confusion offered by language, an eerie awareness of life going on somewhere but one being unable to relate to it with any real sense of focus. In this Dantesque world of the conscious dead … one is compelled to ask ‘Do I exist?’ and the novel offers a bewildering answer that echoes both Dickens’s Circumlocution Office on the one hand and Kafka’s world of what faced Joseph K on the other….”
– IAN BRINTON, Golden Handcuffs Review [on Secret Orbit]
“The tension builds up nicely and the late-night industrial park … becomes suitably spooky. In fact, at one point, I worried that the book was going to use that genre-twist cop-out where the ‘explanation’ for the crime is a supernatural one…. But the weirdnesses stay more or less under control and the denouement is, instead, revealingly bitter in the manner of, say, Leonardo Sciascia’s novels.”
– GUY RUSSELL, Tears in the Fence [on The Grey Area]
978-1-874400-94-3
180pp 3 MARCH 2025