Welcome to a brief and happy edition of the newsletter of Bonfire Books, Fanning the Flames. It’s been a somewhat quiet summer at Bonfire HQ. However, today our first book of 2025 enters the world!
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Happy Publication Day to Paul Scully! The Literate Detective & Other Crimes is officially published today. The Literate Detective & Other Crimes is available for Australian readers at the Bonfire website and for overseas readers via Amazon here. Paul’s work is among the most incisive philosophical and imaginative poetry being written in Australia today, seamlessly combining concrete imagery, high abstraction and gentle sardonic humour. While so many poets revert in (apparent) desperation to their own interiority, Paul thinks his way into the minds of disparate individuals from the past and present, most notably the “literate detective” of the book’s title.
The book will be launched in Sydney by Peter Boyle at GleeBooks on Saturday April 26th. For more details and to RSVP (essential) please see the GleeBooks event page here.
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Alasdair Cannon’s Holding Patterns reviewed in Observer & Review.
In the seemingly unique cultural moment we find ourselves in, as dissatisfaction with the technological managerial “mainstream” becomes almost universal, it seems as though there is an appetite for sustained engagement across ideological divides. In a happy example of this, our own Alasdair Cannon’s Holding Patterns received a long and fine-grained review from new Sydney-based “paleoconservative” publication Observer & Review:
“Cannon’s short volume will be of interest to both cultural critics of the left and reactionary right. He diagnoses many social pathologies correctly, for others he provides a genuinely interesting attempt at ‘unpacking’ their causes and compositions.”
Holding Patterns is available for purchase here.
You can find Observer & Review at their website here.
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Lucas has started a Substack. He will be writing three times a month on books and culture as well as posting the occasional creative piece. You can follow him at The Sprawl of Quality.
That’s all for now. We will have updates soon about our publishing schedule for the rest of the year, including the results of our open submission period in January.
