Emily Boyce, Editor at Gallic Books, has bought UK, Europe and Commonwealth rights (ex-Canada) to a collection of Edward Carey’s ‘lockdown drawings’ from Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann.
Entitled B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS after Carey’s favourite grade of pencil, the book will bring together line drawings Carey has produced and posted on social media every day since the first lockdown in March 2020 from his home in Austin, Texas, along with essays reflecting on the project as it progressed. It will include a foreword by Max Porter, who says Edward has, with his lockdown drawings, ‘singlehandedly made Twitter a better place’.
The drawings include figures involved in the pandemic itself – such as Anthony Fauci and Margaret Keenan, the first person to receive the Pfizer vaccine outside of trials – and reactions to the other tumultuous events of 2020, including the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the American election.
Birthdays and deaths of prominent figures are marked, with captions including quotations which resonate with the world we are living in now. Other drawings are more intimate – requests from friends or family, works of Carey’s vivid imagination, and images that conjure memories and dreams of the world beyond the four walls of Carey’s family home.
The book will be published in B format hardback in November 2021 and will be accompanied by an exhibition of the drawings at Belgravia Books, the bookshop of Gallic Books.
Edward Carey said: ‘I am so thrilled that Gallic will publish this whole year's worth of quarantine drawings. It's very typical of the wonderful and ever inventive Gallic to come up with this idea and I'm so delighted that this journal in pencil will be a book. I am hoping, most of all, that by November, it will all be over and we can all see each other again.’
Emily Boyce said: ‘When we signed Edward’s previous book, THE SWALLOWED MAN, none of us could have imagined how prescient the story of Pinocchio’s father Geppetto, making art to save his mind while trapped inside a giant sea creature, would prove to be. Each of us trapped “inside the whale” has had to find ways to keep going, to find connection and stave off isolation and despair – for Edward, this came through his pencil. His lockdown project is a magnificent achievement, reflecting both personal and collective experience, finding beauty amid the horror of these extraordinary times.’
Isobel Dixon said: ‘Edward Carey’s artistry – and empathy – has never been more apt and immediate than in his commitment to making and sharing a drawing a day in what became a very long time of crisis. An inspired and truly social gift, daily, on social media, now to be shared further afield by Gallic Books. All power to publisher, artist and (B) pencil.’
Edward’s previous book, THE SWALLOWED MAN, was published in the UK by Gallic Books in November 2020, and in the US by Riverhead in January 2021.
Praise for Edward Carey
‘If this were music, Carey would be Eric Satie. If it were film, he would be Tim Burton.’ – Newsday
‘All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.’ – Max Porter
‘Edward Carey, a brilliant love child of the kingdom of letters.’ – Immédiatement
‘Carey, at every step, raises the stakes; he isn't interested in just portraying eccentric characters in an eccentric setting. He wants nothing less than Mastery — of technique, of characterization, of setting, of memory, of resonance.’ – Jeff Vandermeer
‘Edward Carey has an imagination of tremendous range and power. He transforms the familiar stuff of life in shapes utterly strange and marvellous.’ – Patrick McGrath
‘Edward Carey, with OBSERVATORY MANSIONS proves the potential brilliance of the novel form.’ — John Fowles
‘Edward Carey is the Mervyn Peake of our times (with a stronger sense of story too).’ – Gregory Norminton
‘Edward Carey is an enormously talented writer’ – Publishers Weekly
‘Edward Carey is one of the strangest writers we are privileged to have in this country. There are echoes in his work of other great idiosyncratics from Angela Carter to Russell Hoban, but he supersedes even them in the downright oddity of his mind.’ — Observer
‘If you’ve forgotten why you’d even read a novel, Edward Carey is here to set you straight.’ — Alexander Chee, author of THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
‘Carey writes with such persuasive authority, and we are inclined to believe him …The emphasis on detail in Carey’s sweetly detached, exact prose has forebears in the illuminated dreams of Borges and Calvino and Georges Perec.’ — Carey Harrison, The New York Times Review of Books
'Wonderfully weird... Carey reproduces, or invents... with relentless energy.' – The Herald Scotland
Praise for THE SWALLOWED MAN
‘Geppetto, carver of naughty Pinocchio, keeps a haunting journal of his years inside the whale… Bizarre, moving, intensely odd’ – @MargaretAtwood
‘Art objects live in the belly of this marvellous novel, images swallowed by text, sustained by a sublime and loving imagination. Like all of Edward Carey's work THE SWALLOWED MAN is profound and delightful. It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions; parenting and art-making.’ — Max Porter
‘THE SWALLOWED MAN is a beautiful and dark meditation on fatherhood, mercy, redemption and the alchemy of isolation. Strange, moving and musical, it’s a delight.’ — A.L. Kennedy
‘THE SWALLOWED MAN takes as its inspiration the moment in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Pinocchio story when Geppetto, the carver of the wooden boy, sets out to find his fugitive offspring and winds up in the stomach of an enormous sea beast. … Geppetto’s voice, full of wistful overemphasis and bewildered revelation, is absorbing as he takes in the oddity of his situation. And the book, sentence by sentence, offers much in which to luxuriate.’ – Matthew Adams, The Sunday Times
‘Strange and lovely’ – Rhik Samadder
‘THE SWALLOWED MAN is like no other book that I’ve been reading for a long time. That’s enough advice. The fact that it is written with fluid economy, poetic clarity, and artistic boldness adds to that. What a high point with so many lows to finish this year.’ – Helena Sutan, Brinkwire
‘Edward Carey’s latest novel brings a similarly fabulist perspective to the Italian legend of Pinocchio. The author makes clear Pinocchio’s connection to concerns both universal and contemporary, in a story that’s as much about creation and fatherhood as it is about a conscious marionette who wishes that he was a real boy. . . Carey proves once again how there is a magic in that archetypal familiarity of the perennial fairy tale.’ — Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2020 Book Preview, The Millions
‘A deeply insightful meditation on guilt and hindsight, THE SWALLOWED MAN is a must-read for pandemic-bound parents in need of a respite—as well as a reminder of how love often challenges us. Says Carey, “It’s basically a tale of a rather extreme form of social distancing.’ — Austin Monthly
About Edward Carey:
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in North Walsham, Norfolk, England, during an April snowstorm. Like his father and his grandfather, both officers in the Royal Navy, he attended Pangbourne Nautical College, where the closest he came to following his family calling was playing Captain Andy in the school’s production of Showboat. Afterwards he joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at Hull University. He has written plays for the National Theatre of Romania and the Vilnius Small State Theatre, Lithuania. In England his plays and adaptations have been performed at the Young Vic Studio, the Battersea Arts Centre, and the Royal Opera House Studio. He has collaborated on a shadow puppet production of Macbeth in Malaysia, and with the Faulty Optic Theatre of Puppets.
He is the author of the novels OBSERVATORY MANSIONS, THE IREMONGER TRILOGY, ALVA & IRVA and LITTLE, all of which he illustrated. He always draws the characters he writes about, but often the illustrations contradict the writing and vice versa and getting both to agree with each other takes him far too long.
He has lived in England, France, Romania, Lithuania, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, and the United States. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which is not near the sea.