M J Nicholls

Verily miffed by the chancres of chance, chronically ineffective politician Derek Haffman affects to effect an unspecified political revolution by pickpocketing his colleagues in the lobby of the Scottish Parliament. In the wake of the abject failure of this objectless mission, repercussions naturally unfold in painfully precise procession, forcing Derek and his chronically untalented mistress, the singer in an avant-garde rock band too toxic for human ears, to flee to C diz. An unexpected visit from disgraced former politician and bestselling author Jethro Quiver unpeels another layer from the onion of shame in this shambling comic novel that chronicles the descent of a passionately aimless man, a rebel unable to think up an appropriate cause to lend his rebelling talents.A pleasantly unpleasant tale told in four blissfully interminable chapters by the Milky Way's leading virtuoso of the vowels and consonants, The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman is the perfect read for anyone open to consider that unspecified solutions to unidentified political problems may not yield juicily delectable results.

Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call "titular". Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called "a botched stew", the world's unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.

At the Husav k Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsed ttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.

Fiction. Illustrated by Alan Lyons. In 2060, Scotland was annihilated in a series of merciless nuclear strikes from Luxembourg. In response to a curious public's growing hunger for a definitive history of the long-lost nation, M.J. Nicholls provides the most complete account available of Scottish life starting with the failed independence referendum of 2014. Reflecting how 21st-century Scotland split into numerous nation-states with radically different societies and systems of government, this work of painstaking research and archivism is divided into chapters corresponding with those several regions, whose fates, though ultimately conjoined in irreversible darkness, took divergent paths to the inevitable during the brief but colorful period of Scotland's ill-fated fling with freedom. This volume will unearth the enigma that was Scotland before the bomb.

Fiction. Marcus Schott, sacked from serving succour to suckers and loans to losers, leaves the office life to luxuriate in literature. His plan is to read every title featured in Dr. Peter Boxall's notorious compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Motoring toward a small pre-purchased cottage on the Orkney Isles, Marcus soon encounters fatal hiccups in his scheme to compress a lifetime's reading into three years. These hiccups include skittish librarian Isobel Bartmel, self-cauterising critic Raine Upright, and the unpredictable happenings of the characterless Orkney peoples, too long trapped in their bothies of banality, each pushing Marcus further from his ecstatic vision of total list completion. A light comedy with a sunny paradisiac quality, rich in verbal virtuosity, Rabelaisian lists, and the occasional outburst of cheerful, cathartic violence, THE 1002ND BOOK is the ultimate summer novel against summer novels: an anti-crowdpleaser with a tidy, cinematic plot that should please both crowds and all those thoroughly depressed by them.

Fiction. In an obsessive monologue vaguely after the manner of Thomas Bernhard, a socially inept writer, in an attempt to deflate or defeat the humiliation of seeking to impress the smooth-talking, self-important sorts of people he loathes but envies, tries to get to the bottom of an embarrassing incident from his childhood, with entertaining but refreshingly anti-climactic non- results. In THE QUIDDITY OF DELUSION, both barrels of Nicholls' word-gun are, as always, loaded, and the ego gets it hard in the nads.

Fiction. THE HOUSE OF WRITERS is a playful novel set in 2050, when the publishing industry has collapsed, literature has become a micro-niche interest, and Scotland itself has become an enormous call center. Those writers who remain reside in a dilapidated towerblock, where they churn out hack works tailored to please their small audiences. The novel weaves together individual stories of life inside (and outside) the building, where each floor houses a different genre, as the writers fight to keep the process of literature alive with varying degrees of success. THE HOUSE OF WRITERS is a feast of wit: a surreal entertainment, a bracing satire, a verbal tour de force, and a good-spirited dystopian comedy; it is also a loving homage to language, literature, and the imagination, and a plea that they remain vital well into the dubious future that awaits us.

This edition of A Postmodern Belch has been discredited. Pending article 9.6 of the Creative Commons Licence, portions of this work contain improperly brushed syllables taken from a 1978 edition of A Postmodern Belch and inelegantly buffered clauses taken from a 1997 edition of A Postmodern Belch. This edition of A Postmodern Belch is adapted from the 2007 edition of A Postmodern Belch and reinstates all the irritating and unlikeable qualities of the 2010 edition of A Postmodern Belch, including the missing correspondence between Luca Brasi and Lionel Blair that never made it into the 1808 edition.