Scroll down for information and links to stories and projects that are currently available free of charge, i.e. free as in ‘free beer,’ (and often ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, too.)*
‘A Porky Prime Cut’ – Ebook and Audio
You can download a free ebook of my new short story ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ from James Bridle’s Artists’ eBooks.
Here is a live MP3 of me reading the story with live musical accompaniment from bass player Simon Edwards at my recent Dirty Literature gig at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on 18 March 2011.
A Porky Prime Cut © Tony White, 2011; Music © Simon Edwards, 2011. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Feel free to extract the MP3 from this player (e.g. using the Firefox add-on ‘Download Helper’) if you prefer to listen using your own MP3 software or device.
‘A Porky Prime Cut’ is published by SCAN in association with Artists’ Ebooks, Bournemouth Libraries and Arts and Piece of Paper Press. A Porky Prime Cut by Tony White is part of Digital Transformations, an arts project using photography, film, sound, mapping, creative writing, web design and exhibition to raise the profile of the communities of Kinson, Townsend and West Howe in Bournemouth. Digital Transformations is coordinated and curated by SCAN with Bournemouth Libraries and Arts, and Bournemouth Adult Learning. It is funded and supported by The Learning Revolution Transformation Fund, Bournemouth Borough Council, SCAN, Bournemouth University, and The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE).
Balkanising Bloomsbury (Artists’ eBooks, 2009)
Click image above to download
Three free electronic editions in the ePub format published by Artists’ eBooks to coincide with the Destination London series of events at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. These ebooks are designed to be downloaded and read on ebook reading software and devices such as iPhones.
The titles are:
- ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ (click cover image at left to download)
These Balkanising Bloomsbury ePub editions are supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The project has also been supported by Arts Council England, by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) and by Proboscis. Artists’ eBooks is a collaborative project to explore the possibilities of new electronic platforms and formats, created and run by James Bridle / booktwo.org.
‘How we made “An American Legend” part 1′ was commissioned by Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles, California, USA.
‘Include Me Out’ was commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
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Albertopolis Disparu (Science Museum Booklet, 2009)
***PRINT EDITION NOW UNOBTAINABLE***
A story that I produced while writer in residence at the Science Museum for summer 2008. Albertopolis Disparu was published on a specially revived Science Museum Booklet imprint for free giveaway in spring 2009.
It doesn’t quite compare to that beautifully produced, vintage-format book, but there is a downloadable PDF and more information about Albertopolis Disparu and my residency here.
Londonist called Albertopolis Disparu a ‘Weirdly Brilliant Steampunk Thing’, then said:
Anyone who loves alternative versions of London a la Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore should get their hands on Albertopolis Disparu, a short story available for free at the Science Museum. [...] The campaign starts here to persuade the author, Tony White, to turn this into a full-length novel.
Albertopolis Disparu display in the Science Museum, London
Richard Marshall’s review for 3am Magazine said:
White uses primary texts to create his secondary ones and overtly cites five sources, plus the James Colvin ‘Terminal Session’ triple bluff that cavorts back to the great Michael Moorcock who started it in the first place and then back again (which adds up to three) plus the ‘listening post’ pothook of the South Kensington Science Museum plus the American Technical Society of 1911 publication. It might be a story but more likely it merely reads like one to the casual peruse. [...] White is a killer. He’s the deal.
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‘Afternoon Play’ (3am Magazine, 2005)
‘A last word on the matter of ‘craft’. Writing is not an easy business, and one would like to think that one learns, or has learned some things on the way. Most of all it would surely help for the writer to be appreciated for this as a carpenter or stonemason might be. It was good to see that this collection allowed the space for what might be called a conventional short story, Tony White’s ‘Afternoon Play’ but which is as well crafted as a good-fitting door and frame.’ The Hastings Trawler
‘Afternoon Play’ which is published online here, is a short story that I wrote as a sequel-of-sorts to another story ‘The Jet-set Girls’ which had previously been published by Amy Prior in her anthology Retro Retro (Serpent’s Tail) and in Dan Crowe’s shortlived Butterfly magazine where it was illustrated by the brilliant artist Damian Le Bas.
I gave ‘Afternoon Play’ to 3am Magazine to publish online because I liked what they were doing. It was subsequently also collected in their anniversary anthology The Edgier Waters: 5 years of 3am Magazine (Snow Books), edited by Andrew Stevens.
Bargain hunters should note that a 99p edition of The Edgier Waters was produced for some now-forgotten bookshop promotion and that this is still available from The Book Depository here, as is the full priced edition. It’s worth 99p for Michael Bracewell‘s introduction alone.
‘The Jet-set Girls’ had been written as a tribute to Michael Moorcock’s psychedelic anti-Bond Jerry Cornelius, and was published in Retro Retro with Mike’s permission.
‘Afternoon Play’ sees the narrator of ‘The Jet-set Girls’, pulp writer Hughie Johnston, holed up in Hertfordshire forty years later. Jerry Cornelius does not feature in ‘Afternoon Play’, but the late novelist and publisher Anna Haycraft a.k.a. Alice Thomas Ellis does make a cameo appearance.
Factoid: I’d been invited to contribute to the All Hail the New Puritans anthology and ‘Afternoon Play’ was my first attempt to write using the 10 rules of the New Puritan Manifesto. I didn’t stop to check if it succeeded in that aim as I immediately wrote another story and submitted that to editors Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne instead.
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* With apologies to the Free Software Foundation: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”
