In February 2020, Book Works published a new novel, Licorice, by Bridget Penney, as the first book in the Interstices series. At the same time we launched an open call to find two new books for the series, to be edited by Bridget Penney, and we are pleased to announce the resulting commissions: Other Reflexes by Diana Georgiou and The Escape Artist by Harun Morrison.

THE ESCAPE ARTIST – HARUN MORRISON

The Escape Artist takes a photograph of the same name by James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) as its starting point. Shot in Harlem, New York, 1924, the picture features a smartly dressed, unidentified black man in chains, calmly posing towards the camera. This novel explores the material and metaphorical potential of this image and the picking of locks; reconstructing the day it was taken and the build up towards a staged escape act before a Harlem crowd in the 1920s.

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer currently living on a narrow boat in London. Alongside Helen Walker, he co-founded the collective art practice ‘They Are Here’ in 2006. He is the current 2020 Wheatley Fine Art Fellow. Forthcoming activities include an exhibition at Eastside Projects, Birmingham in 2021, new soundwork in the Dakar Biennial 2020 and the design of a community garden in Liverpool, Merseyside, commissioned by Rule of Threes. Since 2019 Harun has been a trustee of the Black Cultural Archive.

Image (top): Harun Morrison, 2020

OTHER REFLEXES – DIANA GEORGIOU

Fleshed out on the porous boundaries between memoir and fiction, five interrelated tales – each dedicated to one of the senses – recount what it means for domestic, interpersonal and systemic violence to be the primary component of one’s world. From the streets of 1980s postcolonial Cyprus to present-day European metropolises, we follow the unnamed protagonist in her quest to construct meaning in a class and a cultural context that lack any sort of support or analytic tools. Deploying a language that vibrates with synaesthetic sensuality, Georgiou captures a life riven by injustice and its inscription on the senses.

Diana Georgiou is a writer and curator based in London. Her recent writing engages with the horrors of violence and the difficulty of their narration. Attentive to the sonic resonances of language, her textual work also takes the form of recorded sound poetry and performative live readings. Other Reflexes is her debut novel.

Image (bottom): Studio Prokopiou, ‘Three Graces (Monument)’, 2018