We are delighted to announce that issue 10 of The Happy Hypocrite – Tolstoyevsky is guest edited by Virginija Januškevičiūtė. It will be published by Book Works in October 2017. We are now issuing a call for submissions.

Submission deadline 15 May 2017

Please send submissions to:

Virginija Januškevičiūtė
The Happy Hypocrite, Submissions
c/o Book Works,
19 Holywell Row,
London,
EC2A 4JB

Or email:
happyhypocrite@bookworks.org.uk

To invite a response and as the call for submissions for this forthcoming issue, Januškevičiūtė sends the following letter:

It started with this one situation in a market when one woman who works there was talking – very loud, for everyone to hear – about some very hospitable man in Georgia with a house full of books. She said that he’d invited her and her friends home and when she saw the books she immediately understood something and she asked if he had read all of them, to which he replied: ‘Oh I have read all your Tolstoyevskys!’

My friends told me his story at a dinner and we all laughed at it, but it appears we laughed for different reasons and even from different people in the story, some of us thought that the man wasn’t joking but had indeed made a mistake.

So the magazine will consist of various artists and just people writing, and maybe other kind of contributions mainly about various difficulties with humour and it will be called ‘Tolstoyevsky’. It will be a collection of various Tolstoyevskys. Perhaps mainly about how humour is often not humour at all or about how it sometimes doesn’t work, and how half of our lives are filled with things that don’t work. But that probably means they work, right? It’s just that for some reason we think they don’t. For instance when a TV host cannot formulate a question but the person they interview still answers without blinking, as if they were asked a normal question. So it’s about these normal things. I suspect that this whole normal things is humour, it’s just that we are somehow used to calling humour that what’s funny. So yes, in a way it’s about human struggle with humour.

And so I am no yet sure how will the magazine turn out exactly but it will perhaps be a little like this game when every once in a while you try to say or do some nonsense. It can be harder than you think, especially if you try this in a room full of well humoured people who are very open to all sorts of cues and just make everything part of a conversation. So the whole magazine will be like that, everyone in great spirit just having a conversation so there’s no nonsense.

I was thinking about how to invite people to contribute, and it’s probably best if they can somehow start writing in the middle – by the way I never read magazines from the start, only from the middle or the end. And if you were to say or do a nonsense it would also always appear as if it’s coming from the middle and not from the beginning because it’s supposed to be a surprise. So I thought, what about if that story from the market was Tolstoy, and this following one by Candice Lin was Dostoyevsky, and if you want you can write in the middle.

Notes on submissions: Hard copy or electronic submissions are accepted for text and image. All submissions should be sent with a cover page detailing the artist/writer’s name, address, telephone number and email address and a short CV (no more than one side A4 please) and a completed equal opportunity form, downloadable on this page. Text submissions should be no more than 2,000 words, 12 point, with a double line space. Image or text/image submissions should be no more than 6 pages, 12 point, with a double line space. Images can be sent in TIFF, GIF, JPEG format. Max size per attachment is 2 MB.

The Happy Hypocrite will return work if a stamped, self-addressed envelope is included. We will only contact you if we want to publish your submission.