Axe: Stories That Cut Deep

A new anthology

I had the pleasure of contributing a story to this wonderful new collection by Heresy Press, a publisher that was established to promote artistic freedom and to push back against the conformity and self-censorship of our times.

Axe: Stories That Cut Deep was inspired by Kafka’s injunction that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us’. The editors, Bernard Schweizer and Adam Szetela, had contacted an array of authors they admired. This was their message: ‘If you can manage it, please write for us a story sufficiently audacious, offbeat, experimental, cryptic, disorienting, discomfiting, impertinent, tasteless, or annoying that it would quite likely meet with rejection by the average mainstream editor’. This book is the result.

I have to say it was so refreshing to be asked to simply ‘follow the muse’ and to write entirely according to my instincts. In the end, I wrote a story called ‘Propaganda’, but I won’t say too much about it in the hope that you’ll read it for yourselves.

Axe also features stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Lionel Shriver, Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, David Sedaris, Alice Walker, Bradford Morrow, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Santlofer, James Morrow, Elizabeth Hand, and an afterword by Junot Díaz.

It’s out very soon, but you can pre-order now at Amazon UK or Amazon US.

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