AN EDITIONS and CentreHouse Press…
…are launching new titles and paperbacks. The launch will take place on 12th November, 5.30 PM in the Library of the Society of Friends at The Quaker Centre, 173-177 Euston Road, London
AN Editions is the publishing arm of the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria. Launched in March this year, we’re proud to carry on our tradition of publishing the unusual, the progressive and the humane with our second season, which sees two new titles and the paperback versions of three of our four earlier hardbacks. We also look ahead to Spring 2026, when we welcome leading poet, novelist and essayist Richard Skinner to our ranks, as well as award-winning chef and writer Arun Kapil, and the recognised off Broadway playwright, James McGuire. In December Ars Notoria will also be launching a print omnibus edition of the magazine including highlights selected by our editors from the last four years of publication, with over 160 contributors.
These publications will be supported by advertising in the London Review of Books, social media and press campaigns, a launch event in London and other readings around the UK.
New Titles by Norman B. Schwarz and Peter Cowlam and two paperbacks.
For review copies, interviews or editorial and rights enquiries, contact: editor@arsnotoria.com.
NEW: HOLLYWOOD: Actors and Politicos: A Shared Profession, by Norman B. Schwartz
Cover design by CentreHouse Press
Since the invention of the microphone and the newsreel camera, the men and women who entertain us, who govern us, no longer need be godlike creatures displaying their feelings, sharing their beliefs from high above us on the silver screen, or from the back of trains; they now must be folks just like us or appear to be. Once handed a scene or speech someone else has written, our heroes, our leaders need only read their lines off a teleprompter in a clear and convincing voice. In this our celebrity culture in which every citizen has not only been guaranteed life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness but the bonus prize of a quarter hour of fame, it is only natural then that the art of acting and the job of politics should have somehow morphed into one shared profession.
Hollywood Actors & Politicos is a collection of twenty or more essays about larger-than-life personalities—some were actors, some were politicians, some both. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, who performed the role of the benevolent aristocrat to perfection to Ronald Reagan, a professional, who played both the boy next door and the 40th President with considerable competence, we meet Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, the Kennedy clan, Marilyn Monroe, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy-Onassis, David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock, the brothers Warner and Marx, the Bushes Sr and Jr, writers Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald, Bogie and Lauren, Laurel and Hardy, Sacco and Vanzetti. As Mayer once boasted about his studio: “More Stars Than There Are In Heaven.”
NORMAN B. SCHWARTZ spent over forty years in Hollywood and Rome, working as a sound and film editor. He was the first ADR editor / post-production dialogue director admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Available now from CentreHouse Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
NEW: Ghosts in the Machine, by Peter Cowlam
Cover design by CentreHouse Press
Ghosts in the Machine is a collection of finely crafted short-form poems, distinguished by their candour and observational precision. The book is a CentreHouse Press parallel text, with Angela D’Ambra’s translations into Italian alongside the original poems in English.
Peter Cowlam is a prize-winning novelist. He has published poetry and fiction in a wide range of literary journals. He has worked as commissioning editor for The Finger, and as literary editor for Ars Notoria. Ghosts in the Machine is presented as a parallel text, poems in English alongside Angela D’Ambra’s translations into Italian.
Angela D’Ambra has a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures (University of Florence). Since 2010, she has been translating postcolonial poetry into English. Her translations have been published online and in magazines. From 2019 to 2024, Angela translated eleven books of poetry (English-Italian), two novellas by Peter Cowlam, an essay on the theory of poetic translation by Michael Palma, and a long novel, King Ezra, by M. G. Stephens.
“Peter Cowlam’s bi-lingual English-Italian collection of poetry, Ghosts in the Machine | Spettri nel meccanismo, is a finely wrought act of introspective minimalism. Structured predominantly as short-lined couplets, they range from imagistic meditations to intellectual and physical explorations.” Sudeep Sen, author of Anthropocene (Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize Winner)
“Crossovers for novelists to be excellent poets and vice versa are not commonly successful endeavours. But as a successful novelist, Peter seems to do it with grace.” Yogesh Patel, MBE
Available now from CentreHouse Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
Oscar: The Second Coming, by Dan Pearce
‘It’s delightful! Very very funny … anyone with a true sense of him should find it wholly engaging!’ Stephen Fry
Dan Pearce at the launch of Oscar: The Second Coming. Photo by Andy Hall
This beautifully-illustrated graphic novel from cartoonist/artist Dan Pearce brings the celebrated and notorious Victorian with a hundred years into the future, with humour and a Wildean sense of mischief in his own right.
Dan recounts that the idea for the book came to him several years ago during a meeting with the editor of the famous humour magazine Punch. The editor had seen a few pages of a pictorial biography of Oscar Wilde that Dan had been working on. When he asked if there was a way of making it more contemporary, Dan had the brainwave of having Wilde abducted from Reading Gaol by aliens and transported a century into the future.
Available now from AN EDITIONS, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
The Rights of Man and Fish, by Paul D. Halas
The Rights of Man … and Fish romps through more than 1,000 years of European history as seen through the eyes of a carp. An intelligent, acerbic, multi-lingual carp with a taste for Armagnac, pastry and rebel politics. Named Gisella, no less – though any resemblance to any talking fish, either real or imagined, is purely incidental.
On her journey she meets such historical figures as William the Conqueror, Marie-Antoinette, Alexander Pope and Jane Austen, as well as becoming enmeshed in Da Vinci’s experiments, various European wars, rows and love-affairs, not to mention all manner of gustatory delight. She also overcomes the ongoing problem of how to breathe through water while talking to humans and avoiding barbs and hooks, both from anglers and philosophers.
Delightful, informative and sceptical – but never cynical – The Rights of Man … and Fish nods to Voltaire, Gunter Grass and Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen while maintaining a humour and breadth of vision entirely its own. Join Gisella as she finds out what makes the ideal society based on lessons from a millennium of human error, misadventure and quality patisserie.
Available now from AN EDITIONS, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
NEW PAPERBACK EDITION: That Was Hugo Blythe MP, by Peter Cowlam
Seasoned literary craftsman Peter Cowlam presents us with the unexpurgated diary of Alaric Casteele. Casteele, an acid, aloof intellectual at odds with his teaching job, has as a ‘last ditch’ agreed to work as researcher for Hugo Blythe, who heads up New Labour’s so-called ‘Ministry of Cult’.
Through the whisperings of Westminster, Alaric discovers something is afoot. People in the department are briefing against Hugo, but Hugo begins to think that Alaric is the culprit. Casteele turns to electronic skulduggery in order to find out who really is behind the attacks, drip-fed to the press.
He writes his diary in a concentrated aestheticised style, as we pay close attention and read between the lines. Love him or hate him, Alaric – in reality a small-c conservative, a sort of enemy within – reinvigorates a forgotten Zeitgeist, and an era pre-dating ‘#Me Too’. But is Casteele’s diary all that is left of Blairite Britain and its milieu as disillusion deepens?
Peter Cowlam’s magnificent achievement is to create a character whose glancing passage through the ‘Ministry of Cult’ mirrors a complex world of moral ambiguity and disaffection. That Was Hugo Blythe MP is a compressed, unblinking portrayal of a politics consumed by intrigue, where value placed on celebrity outbids anything else.
Available now from AN EDITIONS, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
NEW PAPERBACK EDITION: Captcha This! by J.W. Wood
In 2015, J.W. Wood jacked in his day job and disappeared to homestead some acres on an island British Columbia, Canada – armed only with an axe, some tools and the determination to free himself. Captcha This! spares no-one: pompous investment bankers, vacuous fame-hunters, feudal tech overlords, invasive grammar-nazi software, government by bogus statistic and further denizens of today’s digital abyss are all given a not-so-gentle skewering.
On its hardback publication, this collection sold two print runs in as many months and received warm reviews.
“Captcha This! is a delight from beginning to end … J.W. Wood is without doubt a literary force to be reckoned with.” Paul Groves, author of A Country Boy, two-time winner of the TLS International Poetry Prize.
“In these brilliant satires, J.W. Wood’s dry sense of humour illuminates some of the darker corners of our digital world.” James Melville, entrepreneur, activist and founder of “No Farmers, No Food.”
“Capturing the frustration of curtailed lives and the grim horrors of the corporate world, Wood presents a meta-fictional universe in which the rich realise their folly and we control computers, not the other way round.” Julian Stannard, award-winning poet, author of The University of Bliss (Sagging Meniscus, 2024)
Available now from AN EDITIONS, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookshops and Waterstones.
Coming soon in spring 2026
Elle’s Book, by James McGuire
Sara’s Lives, by Paul Halas
Jhatpat Fatafat, by Arun Kapil
Flickers … new poems, by Richard Skinner
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