A Whole New Way of Seeing Annexe – Site Change

The time has finally come. We’re officially going to stop using the WordPress site as of today. We’ve set up a new subscribing/newsletter button over on the new site so you don’t have to miss out on getting our writing straight to your inbox. Head over to our flashy new Annexe site and on every page under the magazine tab, there’s a little form on the right for you to put in your email.

We’ve upgraded our output too, so instead of getting all the articles as and when they are posted, we’ll be sending out a properly drafted newsletter every fortnight with the latest articles linked and a few extra bits that we think you’d like to hear about.

A massive thank you to everyone who has been reading since the beginning, you’ve helped make Annexe what it is. Now come with us to the next step and enjoy our site in all it’s swanky glory.

 

– Nick & the Annexe Team

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Ta Da! Our new site is unveiled!

Today we finally pulled the cover of our brand new site! All singing, all dancing. New and improved. Better than ever.

 

WordPress has been a wonderful home to us for over a year and a half now. It’s straightforward layout has been a joy to work with, but now we’ve decided we want to cut the .wordpress. from our name and exist on our own two feet at http://www.annexemagazine.com. Like a bird flying from the nest (actually more like a teenager leaving home, because we’re still utilising the WordPress CMS in true semi-independent fashion) we will be posting primarily to our dedicated domain. It all looks quite fancy over there too! The layout is updated, though not too distanced from the look you’re used to. Head on over and have a look. If you spot anything that needs changing, drop us a line and we’ll thank you for your vigilance.

If you’re subscribed to us via WordPress, not to worry. We’ll post duplicate articles here until we’ve found a suitable replacement for the subscription system.

Without further ado, I declare the new Annexe Magazine site OPEN! 

Nightjar Press – Treasuring the short story

Following on from our Long Live Print column, we met with Nicholas Royle, the founder of Nightjar Press. Elevating the short story as a form of fiction is Royle’s MO. Each release from Nightjar brings a single short story to the fore and presents it as an elegant chapbook with all the care and aesthetic consideration of a longer work. 

Depth and Density: Webcomics from XKCD to The Clockwork Quartet

Depth and density are overlooked commodities. They are analogous and yet distinct, different in kind rather than degree. Depth, I appreciate as an outsider. I have depths in the same way that a puddle has currents. To quote myself on twitter, and I almost need not finish the thought, I would likely be a Zen being, if only I didn’t care how my hair looked. Desiring what I lack, I believe depth is tremendously important. I would like to admire the great thinkers, and yet I would prefer to be seen to admire the great thinkers than to actually read their works. My bookshelves are precisely ordered to put the “good” books at the front and the “bad” books at the back. I am attempting to create the illusion of depth as my shallows clog and stagnate.

A lovely shout-out about Interrobang Festival from our literary comrades Inc. zine! They’ll be bringing the poetic funk with a barrage of brilliant performances on the day.

inczine

The Interrobang is the latest piece of punctuation to enter the English dictionary and also the hottest literary festival this side of the Welsh border (before we go any further, pub quiz aficionados might like to know that an interrobang denotes a rhetorical question, or a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark, or !?)

The all-day festival is running on Saturday 17th November over three floors of a beautiful old Victorian pub in Farringdon. For the full lineup visit the official webpage.

Inc. zine have been invited to host the spoken word contingent from 4.30pm, where we’ll bring our trademark energetic poetry party to the stage. We’ve lined up performances from our favourite duo Nichol Keene and Toby D’Angeli (Elephant), as well as Zia Ahmed and the hilarious Gary From Leeds (fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe), all accompanied by political musings from Selina Nwulu.

Hosted by Annexe…

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Two Tales: Will Conway

Adding a bit more prose to the proceedings, we are joined by Will Conway. As part of Two Tales (the much loved sister of Two Poems) Will is reading his short story Transport, and a story by Ted Hughes called How the Cat Became.

We chatted to Will a little bit about the two stories and you can read all about it after the jump. 

From Cyberpunk to Postpostcyberpunk: A look at how three generations of near-future fiction have shaped and are shaped by the era of their conception

From Cyberpunk to Postpostcyberpunk: A look at how three generations of near-future fiction have shaped and are shaped by the era of their conception

As a technologically conscious teen, I remember discovering William Gibson’s Neuromancer and falling hard into his cyberpunk world. The gritty streets and clever, but despondent characters spoke to me of the troubled future we were all heading for. I was hooked. I read all the cyberpunk I could.

A New Poster!

Here at Annexe HQ we throw phrases back and forth to each other like a hyperactive air hockey game. Sometimes they stick and we bandy them about for the rest of the day saying things like “Hell, that should be on a poster!”
Rarely do we follow through… until TODAY!

In a complete flight of fancy, we bring you our (fairly nerdy) Waterworld poster.

It’s an A3 poster. blue risograph printing on cream Evercolour paper.

We’ve got 100 of them and we will happily send you one for the laughable price of £1 (plus 60p postage). If you’re interested (and I think you just might be) send us an email to annexemagazine@live.co.uk

 

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We get our stuff printed by the wonderful folk at Footprinters.

Welcome back!

A very happy new year to you and welcome back. The old year came to a close with the obligatory countdown of favourite books, top-selling authors and similar holiday-time listophilia. Predictions were made and resolutions formulated. Now to see it all come together, or fall by the wayside under our noses (giving the knew-it-all-along shake).

After a long and restorative holiday, the Annexe HQ is full again and bustling with treats for the Olympic year. And my, what treats we have in store.
In February we will be part of an exhibition at Five Years Gallery exploring a cross-section of indie publishing-based practices. We’ve got a series of writers’ trips coming up. (A bit like school trips, but with better packed lunch.) There’s a plethora of great writers and poets primed and ready to be unleashed upon you through the website. A couple of other projects are bubbling away for a little later in the year, but we wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise now, would we?

So, I’ll leave it there for now. Glad to see you again, hope you’re enjoying the new year so far and hope to see plenty of you here at Annexe as the year goes by.

 

Nick,
Annexe editor.

One Pun Too Many

With the release of the Et Al Podcast, we thought it only fair to give you some extra bits and bobs too. It’s Christmas after all. So, at the Annexe event, we ran a little competition in which the audience had to fashion some first-class puns. The topic was books cross with bands. We weren’t surprised to see that the Annexe audience is comprised of a lot of witty and erudite folk. We had so many brilliant responses it was hard to choose between them, but we decided on our top four:

Fantastic Mr. Fleet Foxes
Girl with a Pearl Jam Earring
Northanger Abba

The top prize went to:
All Quiet on the Westlife Front

Since that night the entries have resurfaced every so often and without fail every soul in Annexe HQ falls into fits of laughter. We realised it was cruel to keep all this mirth to ourselves so, in no particular order, after the jump are ALL the book/band puns from Annexe Presents…Et Al.