Tom Cox | Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighborhood - Signed Copy

9781066743407

15/09/26

PB

195 pages 

SIGNED COPY

The Immortal Executive Branch Manager Of Primordial Evil For South West Britain is experiencing a crippling crisis of confidence. Lucky, then, that Tom Cox is on hand to capture his plight in print.

Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood also features an erudite badger; a poet-prejudiced bookshop owner and his larcenous young apprentice; a worried businesswoman spying on her ex-husband from a tree; a mysterious stone that gives shocking insight into true identities, and many more surreal and humorous scenarios.

The second collection of short fiction from the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Tom Cox will take you on a wild ride through the portals of his psychedelic imagination. Into the kind of parallel worlds perhaps accessed through the hollow of an ancient tree… suddenly up-ended worlds holding up a warped mirror to our own.

You might even have the uncanny sensation that this follow up to Help The Witch has been carved from an enchanted piece of wood specifically for you.

'Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighborhood is a short book - more relentlessly silly and less structurally ambitious than my last few - but it was exactly what I needed to write after my third novel Everything Will Swallow You and I had huge fun with it. In a way, it's my attempt to make my own magical portal for readers that simulates the ones I find in the countryside. A place where the daily frustrations and injustices of 2026 can be briefly left behind. It probably wouldn't exist in quite the same way if I'd never read Richard Brautigan's Revenge Of The Lawn, or the stories of Grace Paley, or Without Feathers, or the books George Saunders wrote at the beginning of of this century, but it's entirely my own. It's not "folk horror" and it's not me trying to write a book that's like anyone else's book (even though I sometimes get the feeling from the publishing industry that that's what it wants me to do). If my sixteenth book does have a genre, that genre is 'Me'.

Repeatedly, for many years, publishers and agents have told me that short stories "don't sell". Whether this is true or not (and the careers of Claire Keegan and Jhumpa Lahiri, to name just two, strongly argue that it isn't) I believe that short stories should be valued and that how "marketable" they are should not come into it. Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood is not just my second collection, following 2018's Shirley Jackson Award-winning Help The Witch; it's my stubborn defence of the short story in an attention-sapped era which, illogically, seems to want to forsake it as an art form. It's me replying to a world that's saying "You should write this - it will make more money" by saying "No, actually I'm going to write this thing I have a burning need to write instead."

When Swift Press, the publishers of my latest novel, told me they wanted another novel from me but didn't want to publish a collection of short stories, I had a few options. I could have sent the Curious Events manuscript to another traditional publisher. I didn't do that. I could have crowdfunded it and put it out myself. I didn't do that, either, partly because I feel wary of the crowdfunding method since the 2025 collapse of my former publishers Unbound, which left readers and authors, including me, thousands of pounds out of pocket. Instead, I've chosen to collaborate with Breakthrough Books, which was founded by a group of ex-Unbound authors who wanted to put together a system that treats writers more equitably than publishers like Unbound have done in the past. There's no advance, no "target". I send the books out myself. Those books will, hopefully, be making their way into a few shops too. It's a smaller way of doing things. But the profit share is extremely fair. By ordering a copy in advance you'll be helping to cover our costs. But whatever the case, the book is done, will soon be on its way to the printers, and will be arriving on your doorstep in September.

Thanks for reading this and - to those of you who do place an order - for helping me get another weird book out into the world.'

Tom