January sale on Amazon for all our titles except Stillness of the Sea and Can the Gods Cry?

The sale started on 20 December and last until the end of January, and there's 70% off with free delivery.

Go to amazon.co.uk to find out more.

 

Click here to download our winter 2011 catalogue

Click here to download the form for the "3 books for £18" offer

Vagabond Voices is both Scottish and fervently European in its aims. Its reputation as a groundbreaking publisher will increase with its new series of polemical works (Rants) in which contrarian authors give vent to their passions. These will be counterbalanced by series of quality novels (Vagabonds and Changelings).

Literary works in original English are Vagabonds, and translated novels are Changelings. Translations, like changelings, only give the appearance of being the original but are in fact subtly different, and the process of replacement is an act of deception. So far we have three Changelings: The Anonymous Novel, The Nocturnal Library and Stillness of the Sea.

Why Vagabond Voices? Novelists do not always resemble vagabonds literally, although many do. But like vagabonds, they are itinerant always in their minds and often geographically too. They move quickly across a landscape, recording it, examining it and often misunderstanding it, because it is not the job of the novelist to utter the final truth on anything, but rather to go in search of small truths while leaving some work for their creative partners: the readers.

Vagabond Voices is a Scottish publisher, just founded, with an up-market European brief. Good news for adventurous readers. They have scored an early coup by bringing us a short novel by Allan Massie, Surviving  - Ronald Frame in the Scottish Review of Books.

There is, however, another reason for this name: the core activity will be the translation of European literary fiction into English, and so there is this transmigration of words from one language to another, the forced march of great multitudes of letters, the exodus of thoughts towards an inspired approximation of the original. This will make a tiny contribution to the woeful lack of translations in the English-speaking world – a kind of provincialism of the powerful. In 2006, 30% of books published in the world were in English, but only a very small proportion were in translation. In 2004, slightly more than 3% of English books were translations (2.62% in the United States). In fact, America produced only 4,982 translations, slightly ahead of the Czech Republic which produced 4,602. The record went to Italy which managed 12,197 and 22% of its total output in translation, and it therefore wins the prize for the most outward-looking country when it comes to reading.

To discover the most advanced ideas in literature, you need to know what is happening elsewhere, and however vast the English-speaking world may be, it is still thinking through the closed mechanisms of a single language.

The resources of a very small publisher like Vagabond Voices can do very little about what is also a question of attitude amongst the majority of readers, but we do feel that a small minority of readers is being let down in these times, which are dominated by the economies of scale. Vagabond Voices started with translations from Italian, because that is where our talents currently lie, but we have now brought out Stillness of the Sea, by the German author Nicol Ljubic and translated by Anna Paterson. In the future other writers and translators will hopefully join in the enterprise.

For Vagabond Voices, the most important thing will always be the text. Where there are extra resources, we would prefer to put them there, rather than into the cover or this website, which recall a more spartan era when words were valued more.

So far Vagabond Voices has published twelve titles, and, in spite of the above, have great new covers thanks to the assistance of Freight Design in Glasgow. Our thanks to them.

 

If you live in the UK and want to order on line, you can find them on www.amazon.co.uk, London Review Bookshop, News from Nowhere, or the Book Depository. If you want to buy them in the shops, then you can find them in quite a few of the Waterstone's stores (particularly city stores or the larger campus ones), Blackwell, John Smith's or one of the many independents who stock our books (independents being an essential part of our book culture and we will shortly be publishing a list of those that stock our books).

If you live outside Britain, the best deal is definitely the Book Depository which delivers free of charge almost anywhere in the world and often reduces prices up to 12% below RRP. You can buy at this website, but on the whole it is better use one of the above.