Blackwell’s Manchester are thrilled to be hosting an evening with Iphgenia Baal and Juliet Jacques to celebrate their incredible new short story collections MAN HATING PSYCHO and VARIATIONS. Published by Influx Press, both collections explore themes of gender, queerness and politics. Iphgenia and Juliet will be in conversation with Honor Gavin (Midland)

Doors 6.30pm, Event starts 6.45pm

Man Hating Psycho – Iphgenia Baal

Man Hating Psycho is the caustic new collection of stories from visionary writer Iphgenia Baal. Interrogating the disconnect between our public identities and real-life selves, Baal exposes the inherent duplicity of online communication. Text messages relaying deep personal crisis are nothing more than an annoyance, WhatsApp takedowns of wide-eyed left-wingers unfold at breakneck speed, friendships that seem set in stone disintegrate at the first hint of sex, the language of love degraded as life becomes more and more transactional. With black and disquieting humour, thirteen playful texts disparage the highly-profitable superstitions that are the scaffolding of our current social order.Man Hating Psycho lays bare the trappings of modern life, whilst putting the short story form through a literary mincer.

Iphgenia Baal is a writer who lives and works in London. She is the author of several fiction books, including The Hardy Tree (Trolley Books, 2011) and Death & Facebook (We Heard You Like Books, 2017). Her unique prose style, once cited as a ‘marrying of politics and ass’, has been likened to writers as varied as James Joyce, Manuel Puig and Dodie Bellamy, and appeared in publications including AQNB, Nervemeter, Schizm and The White Review, among others.

Variations – Juliet Jacques

Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain’s most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. Variations travels from Oscar Wilde’s London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester’s protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines. Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She is the author of Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007) and Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015). Her landmark column on gender reassignment appeared in The Guardian, entitled A Transgender Journey (2010-12) and she has written for London Review of Books, Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, Art Review, New York Times, and many more. Juliet was included on The Independent on Sunday Pink List of influential LGBT people in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Honor Gavin is a creative writing lecturer at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and the author of an exuberant, experimental novel, Midland (2014), which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Honor also writes short fiction: a story called ‘Home Death’ was longlisted for the 2019/2020 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize.