In March 2011, Nightjar Press will publish two new chapbooks linked, tenuously, by geography. ‘Lexicon’ is a new short story by Christopher Burns (below), author of five novels including The Flint Bed, The Condition of Ice and Dust Raising. Burns’s first short story, ‘The Mummification of Princess Anne’, was published in an Arts Council anthology, New Stories 1, in 1976, having been selected, along with 38 other contributions by writers including Elizabeth Baines, Giles Gordon and Desmond Hogan, from 700 submissions. In the intervening years dozens of Burns’s stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies and chapbooks. A collection, About the Body, was published by Secker & Warburg in 1988. Christopher Burns was born and brought up in west Cumbria; he lives in Whitehaven.
Accompanying ‘Lexicon’ will be a new story by Tom Fletcher (below left) entitled ‘Field’. Fletcher is the author of Lakeland-set The Leaping and a number of short stories, including ‘The Safe Children’, published as a Nightjar Press chapbook in 2009. His second novel, The Thing on the Shore, set in and around a call centre in Whitehaven, is due in February 2011 from Quercus. Although born in Worcester, Tom Fletcher was brought up in Whitehaven and lived there until recently, when he moved first to Yorkshire, to study creative writing, and then to Manchester.
