nothing in the rulebook

A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!

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Tag: literature

  • “Groundbreaking” app to predict whether a book can be crowdfunded successfully

    Award-winning publishing company Unbound has launched a “groundbreaking” app to predict crowdfunding revenue as well as the length of time required to fund a project. Unbound, who have carved out a space in the literary market for bringing together traditional publishing and crowdfunding, have already successfully brought over 300 books to market. The company now…

  • The research is clear: we need to put down our phones and pick up our pens (and our books)

    “What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity,” so opined Henry Beston in what is a timeless meditation on the relationship between humanity and technology. Beston was writing in the late 1940s; but…

  • Book review: The Only Story, by Julian Barnes

    Paul and Susan meet at a tennis tournament, at their village sports club, when they get randomly paired together. He is “only nineteen”, is not interested in British politics at all and “dislikes and distrusts adulthood”; she is blond, in her forties, has prominent front teeth and looks beautiful in her white tennis dress. They…

  • Will Eaves’s novel ‘Murmur’ – inspired by real-life tragedy of Alan Turing – wins £30,000 literature prize

    The novelist and poet Will Eaves has won the 2019 Wellcome book prize for his fictionalised take on the chemical castration of mathematician Alan Turing. ‘Murmur’ (read our review here), published by CB Editions, was hailed as “a future classic” by judges of the £30,000 prize. It is Eaves’s fifth novel and the third published…

  • So alternative: 50 independent and alternative publishers to support, buy books from, and submit your work to

    We live in an era where the biggest publishing companies and media organisations are only concerned with stabilising profits for shareholders – and are prioritising making money over supporting originality and new creative ideas. This is strangling our modern culture – limiting us to a devastating cycle of reboots, sequels, prequels and franchises; where the…

  • Creatives in profile: interview with Sean Leahy

    Named as one of the ’50 Funniest People on Twitter’, Sean Leahy has built quite the following on the Twittershphere as @thepunningman. Appearing on Buzzfeed, Comedy Central, The Poke, Huffington Post, Funny or Die and TimeOut (among others), he has recently published his debut children’s book, The Monster Cafe via award-winning publishers Unbound.  Illustrated by Hungarian artist…

  • Navigating Ulysses: a literary map from Nabokov

    “The Joyce industry has elevated a diseased and querulous pedantry into an artform […] It is literature at its most debased.” So wrote Kevin Myers in The Telegraph in late 2001. Few books have the effect of producing a such a strong reaction upon hearing its name that Joyce’s Ulysses.  Yet the impact of Joyce’s work on modern…

  • Watching your gait: how walking helps your writing

    In 2014, researchers at Stanford university found that walking boosts creative inspiration. They examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. A person’s creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking. This research builds on studies conducted by other academic institutions, including the University of Michigan and Illinois…

  • Creatives in profile: interview with Paul Scraton

    Paul Scraton is a writer and editor who grew up in Lancashire in the north of England and now lives in Berlin, Germany. Among various projects, Paul is the Editor in Chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and also contributes to Slow Travel Berlin, Caught by the River. The author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels Along Germany’s Baltic Coast, his fiction debut is  Built…

  • Book review: Slack-Tide by Elanor Dymott

    If you’ve ever wondered why you write, why you feel the need to create, why you feel everything constantly depends on what you are capable of creating, then you should read Elanor Dymott’s Slack-Tide. Elizabeth is a novelist in her forties, who had a miscarriage that led her marriage to an end. When she’s set…