Böcker av Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Comic-operetta stage set, or ghost town haunted by the walking dead - Sigmaringen still fascinates long after its collapse at the end of the Second World War. This enclave of French Vichy officials and fascists on German soil - refugees and hostages maintained at the Nazis' pleasure - played out the last residue of French collaborationism in the closing months of the war, presided over by the inert figurehead of Marshal Pétain, against the fairytale backdrop of Sigmaringen Castle. No single English-language history of the Sigmaringen enclave exists, yet it brought together some of the most colourful and controversial collaborationists, from the militant French SS officer Joseph Darnand to the delirious writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in a petri dish for the last samples of the collaborationism that had infected France and laid her low. Vichy's Last Castle brings together contemporary documents, eye-witness reports, diplomatic communiques and protests, and personal chronicles, alongside post-war analyses, war crimes trials, apologetics and memoirs, to provide a complete picture of the Sigmaringen enclave, from daily life to political chicanery. From the vain, formal protests of Marshal Pétain to the hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness of Céline, the book draws on contemporary photographs as well as texts to encapsulate this bizarre milieu, where the rank-and-file starved and suffered, while the elite played and plotted their tragicomic endgame, in a sublimely appropriate Wagnerian setting.

This is a story of three men and a boat - a story that knits together the triumphs, terrors and tragedies of the dawning 20th century. The three men are legendary millionaire balladeer Cole Porter, jazz virtuoso and polymath playboy Artie Shaw - and Scottish sailor and scholar John Graham. The ship is the RMS Franconia, Clyde-built Cunard palace of the Thirties elite, nerve centre for Winston Churchill at Yalta, and venue for the composition of one of Porter's, and Shaw's, most enduring hits, "Begin the Beguine" - a song that likewise knits the vital strands of the half-century together. Their interweaving narratives embrace romance and heroism, loss and vengeance, high politics and grand passion, West and East, Clydebank and Christmas Island, and the whole sweep of modern history.

Identity theft isn't new - it was just so much more insidious back in the day... Todd McWhirter passes an idyllic student existence in the early 1980s as a Cambridge undergraduate - an idyll marred only by the unsettling intrusion of Robert Grieve, sometime friend, sometime stalker. Grieve's suicide casts a shadow over the lives of all who knew him. Then, years later, Todd comes across another suicide, a disgraced City banker who apparently embodied all the values of Thatcherite Britain - and who bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Grieve... "Mackintosh engages with the written word as a creative expression of some cleansing fire of the spirit, an act of atonement that builds rather than destroys, an orgasmic confession joining pain to redemption that instills a sense of almost voyeuristic guilt in the reader who will likely be unable to look away: perhaps fascinated, perhaps repulsed, perhaps changed... and certainly never bored." - Nicholas Shipman "Paul StJohn Mackintosh is one of those writers who just seems to quietly get on with the business of producing great fiction." - Paul Michaels, This is Horror

A neglected passage of World War II history, when French forces liberated this trophy city in the aftermath of a Nazi collapse, only to almost lose it again in the Battle of the Bulge. De Gaulle described the liberation of Strasbourg "one of the most brilliant episodes in our military history." But who did the fighting?

Ballads are the original short stories - concentrated doses of narrative, pared down to their essentials. And Scotland has one of the world's richest - and darkest - traditions of myths, legends, weird and fantastic beings, and folk horror. Yet few of these have made their way into modern literature, in any form. These ballads revisit that great tradition with recastings of ancient folk tales and bizarre lore, to tease, delight and even terrify. Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish poet, writer of imaginative fiction, and journalist, currently resident in France. He is online at www.paulstjohnmackintosh.com. Comments on Paul StJohn Mackintosh's poetry "I love the moments of serenity, the unfailing gravity, with sometimes a little gentle irony, showing an oeuvre of great power" - YVES BONNEFOY "Paul StJohn Mackintosh is writing singularly skilful and attractive poems. At the heart of his work is a love of his medium. He delights in word-wit. His use of rhyme is uninhibited, joyous. He is utterly alive to rhythm and sound, form and tone. One can imagine Auden, aux anges, giving his craftsmanship an approving grunt."- KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND

"I've been told that this is the most elegant thing I've ever written. I can't think how such a dark brew of motifs came together to create that effect. But there's unassuaged longing and nostalgia in here, interwoven with the horror, as well as an unflagging drive towards the final consummation. I still feel more for the story's characters, whether love or loathing, than for any others I've created to date. Tragedy, urban legend, Gothic romance, warped fairy tale of New York: it's all there. And of course, most important of all is the seductive allure of writing and of books - and what that can lead some people to do. You may not like my answer to the mystery of the third book. But I hope you stay to find out." - Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Weird fiction with a darkly sensual twist. BLACK PROPAGANDA delves deep into the dark, twisted roots of human nature and human sexuality. Using desire to dissect the delusions and dilemmas of will, choice and identity, this collection challenges genre boundaries and social conventions. Transgressive, confrontational, passionate, poignant, these sinister stories touch on every shade of black, from noir to the Lovecraftian cosmic abyss. Readers may be horrified, touched, tempted - never unmoved. This is the first short story collection from noted British poet and weird fiction writer Paul StJohn Mackintosh. Few British writers have dared trace the borderlines between lust, insanity and terror so graphically since Clive Barker and J.G. Ballard.