DEVOURINGS
James Vella
Book

Exterior: 270 gsm grey paper, letter-pressed and silkscreened.
Interior: 80 gsm Enzo bookpaper.
Hard-cover
140pp
An edition of 2000
Cover illustration by Onur Kutluoğlu
Edited by Gilly Wright and Karl Smith
Foreword by Mike Diver
ISBN 978-605-4897-00-1
Release date 31 January 2013

First 100 copies come with a numbered and signed – by the author – Colophon Card.
First 500 copies come with a U.S.S Passumpsic Postcard and tooth illustration postcard.
All copies come with a bookmark with a photograph on by Sine Büyüka

Price: ₤6.99 (+shipping / packaging)

To order, please send an email to atayilgun@gmail.com.

The shortest tale can leave the longest impression.

Devourings is collection of short stories from talented debut author James Vella. Each of these stories is bound to the next by a broader, unifying theme: being devoured by a moment, an encounter, a political situation, an emotion.

Devourings travels to many destinations. Esthers follows a snaking murder plot set in 1940s Argentina. A saboteur wreaks havoc in USS Passumpsic, which plays out in the late 1950s on a doomed Pacific liner. These are stories of palpable heat, dirt, desperation and realization, in which the landscape is as significant as the characters that rise and fall before it.

Vella is British of Maltese descent and, having spent substantial time in both territories, the short stories that make up Devourings are informed by his travels across the world. He lives in Brighton (among piles of LPs, books and musical instruments), where he works in the music industry.

Vella’s fiction is immensely lucid and yet so strangely dreamlike. So clear, and yet so elusive, like half-forgotten fairy tales. His ornate prose has a rare and shimmering beauty.

– Rune Christiansen,
author of The Absence of Music, winner of 2007 Oslo Prize for best novel.

James Vella’s work proceeds with the pure and clear language of a Raymond Carver short story towards mythic conclusion. Each line accrues nuanced meaning until the stories close in on you like night.

–  Roger Robinson
author of The Butterfly Hotel

The stories in Devourings read like dark fables admitting passage into a realm of bewitching hyperreality…Intense, enriching and rewarding.

– Noel Tanti (Nigredo’s Room)
Read the full review here.

“Nothing short of breathtaking…The attention to detail makes for beautiful reading…Exquisite.”

– From Loud & Quiet Magazine (written by Janine Bullman)