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Jay Spencer Green

~ Novelist and Ne'er-Do-Well

Jay Spencer Green

Monthly Archives: October 2015

Heads-Up: Is It a Bird? Yes.

30 Friday Oct 2015

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IMG_0374

A Man Among Giants

Just a quick heads-up at short notice that FutureBook‘s #FutureChat today on Twitter is asking the question “What makes a good indie book cover?” It will feature Porter Anderson, associate editor of FutureBook, and Sarah Juckes from CompletelyNovel, the organizers of the Lord of the Book Covers award. You can read Sarah’s piece on the subject over at the FutureBook site, where she discusses Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s and the other successful entrants in the contest.

That’s at

  • 4:00 p.m. London (GMT)
  • 5:00 p.m. Rome (CEST)
  • 12:00 p.m. New York (ET)
  • 11:00 a.m. Chicago (CT)
  • 9:00 a.m. Los Angeles (PT)

The Official Announcement

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by jayspencergreen in Books

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's, Jon Langford, Lord of the Book Covers

Native Cover_5131623_Kindle Front Cover

The good folk over at CompletelyNovel have officially announced the winner of the Lord of the Book Covers award for 2015. The announcement is accompanied by short statements from Jon and me explaining the rationale behind the design of the cover of Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s. You can see, too, from the announcement that the competition was really tight and that there were some knockout covers in the shortlist, including The Brighton Maverick: The complete series of love, life and liaisons in Brighton’s Lanes, by Scott Chadwick; The Alchemist’s Kiss, by AR DeClerck; Stan and the Enchantress, by Sarah Hitchcock; and The Inheritance Powder, by Hilary Standing.

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to vote for me, and thank you to CompletelyNovel for organising a contest that gives indie authors and artists a chance to shine. A particular thank you, too, to my friend Caitriona Lally, who drew my attention to the contest in the first place and encouraged me to enter. If you haven’t yet checked out Caitriona’s debut novel, Eggshells, I urge you to seek it out. It’s fab.

Woop! Woop!

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's, Jon Langford, Lord of the Book Covers

winner-web-badge-LotBC
You did it! Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s won the Lord of the Book Covers award for best cover design following a public vote. Thanks so much to everyone who voted and to the team at CompletelyNovel for running the contest. There were some really super covers in the shortlist, and I believe the vote was really close, so it’s a complete surprise to win, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that so many folk love Jon Langford’s fabulous art. He’s a one-off!

I Don’t Just Make This Shit Up, You Know

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

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CIA, Stranger than Fiction, Torture, Westlife

westlife(Not) Your typical Westlife audience

From Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s

“The music is to scare them. Frank has a penchant for 90s Irish pop—Boyzone, B* Witched, Westlife—and what could be scarier than that? Frank’s rationale is that by playing tunes from his victims’ childhood or adolescence, it encourages them to reminisce, to become teenagers again, to fill up with nostalgic yearnings for stolen kisses and playing truant down on Sandymount Strand. It renders them more vulnerable, makes them feel more isolated, more distant and separated from those innocent days. Besides, he says, you can’t beat a bit of cheery music to help the torturing go by with a laugh and a smile.”

From Vice magazine:

According to a 2012 article in the Nation, after 9/11, a bounty system emerged in which African warlords would sell “terror suspects” to the CIA for cash. Suleiman Abdullah, a newlywed fisherman in Tanzania, was captured in March 2003, possibly by the help of one such warlord named “Mr. Tall.” He was taken first to Kenya, and then shuffled around to various places in Afghanistan, like a prison called COBALT—where, according to the ACLU, he was assaulted with music by the Irish boyband Westlife alternating with heavy metal and kept in a pitch-black cell that smelled like rotting seaweed.

Thanks to Broadsheet.

Tourne, Tourne Again

12 Monday Oct 2015

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Marketing, Paris 68, Satire

underthebeachBabybels are those who struggle

Advertising agency Whittington, Burgher + Leveque was founded by three soixante-huitards in 1974, in the aftermath of the failure of the European social revolution. Disappointed by the turn of history, the company’s founders nevertheless put their experiences to good use, courting controversy (and in the process getting great publicity!) by taking the Situationist slogans of the late 60s and using them, much as Malcolm McLaren did, to sell commodities to the public. The agency is now one of the largest in the world, with an annual turnover of €345 million. Some of their best-known and most successful ad campaigns will be oddly familiar to connoisseurs of the revolutionary left:

Be Realistic! Demand the Mission Impossible Soundtrack.
(Warner Bros.)

Viagra: Take Your Desires for Reality.
(Pfizer)

The Boss Needs You, You Don’t Need Him.
Bruce Springsteen on tour this autumn.
(Ticketmaster UK)

How Can One Drink Freely in the Shadow of a Chapel? Why, Buckfast, of course!
(J. Chandler & Co.)

The Prospect of Finding Pleasure Tomorrow Will Never Compensate for Today’s Boredom.
(RTE Guide)

Never Work!
Buckingham Palace, open 1–5 p.m., Wed–Fri.
(House of Windsor Inc.)

In a Society That Has Abolished All Adventures, the Only Adventure Left Is to Abolish Luxury.
(EasyJet)

Read Less, Live More!
Your Super Soaraway Sun, Now Just 40p!
(News International)

The Liberation of Humanity Will Be Total or It Will Be Not at All.
(Total S.A. Petroleum)

I Find My Orgasms Among the Paving Stones. Dispose of Your Condoms Responsibly.
(Durex Condoms)

All That is Sacred: There is the NME.
(IPC Media)

It is Forbidden to Forbid: Just Do It!
(Nike)

Neither God nor Master!
(Church of England plc)

A Cop Sleeps in Every One of Us: Keep It That Way with Night Nurse.
(GlaxoSmithKline Beecham)

Let’s Be Cruel!
(Fendi)

Poetry is in the Street: Smoke Pall Mall.
(R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.)

Arise, You Wretched of the University! Supermarket Sweep is Back!
(Carlton TV)

The Bourgeoisie Has No Other Pleasure But to Biodegrade All Pleasures. What’s Your Carbon Footprint?
(Defra)

Under the Pavement, the Métro!
(RATP)

Live Without Dead Time: New Sky Plus Digital.
(News International)

McAlpine Construction: Because the Hacienda Must Be Built.
(McAlpine Construction)

Club 18–30: Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Misery.
(Thomas Cook)

Run, Comrade! The Old World is Behind You!
(Reebok)

It’s Painful to Suffer the Bosses. It’s Even Stupider to Pick Them.
The Apprentice, weeknights on BBC 1.
(talkback Thames Productions)

All Power to the Imagination!
(Nintendo)

And of course

People Who Talk About Revolution and Class Struggle Without Referring Explicitly to Everyday Life, Without Understanding What is Subversive About Love and What is Positive in the Refusal of Constraints, Such People Have Coco Pops in Their Mouth.
(Kellogg’s)

Toner’s of Baggot Street

09 Friday Oct 2015

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's, Toner's pub

Where Joe meets Delia in the opening chapter of Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s. Have a great weekend!

Like an obnoxious spy-comedy seen through the blurry eyes of a filthy drunk

02 Friday Oct 2015

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Native Cover_5131623_Kindle Front Cover

Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s has just received an honest, no-holds-barred review-to-be-proud-of over at the Bloomfield Review. Highlights include:

Joe Chambers is … the perfect guide to this bizarre and repulsive journey into Dublin’s gutters.

Jay Spencer Green presents a twisted and exaggerated, but wholly recognisable vision of Dublin … It is a Dublin of no redemption. The whole book is a dig at a country that lost the run of itself in the good times, and just lost itself in the bad.

It is not a book for those easily offended. The language can be absurdly, almost heroically, obscene.

Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is like an obnoxious spy-comedy as seen through the blurry eyes of a filthy drunk.

My chest swells with narcissistic hubris. My grin bites my ears. Thank you. Bloomfield Review. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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