BLACK BRICK PUBLISHING
THE BOOKS
Check out extracts from some of our latest books here at Black Brick Publishing. These snippets will give you a better idea of the flavours within. All titles are available at Black Brick Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the usual online outlets. Feel free to contact us through this site or on Twitter.
The Suited Freeman
ISBN: 9784990885106
The Suited Freeman is the story of a share trader who gives up everything to set an idea in motion that had burned inside him for years. On the eve of the financial crisis, he puts an age-old theory into practice while ignoring the fix.
The Art of Walking
ISBN: 9784990885113
The Art of Walking - Spencer Lurie's farewell account of how he learned to walk himself to a better state of mind - is now available at Smashwords and Amazon.
It's a guide to exercise, the mind and how to use space to change the way you look at the world. Lurie breaks down how he went from learning to walk properly to freeing his mind.
The Lost Artists
ISBN: 9784990885120
Set in the near future, The Lost Artists is a story of the organization of art and artists according to government sponsorship.
Perfectly arranged art zones provide a utopia for commercial artists. Meanwhile, the Artistic Foundation is shoring up the unlicensed areas of artistic expression in the city.
The Handbook of Hypochondria
ISBN: 9784990885137
After years of research, Dr. Eva Sounder comes with a comprehensive guide to living with hypochondria. Unlike other books full of vignettes of medical anomalies, Dr. Sounder provides a practical guide to find value in life while living with hypochondria. After a brief trip through the history, Dr. Sounder outlines the fundamentals, prevailing conditions, alternative approaches and how to self-actualize with hypochondria. Lead the most valuable life you can with The Handbook of Hypochondria.
Stealing Through
ISBN: 9784990885144
Claude let the fifth option run around his mind. In the chamber, he’d already decided that the word, aesthetics, music and sculpture were the four corners of the foundation he’d build. But he felt there was something else, a fifth pursuit that somehow blended the others together. He thought in terms of the way and then veered towards the notion of flow. But the one idea that wouldn’t leave him was the concept of movement.
The interior contained an incalculable symmetry. There seemed to be layers upon layers, hexagons within honeycombs, Islamic patterning underlain with Grecian ratios. Golden hues shifted with the surrounding colours: dark green, vermillion and blue-grey cubes. The perimeter of the chamber appeared irregular but the hemispheres within seemed perfectly balanced. It was like looking at a two-dimensional visual trick, yet there was no jarring… or point of connection. From every angle, the viewer was connected.
As I turned northwards in an effort to quietly slip over the border into remotest Tibet through valleys rumoured to have once contained the perfect symmetry between bounty and seclusion, I felt an intrepid peacefulness. The last feint mechanical burrs only served to anchor the peace, as did the shades and colours in front of me. I was going off-road now towards Sunsera, and apart from the occasional stretch of mud, seasonally navigable by non-existent four-wheel drives, it would be a couple of weeks until I witnessed a road again. It was with relief that I headed towards the grassy highlands, a sense of finally being without direction, mapless and painless.
While I tried to figure out what I could add to my oatmeal to fool myself dinner was different to lunch, I was startled to see a teenage boy shadowing my path. Wearing red, he paused every time I shot a glance in his direction. I couldn’t work out where he was going, unless the catchpool of the last village I’d seen extended farther than I thought due to the emptiness of the land. I romantically convinced myself that he was the last in an unbroken line of pilgrims to Zhang Zhung.
I knew fuck all about this ancient land, bar that it had once been a cradle of rest for the zig-zagging thoughts of pilgrims, but I’d vague memories of a nutty uncle telling me of Kyunglung being the last remaining proof of the land everyone was looking for. It was still gnawing at me that instead of blowing through Puh and into China from India, I had to come all the way around to sneak in from the rear to avoid trigger-happy protectors of the motherland. With these minor annoyances swirling around my cranium, I lolled northwards towards the border and into the Burang region, wondering if Red Boy was going to get close enough to initiate some awkward sign language. But he was beginning to lag, no doubt curious as to what the long-faced if now brown stranger was up to. In my ignorance, I assumed he may have copped me for a blended Central Asian.
The funny thing about being stalked, whether by phone or by highland, is when it suddenly stops you’re left with a feeling of rejection that you try to rationalize away as being weirded out. Maybe it’s a weaker version of the universal pain of disconnection, or the death of the utopian stalker fantasy. When I turned to look back at the rolling hills behind me, I saw Red Boy waving from the safe distance of a mountain away. I smiled, assuming somehow he could detect it, and held my hand up. Then I turned around and headed north, guessing at which mountain in the distance contained the imaginary line men get hung up on.
Terry was at his happiest working alone. Zero chatter saw him get into a zone where he was only aware of awareness, his eyes the only physicality that registered. People goofing off, or confusing dialogue with knowledge, never bothered him – he just didn’t want to work with them. Operating alone, his timing was impeccable. He’d unscrewed the lock of a decorative side door before any passers-by could have clocked him. One of his scanners picked up the first motion sensor, fifteen feet inside the building. He disabled it before turning back around, fixing the lock on the side door from the inside and closing it in case a random walked by. The absence of a door alarm caused him to smile – someone up high had decided because it wasn’t in use, it didn’t deserve security. That was a major leak in Terry’s world. It was going to make navigating and disabling the building more predictable. But he’d still take the long road of sweeping every room and corridor.
The back end of Victoria Station looked the same as always. It had been two years since George had seen it; only nostalgia brought him north of the River these days. Memories of childhood trips with his mother to Oxford Street to shop for bargains crept into his thoughts. Back then, he would be on his best behaviour in the hope of securing a new toy. Through the grey, he’d tag along as his mother walked miles to save pennies on cloth, eventually returning empty-handed to Victoria to get the bus home. London had seemed magically massive to George, but now it was just a confusion of options.
Memories of memories hinted at in the forbidden buildings of Pall Mall pulled George further north. That post-war joy that had once streamed down to the Strand was calling him. Even with empty pockets, London was a prized place to belong to when you looped through Green Park to the Strand and on to the River. His dreams back then had never really been about joining that tunnel of Englishness... more a feint hope of experiencing some of the stories pulled back in from the remote reaches of the Empire. But now there were no such images to accompany him as he walked towards the Strand, just a flimsy feeling of the shrinking facades of buildings. They were the same but smaller, weaker in connection and emptier in content. Soon, there’d be nothing of it left.
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