Since autumn 2014, the contemporary online platform Somesuch Stories has published a singular essay or piece of short fiction per week. Off-beat and delightfully esoteric, the content spans a variety of experimental topics, themes and genres – which, was precisely its aim. "It's an agenda-free, outside space to invite deep reading online," explains writer Suze Olbrich, who launched the project in collaboration with Sally Campbell and Tim Nash, founders of the award-winning production company, Somesuch. "It allows for proper storytelling, using money made from advertising to give writers a decent platform for long-form pieces, anti click-bait," adds Olbrich.
Spurred on by its burgeoning digital presence, Olbrich, Campbell and Nash decided to distill the very best of the online content into a pocket-sized paper volume, aptly entitled: Somesuch Stories Volume I. Navigating culture, nature, sex and society, the book makes for a vibrant, left-of-centre read, heightened by the varying tones of voice employed by its astute authors. "Drones, a great professor, the sin of nostalgia, a tapir and Tracey Emin" are just a few of the curious themes that form succinct chapters in the edition. Not forgetting the features penned on self-shedding limbs and Schrödinger's Cat.
The book's identity is further forged by its distinctive aesthetic, designed by Ben Freeman of Ditto Press. "Ben [Freeman] was thankfully was keen to take it on, and looked after it impeccably," notes Olbrich, adding. "He suggested it be large coat-pocket-sized and exceptionally tactile. He wanted to create an identity for the Stories series, where illustrations are constructed from the font and have a strong personality of their own. The font will change for each issue and this will be reflected in the icons."
Below, Olbrich has provided an exclusive extract from the story Anna-Sophie Has A Drink on Sunset by Dean Kissick.
Anna-Sophie Has A Drink On Sunset
The other day, my mother handed me a pot of yoghurt, cultivated from my great-grandmother’s vagina, across the antique wooden breakfast table, before I had had even the first of my morning coffees. But, of course, I tasted a spoonful out of politeness. It was gloopy and unpleasant.
This was some months ago, I think, or whenever I was last at her house in Malibu. Through the open windows, I watched pelicans fall from the sunshine into the waters below and thought about a story I had read recently, somewhere, about how they would stab themselves in their own hearts with their soggy, preposterous beaks, and profusely bleed into the mouths of their pelican children. “How horrible,” I thought to myself, followed by a floaty jellyfish-like feeling of annoyance that my own mother would not provide for me in this manner; for my younger sister Isabelle, certainly, but not me – no, never. Ugh. Isabelle!
Actually, my mother drinks a mug of warm horse’s blood in the morning, every morning, because she is a knitwear designer from France, and that is the sort of thing they enjoy. “Anna-Sophie, it makes me strong,” she says. Nobody knows where all this warm horse’s blood is coming from, and whenever I ask her, she pretends not to hear.
“Bad bacteria is behind all of society’s ills,” she informed me sternly that morning, as she does most times I speak to her, which is not often. And she spooned some more of the yoghurt made from my great-grandmother’s vagina onto my muesli and spoke passionately, lyrically, about how this was a good bacteria, a happy and unusually kindly one with which our family had been cooking up homemade yoghurts for well over a century.
“One day, my Anna-Sophie, in the whole wide world there will only be a handful of people that have never taken antibiotics – they will become like gods! – and the rest of us will make pilgrimages of thousands of miles, through frozen mountain passes and across perilous white waters, only to make yoghurts out of their bodily fluids, or to partake in samples of their stools. Each of their waste orifices will become like a gold mine, or a fountain of youth.”
My mother, she spoke for hours about the hidden powers of raw yoghurts and I wondered to myself whether she was using them for the purpose of evil.
Somesuch Stories Volume I, published by Somesuch and edited by Suze Olbrich is available to buy online via Antenne Books
