Rough Trade Books, 2025, softcover, 180 pages, 17 x 13 cm
A story-cycle from the deep taproot of the Sussex 'Weald', The Pin Jar is a record of vernacular folk tales as transcribed by the enigmatic composer and amateur ethnographer Francis J. Cardwell, who habitually, compulsively, taped the various stories and songs he encountered in the now lost pubs of his county. Earthy, half-haunted, dialect-rich - this is the true stuff of deep weird England. Sam Reid's beguiling debut presents us with the folk process of story-telling and song reimagined as a radical literary experiment and fictional archive of place-memory.
