Tuesday 3 Feb / Book Launch Jingle Jangle Song
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To celebrate LGBTQIA+ history month, publisher D-M Withers and publishing researcher Karishma Koshal will be in conversation about an important, and until now largely unknown queer novelist, Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1937-2023), and her finest novel, A Jingle Jangle Song.
Bristol based indie publisher Lurid Editions are bringing out a new edition of A Jingle Jangle Song in January 2026 and are very excited to re-introduce readers today to this important and intoxicating love story.
This conversation will discuss Villa-Gilbert’s life and work, queer book and publishing history; it will reflect on why access to the literary past is vital for queer readers, alongside the wider recovery work of Lurid Editions, publish rediscovered LGBTQIA+ books from the twentieth century archive.
Tuesday February 3rd - 6.30-7.30pm
Tickets are £5 - save your seat!
About the book:
Perfect for LGBTQIA+ History Month, rediscover this lost lesbian novel of the late 1960s – quirky, sweet, eccentric and filled with the sounds and energies of the era’s counterculture, from a forgotten queer author who deserves to be remembered.
“You get fed up singing jingle jangle songs and doing gigs around the country. There’s no time to wonder, no time to lie in the grass and dream. One loses so much: one just isn’t a real person any more.”
Late 60s London, folk singer Sarah Kumar arrives to give a concert. She is hot stuff and a hot mess – androgynous, awkward and alluring.
Kumar attends hip parties, sings to her fans and passes out wasted. She is a picture of consummate coolness, hid nervously behind huge sunglasses – a subversive imagining of a strong queer female lead amid the commercial folk boom.
Inside the countercultural throng, Kumar’s life is soon derailed by an encounter with an older woman, the intoxicating Mrs. Stankovich.
Buried in the archives for far too long, A Jingle-Jangle Song is the lost queer novel of the late 1960s. Eccentric and atmospheric, sweet and satirical, the novel celebrates how queer desire erupts in unexpected – and unignorable – ways.Publisher, D-M Withers said: “When I first read A Jingle Jangle Song, I was thrilled by the prose, intoxicated by the story and captivated by the protagonist Sarah Kumar's Main Character Energy. I then felt sad, and furious, that a book this good was not more widely available, and that such an interesting queer author, published by a stellar literary publisher in the 1960s, has more or less totally disappeared from the literary map. Bringing out a new edition of Villa-Gilbert's most groovy novel is a restorative act that will enable her work to be read again in a historical moment that will understand and - I hope - embrace her.”