Can of Worms Press publishes all kinds of interesting, quirky and fascinating titles. We pick our books not in terms how profitable it will be (well… we do think about that too), but how interesting it is. Check out some of our titles and decide for yourself:

Graphic Shakespeare

The Stage becomes the Page.

Graphic Shakespeare series offer the memorable real-life action of a play in the popular ‘graphic novel’ format, while maintaining the intimate relationship with the written text.

Don’t just read it … see it!

About the illustrator:

Oscar Zarate is a prize-winning author and illustrator of graphic novels. Born in Buenos Aires, he initially studied architecture and worked in advertising, before moving to Europe with the intention of becoming a comic artist.

Zarate started illustrating children’s books before moving onto a comic adaptation of Marlowe’s Faustus. He then worked on many of the world famous titles from the ‘For Beginners’ and ‘Introducing’ series. The most notably being Freud for Beginners, which is still a bestseller, and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology, one of the books attributed to be an inspirational source in the creation of the film The Matrix.

After producing short stories for several European magazines he went on to create several graphic novels, including A Small Killing, with writer Alan Moore, and Its Dark in London. He currently lives in London.

‘It’s a marvellous twitchy performance from Zarate’s cartoon Othello … the more anxious the hero, the closer the artist follows his darting eyes.…’ – The Guardian

‘Having found the story boring before, I think it is a good idea to have pictures. They give it atmosphere, as if you are watching a play. It has helped bring the play to life.’
Sonita, 15, Leyton High School

‘The series constitutes an excellent unpatronising introduction to Shakespeare.’ –
The Financial Times

‘Even if you don’t understand some of the language you can follow what’s happening from the expressions on the characters faces.’
Jill, 14, Sanders Draper School

Each Day Small Victory
by Chips Hardy

Each Day A Small Victory is a novel for adults, and a dark one at that – after all it is Rural Noir – it is also illustrated with some wonderfully evocative images by Oscar Grillo.

Each Day a Small Victory contains dateline dispatches from what to passing motorists is a lay-by on an English country road but to the indigenous inhabitants is more like a war zone.

These monthly bulletins of a furred and fanged community describe how they survive with and on each other, recording the differing threats and triumphs that the year brings and the resilience, patience and humour required to get through it.

“All Quiet on the Western Front – with fur!”

Each Day a Small Victory portrays in unfettered language all the drama, beleaguered optimism, muttered jokes and clenched terror that inform the survival and otherwise of its wide cast of characters. Most of them looking over their shoulders. All of them on borrowed time.
How they manage to live alongside each other and how they do it right next to a busy and indifferent human world is a day to day struggle with an entirely different perspective to ours. It’s a struggle constructed of hope, chaos, violence and all kinds of surprises. Some of them pleasant. Most of them lethal.

Jake Arnott describes the book as “Pulp Fiction meets Wind in the Willows.”

Robert Lindsay enjoyed reading Each Day A Small Victory so much that he very kindly agreed to record the July chapter: Keeping Death Off the Road to help promote the book.

To listen to Max’s midsummer mayhem click here:

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About the author:
Chips Hardy is a British Comedy Award winner and has produced and written for television and the theatre. He was born in 1950 in Ealing, London. He went to Cambridge, and threw himself into The Very Modern Novel, Situationism and other more established university theatricals. In 1972 he flirted with BBC Drama and subsequently veered off, temporarily into advertising. He is now international Creative Director for JWT. Hardy has recently signed a Hollywood contract for ‘Acts of Charity’. A play, Blue on Blue, is being showcased at the Latchmere Theatre by Shotgun soon to go national.

About the illustrator:
Oscar Grillo is a world-renowned illustrator and animator. He won a Palme D’Or at Cannes for Seaside Woman and had a role in visual development for Monsters, Inc. and as animation consultant for Men in Black. He was born in Buenos Aires and lives and works in London.