sincere corkscrew is a small press based in Glasgow, Scotland. It is the project of Ian Macartney (hullo). Santiago Taberna drew the logo.

Elegy [Model Interaction Trend] – Charlie McIlwain

March 2025

"Charlie McIlwain’s Elegy is a thought-provoking reflection on memory, loss, and (absent) confession. Repeated breaks in sense and syntax mirror the inability of memory to capture charged events with clarity. McIlwain looks back on that which evades representation and offers us his reflections “in chalk”. To speak in chalk also implies the production of word and sound particles that remain on the sleeves, in the air, taken into the lungs. After reading McIlwain’s Elegy, you will carry some of its lingering chalk dust away with you.”

— William Keohane

"Charlie McIlwain is a contemporary shaman battling forces of light and dark on an extended KWEHR-tee keyboard, a poet’s poet, a cowboy with a Mac here to give the mind, body and soul what they long for, an artist who doesn’t come around often and isn’t born easily. Their work requests a subjective reading experience, in the way one might expect to read an abstract painting, feel a Miles Davis performance or discern images within the flames of a fire — the reader has to do some of the lifting to gather the wood here, but becomes all the warmer for their participation. E[MIT] is a happening, an event in aid of itself, where understanding isn’t as important as experiencing. McIlwain’s world is vital, various, a delicately plural symphony of signs, ritualistically bodying forth a tear in our expectation of language and poetic utterance while giving rise to how these are witnessed, here and now, collaborating anew."

— Jake Hawkey

Read the full list of samples here.

Terminal – Ricky Monahan Brown

September 2024

From visionary writer Ricky Monahan Brown comes Terminal: fourteen tales of 'the end'. From the neo-Gothic to sci-fi, Leith to Brooklyn, this is vibrant short fiction which will shock, humour and astound in equal heady measure.

"Terminal lives up to its titular promise of hurtling towards many different senses of ‘end’. Smart, trippy and irreverent, Monahan Brown’s narrative style is just as confident crawling under the bonnet of sci-fi as it is doing Celtic realism, moshing or luring us, fable-like, close to the wood wide web. What use is there for existentialism in an accelerated world of sex dolls, conceptual thanatos and perpetual technical difficulty? Drift on to find out. "

— Maria Sledmere, author of Midsummer Song

"Ricky Monahan Brown’s stories evoke the uncanny reality of contemporary life and simultaneously summon the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Poe. Behind his precise prose lurk surprises around every corner, and Monahan Brown walks a fine line between reality and fable in a world that is at once familiar and strange. Spending time with these stories will be richly rewarding."

— Stephen Sacco, host of Plague Remedy podcast

"Ricky Monahan Brown’s language has real pop and fizz. Tense, funny and original: these stories remind us what a good short story is."

— Cameron Wylie, author of Is There a Pigeon in the Room?

Ammonia Sunrise – Aske Hyldborg Jensen

January 2024

From the Danish artist Aske Hyldborg Jensen, Ammonia Sunrise reads like Barthesian dispatches from another dimension. In the form of prose-poems and poem-poems, Jensen details strange turns of the mind — melting into a world weirder than thought — with humour, playfulness and grotesquerie.

"Digital and bodily. Ammonia Sunrise is dealing with the endless entanglements of the symbioscene, where trauma and memory become dreams, become frogs, become landscapes become us become pixels. The work is as empathetic as it is distant. As humorous as it is gore-ish. It sticks to your memory like shoe-goo™, with the smell of motor oil and soap and the sound of a frog croak. Entering is not impossible, tech is required. Mould patterns as decorations of our church, sacred paintings for refuge- seeking rodents. Dreams are true down there, undiscovered and hidden."

— Victor Bengtsson, visual artist

"Ammonia Sunrise uplifts a series of selves without clear boundaries, where the environments of cliffs, frogs, styrofoam, goo, and silverfish swim with human embodiment and wonder... here is hybridity in form mirroring hybridity in the restlessness of our living archive, in all of its plurality and density, constantly rupturing."

— Kirsty Dunlop, Editor-in-Chief of SPAM Press

World-dreem: an anthology of new(er) writing – eds. Ian Macartney, Tom Byam Shaw

May 2021

A man is plagued by visions of the hollow earth. Onions sprout from a dreamer’s legs. American ghost hunters search for murdered spirits, and you’re skiving Wednesday P.E. to smoke on a riverbank.

This collection brings together bold and esoteric visions from the cutting-edge of Scotland’s young literary scene, and beyond.

This is a transmission from the otherworld. Are you receiving?

Featuring: Tom Byam Shaw, Rory Mullen, Miriam Schlüter, Ian Macartney, Ask Vestergaard, Mae Diansangu, Kieran Donnan, Seoras Eaglesham, Prema Arasu, Parawat Chang, Mag, Enxhi Mandija, Endija Lukstina, Arthur Allen, Fredrika Siden Cruz, Christopher Kestell, Jordan Stead, Blythe Stockdale, Shaw Worth, Savannah Brown, Murid L. Keshtmand, Orooj e-Zaffar