Sandstone Press are pleased to announce the publication of the fourth Sandstone Review.  The free online arts and culture magazine can be accessed at the Sandstone Press web site at www.sandstonepress.com as usual.  This new issue features visual art from Evelyn Pottie of the art.tm studio, Gavin Bowd’s reflections on the work of Kenneth White, fiction from Valerie Thornton, a lovely poetry spread from Poetry Scotland’s editor Sally Evans (visit www.poetryscotland.co.uk ), Chris MacIvor writing out of his work in international aid in Africa, and Myles Campbell’s bilingual review of Angus Peter Campbell’s new novel.

The Sandstone Press web site is currently undergoing a substantial re-edit that we hope to launch around the weekend of Saturday 12th March.  Available from that time will be the first of their new, exceptionally affordable, reading downloads.  These will include a brand new novella from prize-winning author Ron Butlin and Anna Crowe’s translations of the astonishing Catalan poet Anna Aguilar-Amat.  Both are absolutely knock-out!

Not too long after that Sandstone Press will present the first of their Pearls series of Gaelic-language fiction with Flora MacDonald’s ‘Letter From America’, and a rather mysterious work, this time originating in America where a manuscript has been unearthed.  Sandstone Press understand it to be one end of a rather ancient correspondence and that it at least resembles the writings of Rev Robert Kirk in late 1600s.  Time will tell.  The Pearls series will be presented without translation unless the authors specify otherwise.

These new downloads, Sandstone Fiction, Sandstone Bridges, and Sandstone Pearls will point the way of publishing in the 21st Century.  Hard copy will never leave us, or so we in the Highlands believe, but new means generate new methods and expand the realm of possibility for the human imagination.  With work being done in galleries and studios all over our area, with the coming reconstruction of Eden Court Theatre, with the developing Highland 2007 project, Sandstone Press serves to move the cultural centre of gravity of Scotland that bit further north.

For Sandstone Press Managing Editor’s thoughts on Highland 2007 visit the Highlands and Islands Arts Journal at www.hi-arts.co.uk but first visit www.sandstonepress.com for the new Sandstone Review.