True Life Nude is the third part of Suki the life-model’s autobiographical trilogy. It was published in January 2020.

A Small Life and Two Small Lives are the first two parts of Suki’s life-story. At the opening of this final part of the trilogy Suki has escaped to Berlin to try and pick up the threads of her former seventeen-year relationship with Ilka. Despite Suki’s recent ‘success’ as a writer (the modest publication by a small press of her first novel) she must still work as a jobbing life-model to make ends meet.

From what has Suki ‘escaped’? Well – the trauma of a stillborn child, followed by a distractingly riotous fling with dominating control-freak Tamara: zany and fun – but a BDSM relationship didn’t look anywhere near as safe as…
…Acquiescent Ilka.

So will Berlin be the answer? Resorting to the manageable familiarity of a passionless relationship in order to write? Having to work for artists (German ones this time) to get money? Has Suki attained her dream? The pot of gold? The realisation of her raison d’etre?

And if so then why, with her literary agent keenly awaiting her next manuscript, is it proving impossible to get down to it?

If Berlin is not Suki’s final destination, then what next?

Here the writer is laid bare to her bones, then she is pared back further to the very heart of what it means to be human. This is a captivating story about a quixotic quest to find meaning through writing and poetry and art, even as the world is falling apart. Suki is a hero for our times.

Apart from being well-written, moving, smart, funny, I can’t remember the last time I read anything so interesting. It absolutely feels and reads like an important piece of writing.
Meredi Ortega

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

Naked Eye is pleased to publish David Pendleton’s book Kick-off; The start of spectator sports as the first in its Potted Theses series.

“It is to be hoped that David Pendleton’s wonderfully readable and entertaining vision of a past which remains central to the way we still perceive ourselves, will become a staple of sporting history bookshelves.”
The Yorkshire Times

Kick-off charts and analyses the experience of Bradford in relation to the national development of sport in the modern city and how spectator sport, in particular, helped shape personal and civic identities in a bourgeoning industrial community. What took place in Bradford in the latter half of the nineteenth century was nothing less than a sporting industrial revolution, whose effects remain with us to this day.

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

Read more about David Pendleton here.

More about the Potted Theses series here.

Return to the homepage here.

‘True Life Nude’, Part III of Suki’s trilogy,

A Small Life and Two Small Lives are the first two parts of Suki’s life-story. At the opening of this final part of the trilogy Suki has escaped to Berlin to try and pick up the threads of her former seventeen-year relationship with Ilka. Despite Suki’s recent ‘success’ as a writer (the modest publication by a small press of her first novel) she must still work as a jobbing life-model to make ends meet.

From what has Suki ‘escaped’? Well – the trauma of a stillborn child, followed by a distractingly riotous fling with dominating control-freak Tamara: zany and fun – but a BDSM relationship didn’t look anywhere near as safe as…

…Acquiescent Ilka.

So will Berlin be the answer? Resorting to the manageable familiarity of a passionless relationship in order to write? Having to work for artists (German ones this time) to get money? Has Suki attained her dream? The pot of gold? The realisation of her raison d’etre?

And if so then why, with her literary agent keenly awaiting her next manuscript, is it proving impossible to get down to it?

If Berlin is not Suki’s final destination, then what next? 

Here the writer is laid bare to her bones, then she is pared back further to the very heart of what it means to be human. This is a captivating story about a quixotic quest to find meaning through writing and poetry and art, even as the world is falling apart. Suki is a hero for our times. 
Apart from being well-written, moving, smart, funny, I can’t remember the last time I read anything so interesting. It absolutely feels and reads like an important piece of writing. Meredi Ortega

You can read an online version here.

You can buy a copy of True Life Nude in the UK from Bookshop.org here (or from here in the US.)
(We may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.)

Return to our homepage here.

We publish concise layperson-friendly versions of PhD and other research theses to bring to a wider audience the ideas and wisdom of people whose master oeuvre may otherwise languish in eternal obscurity in an academic library. The requirements of academic rigour can make theses tedious to wade through, weighed down as they are by unwieldy chapters on methodology and statistics. The ‘potted thesis’ concept is to consign the boring bits to the footnotes, refining the text to convey the kernel of the idea and the meat of the discussion – the bits the author will tell you about at parties.

To aid readers encountering a subject for the first time, our potted theses may include a guest editor’s or the series editor’s clarifications and commentary or questions to the author.

“Settle publisher Naked Eye’s Potted Thesis series is an intelligent and innovative new venture.”

“Naked Eye’s approach gives the mainstream reader what he or she most wants: accurate history, incisive argument and engaging presentation, in the kind of divertingly bite-sized chunks which subordinate pages of turgid supporting statistics to startling revelations, and sometimes to counter-intuitive factual evidence.”
The Yorkshire Times

Return to our homepage here.