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Wedgwood Press Launches with a Pair of Ambitious Debuts from Visionary Author M. Maurice Hawkesworth

BERLIN, Germany – September 5, 2025 – Wedgwood Press, a new independent publishing house based in Berlin, is thrilled to announce its inaugural season, featuring two extraordinary and deeply connected books from the visionary author M. Maurice Hawkesworth. Launching with both a surrealist, genre-defying novel and a profound work of popular linguistics, Hawkesworth arrives on the literary scene as a major talent with a singular, electrifying vision.

The two launch titles, the novel The Smoking Gun and the non-fiction work Jeg Elsker Dig: The Secret Life of Ancient Words, offer readers a unique opportunity to explore a rich and cohesive literary universe. While standing alone as masterfully executed works, together they reveal an author fascinated by the secret lives of objects, the chaotic beauty of language, and the narratives that shape our world.

The Hawkesworth Universe: A Unified Vision

Read together, these two books offer an experience greater than the sum of their parts, revealing a literary universe guided by a consistent and fascinating vision.

• The Secret Life of Objects: Jeg Elsker Dig introduces the concept of words as living "fossils" with their own histories. The Smoking Gun takes this metaphor and pushes it into the realm of magical realism, giving full, vibrant consciousness to an inanimate object. The gun, Mimi, is the ultimate linguistic fossil—an ancient tool of violence that has learned to speak, rap, and demand its own narrative.

• The Power of Language and Narrative: Jeg Elsker Dig is a treatise on how words and stories shape our world. The Smoking Gun is the chaotic, dramatic proof. The entire plot is driven by the power of language to create reality, whether it's Mimi's hip-hop lyrics, the political slogans she deploys, or the final, stunning prayer she delivers to God . Hawkesworth shows that the stories we tell—and the words we use to tell them—are the most powerful force we have.

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The Double Debut: A Blueprint for Understanding

Hawkesworth’s project is unique. The two books are designed to be read together as a single, cohesive work

• Jeg Elsker Dig is a non-fiction exploration of language, treating everyday words like bread, law, and love as "fossils in sound" that carry the DNA of human survival . But this playful "kitchen-table history" serves a deeper purpose: it meticulously builds a moral framework for understanding the concepts of truth, honor, and theft . The book culminates in the explosive

  Chapter 18, "Words as Crime," a direct, factual testimony where Hawkesworth alleges he wrote the iconic resolution line for Ace of Base's hit "The Sign" in 1993, only to have his contribution erased . He supports this claim with what he calls his "smoking gun": a 1997 fax from Mega Records to Arista Records identifying him as the person who "cleaned up" the lyrics on the band's first album .

• The Smoking Gun is the fictional counterpart. It's a surreal road novel about a grieving professor who accidentally kills his neighbor and flees across the American West with his sentient, talking revolver, Mimi . The book is a wild, satirical, and deeply philosophical exploration of the very "fossils" dissected in its non-fiction twin:

  words, memory, survival, and theft .

When Satire Becomes Reality: A Disturbing Convergence

Separately, these books are compelling. Together, in the context of the (fictional) news of September 2025, they are nothing short of prophetic. The surreal events of The Smoking Gun have been eerily mirrored by the headlines.

Consider the parallels:

• A Nation on Edge: The Guardian reports that the killing of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus has raised fears of a "darker chapter" of political violence in America. Hawkesworth's novel begins with an accidental shooting in

  Salt Lake City, Utah, and climaxes in an act of political violence where one candidate for sheriff literally shoots her opponent .

• The Burning Man Tragedy: Rolling Stone details the shocking first-ever murder at Burning Man, an event that shattered the community's "social contract". Hawkesworth uses the Burning Man festival as a central set piece in his novel, portraying it as a chaotic microcosm of American society where the lines between performance art and real danger blur completely, culminating in a confrontation between real police and a troupe of "Art Police" .

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Anna L.

The Smoking Gun is a captivating read! Can't wait for more releases from Wedgwood Press.

★★★★★