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Author: GRB
A Fantastic Event, Some Excellent Summer Paperbacks, Incompetent Buffoons, Plus Werner Herzog’s First Novel!
Hello Readers,
Welcome to our second newsletter, featuring our last literary event before the summer break kicks in (we’ll pick up again in September), some excellent new releases and oodles of new paperbacks.
On Friday 15th July we will be welcoming Mona Arshi & Preti Taneja to the Gloucester Road to talk about two of my favourite books of the last couple of years. There will be much for these writers to discuss (with Noreen Masud, from Bristol University) so it promises to be a fascinating evening. None of our events will require having read the book/s beforehand – the authors will be discussing the themes broadly so even if you have never heard of either writer or book, there will still be plenty for you to take from the evening. Tickets are £5 from Eventbrite, via the link below, where there is more info about the books and the writers. Tickets are also available in store. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mona-arshi-and-preti-taneja-in-conversation-tickets-334503718627
Rarely has the timing of a paperback release so perfectly correlated with a real world exemplar of its importance. If you want to know why our outgoing Prime Minister is wired the way he is, then Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men is the place to look. If you have, by this point, reached and exceeded your threshold for musings on the greased piglet of British politics, then I entirely sympathise. However, the chances are very good that the person who replaces Johnson will also be a product of a system that so often produces humans entirely incapable of doing justice to the priviledged positions they acquire.
Also well timed, and on a far more positive note, is the release of A Woman’s Game, to coincide with start of Euro 2022. A fascinating history of the rocky progress of women’s football from the Victorian era to present day.
This week has seen an absolute deluge of excellent new paperback releases. This is a modest selection of the paperback fiction that has appeared on our shelves and table in the last few days. There’s a good spectrum represented too, from pure storytelling to stranger & more challenging tales.
There’s plenty of good new non-fiction coming into paperback in time for summer reading too, if that’s the way your beach/tent/park reading is inclined:
Lastly, this week also saw the release of Werner Herzog’s first novel, The Twilight World. I’m not necessarily always convinced by forays made into writing by people who have made their names in other media (though the 254,565,343,692,954,267,219,040,012 people who have read Richard Osman’s books to date show I’m clearly on the wrong side of that one) but I’ve read both of Herzog’s non-fiction books, and they are totally brilliant, so I’m very much looking forward to reading this. It tells the story of a Japanese solider abandoned, toward the end of WWII, on a small island in the Philippines. He is given orders to defend the island at all costs, using whatever guerrilla tactics he can, which he duly does… for the next 29 years despite the war being long over. Those familiar with Herzog’s film making will recognise precisely this kind of premise; epic and absurd. I can’t wait.
Happy reading everyone,
x Tom
Our first newsletter, Independent Bookshop Week & Sandor Katz
Hello & welcome to our very first Gloucester Road Books newsletter!
This Saturday marks the start of Independent Bookshop Week in the UK. To celebrate, we’re working with Little Toller, a wonderful small publisher based in Dorset, who publish books about the natural world and place. We always carry a small selection of their books in our Independent Presses section of the shop, but next week we will have a broad array of their wonderful titles on show. They have also very kindly sent us some books to give away to customers who buy one of their books from us during the course of the week.
Also to coincide with Independent Bookshop Week, we have a fantastic event with a renowned fermentation specialist – and the man largely responsible for the popularity of sourdough! On Friday 24th June we are delighted to welcome Sandor Katz to Bristol to discuss his books, his travels, and his lifetime of experience with fermentation. Sandor will also be giving us a demonstration, and signing copies of his books.
Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, his explorations in fermentation developed out of his overlapping interests in cooking, nutrition, and gardening. For the past twenty years, Sandor Katz has traveled the world, learning, teaching and sharing his knowledge of fermentation, discovering fascinating techniques for creating fermented foods. Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys is the long-awaited follow up to the James Beard Award Winning The Art of Fermentation, where Sandor shares the recipes, processes, cultural traditions and stories from around the globe that have inspired his life’s work.
The talk will be held at the BA Church Hall on Gloucester Road (around 50 yards down the hill from the shop). Doors at 18:30, event starts at 19:00. Tickets are available in store or from the Eventbrite link here:
Thanks for reading & hope to see you soon!
Tom, Leah & Joe