It was wonderful to see so many of you at our events with Mick Herron and Zadie Smith last week. Now that we’ve had a moment to collect ourselves, it’s time to announce another really exciting date for our autumn schedule.

You are warmly invited to join us for a very special event to mark the launch of Bristol-based Lurid Editions republication of the early anti-imperial feminist classic, The Awakening of Indian Women.

Thursday 12th October, 6.30-8pm, Gloucester Road Books, 184 Gloucester Road. Tickets & more info are available here.

Writers, researchers and academics, Maya Caspari and Aparna Mahiyaria, will be in conversation to celebrate this landmark 20th century text which was first published on the eve of the Second World War and, until now, buried in the archives. This unique document from the first global feminist movement is testimony to the deep historical roots of revolutionary feminist thought and action.

For Amia Srinivasan, Kamaladevi’s The Awakening of Indian Women is “radical and visionary” and “deserves a place on feminist reading lists and in the wider transnationalist feminist imagination. Among other things, it is a potent reminder that feminism is not an invention or prerogative of the West.”

Told by a vibrant cast of activists at the centre of feminist and anti-imperial struggles, The Awakening of Indian Women includes a historical account of the Indian feminist movement written by Irish suffrage activist and anti-colonial agitator Margaret Cousins.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (3 April 1903–29 October 1988) was an artist, activist and a central figure in the inter-war Indian feminist movement. A twentieth century Indian feminist icon, after independence she is celebrated for leading the revival of Indian handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre after independence.

About the Speakers:

Maya Caspari is writer, curator and researcher and currently works as a lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her book Reading Frictions: Memory, Violence and The Politics of Touch in Contemporary World Literature is forthcoming. Maya curated Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media—an online exhibition for the German Historical Institute London. Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review and Ambit, and was highly commended in the 2022 Forward Prizes.

Aparna Mahiyaria is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter whose work is grounded in Marxist-Feminist praxis, and engages with the intersections of performance and politics, particularly in the context of South Asia. She is interested in how performance practices emerge from and intervene in their political contexts, challenge colonial histories as well as contemporary imperialist-Hindutva epistemological onslaughts.

Lurid editions are based in Bristol and publish ‘lurid writing from the 20th century and beyond.’ @lurid_editions

We are delighted to announce our first event in October (there will be more to follow!).

We are thrilled to be welcoming French author, journalist and editor, Nolwenn Le Blevennec to the shop to discuss her brilliant debut novel, As the Eagle Flies, with the book’s translator, Madeleine Rogers.

The talk will be held at 7pm, on Tuesday 3rd October at Gloucester Road Books. Tickets and more info are available here.

Published for the first time in English by dynamic indie publisher, Pereine Press, As the Eagle Flies is a witty and fully charged novel from an outstanding writer. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear from both the writer and translator of this scintillating debut. It is always an honour, and a wonderful opportunity, to have both writer and translator at an event. Our talk with Alejandro Zambra and Megan McDowell was one of the highpoints of our year so far, and we are just as excited to talk to Nolwenn Le Blevennec and Medeleine Rogers.

This is the story of an affair, or two. The narrator of As the Eagle Flies has been with Igor for seven years, and has two children with him – when she meets Joseph. Before long, they are deeply entangled with each other and she must decide between the life she knows with Igor and this unpredictable, and potentially destructive, affair. She is willing to start again with Joseph, but at what cost? And, does he feel the same way? With a sharp wit and a refreshing honesty, Nolwenn Le Blevennec uses literature, psychology, and popular culture to get to the heart of questions about love, family and identity. This is a book about getting lost in other people, and the lengths we go to to find ourselves again.

We have two fantastic new events in September to tell you about.

We are delighted to be welcoming one of the recently selected Best of Young British Novelists, Thomas Morris to Bristol in September.

The award-winning author and editor will be discussing his new short story collection, Open Up with writer and academic, Constantine Blintzios. The talk will be held in the bookshop at 7pm on Tuesday 19th September. Prices are either £5 for ticket only, or £16.99 for a ticket and a copy of Open Up (save £3 on the ticket price) and can be purchased from our website here.

The new collection from a literary star – five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection.

Everything felt familiar and nostalgic. It was the joy and blood-thrill of being understood, of being ready to give himself entirely to another.

From a child attending his first football match, buoyed by secret magic, and a wincingly humane portrait of adolescence, to the perplexity of grief and loss through the eyes of a seahorse, Thomas Morris seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery.

Philosophically acute and strikingly original, this outstanding suite of stories is bursting with a bracing emotional depth. Open Up cracks the heart as it expands the short story form.

Praise for Thomas Morris:

‘Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ Ali Smith

‘That tonic gift, the sense of truth – the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own’. The tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris’s debut short-story collection.’ Irish Times

‘Morris’s fresh, direct writing style feels brand new.’ Metro

‘Radiant’ Independent

Thomas Morris is from Caerphilly, South Wales. He was educated solely through the Welsh language until the age of eighteen and, in his teens, trialled at Cardiff City and played Welsh League football. He studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Dubliners 100, a short story anthology he devised and edited, was published in 2014. He is the author of the short story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, and was recently named as one of Granta’s prestigious Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in Dublin, where he is the editor of the very influential magazine, The Stinging Fly.

We are now squarely into the period where people are doing their reading from deck chairs, hammocks, beaches (don’t fall asleep or some clever so-and-so will bury you up to your neck in sand, you know what they’re like), pavement cafes, pub gardens etc.

It is somehow always surprising just how much the rhythm here changes over the school summer holidays. We generally avoid scheduling events during this period for this very reason, but when the author is based abroad we don’t always have the flexibility around dates we might otherwise have. This is the case with Michael Winkler, who is based in Australia but is in the UK for a brief period in August. Thus far we’ve not had many takers for our talk scheduled on Tuesday 8th August. We knew it would be a risk to go ahead with so many people out of the city, but this is a brilliant opportunity to hear a really fascinating author discuss his work, and it would be a real shame to let this one go, so we thought it would be worth putting the word out one more time.

Grimmish really is an extraordinary book. Winkler borrows from real life for his protagonist, in the form of Joe Grim (1881-1939) variously known in his time as ‘The Iron Man’ and ‘The Human Punching Bag’. He was an incredible figure in his own right (have a look at the Wikipedia page for him here). He’s the driving force behind the narrative in Grimmish, travelling America and then all the way to Australia in a bizarre odyssey to seek out the most destructive fighters of his time, and prove none of them can dish out more than he can take. This is a book about human motivations, both extreme and banal. It is rich with invention, brilliantly written, and genuinely one of a kind. I loved it, and I’m confident the conversation with Winkler will be absolutely intriguing.

Tickets are priced £5 and are available here or in store.

Happy summer reading everyone,

Tom, Leah & Joe

Has your reading been as wild as the weather lately? No? Well we can go someway to redressing that with our next event.

We are very pleased indeed to welcome, all the way from Australia (though we suspect he didn’t travel only to pop in and speak to us) Michael Winkler, author of Grimmish. He will be joining us in the shop on Tuesday 8th August at 7pm. Tickets are available in store or via our website here.

I read Grimmish earlier this year and found it to be a wildly inventive, thoroughly enjoyable novel, with perhaps unexpectedly deep reserves of humanity. The book wears its oddness on its sleeve (quite literally, in the form of a quote from J. M. Coetzee, who declared it ‘The strangest book you are likely to read this year’) and while it fulfils on that peculiar promise, it is also a hugely affecting book. If it is strange, it is because we humans are unendingly so.

We are greatly looking forward to hearing Winkler’s thoughts about the novel and the man behind his extraordinary character, Joe Grim. Grimmish is the kind of book that causes an unending stream of questions to pop into the reader’s head – at least it did for me – so I am particularly looking forward to directing some of those questions Winkler’s way!
Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. A superstar boxer who rarely won a fight, Grim distinguished himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment.

In this wild and expansive novel, Michael Winkler moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908–09 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative.

Pain is often said to defy the limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain – physical and mental – is also the most familiar and universal human condition; and, perhaps, the secret source of our impulse to tell stories.

Praise for Grimmish

‘A powerful blast of literary ingenuity and originality.’ – Lloyd Jones

‘I lurched between fits of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler’s verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable slow of his images, the bizarre with of the language of pugilism – and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness.’ – Helen Garner

‘All the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching.’ – The Guardian