"The Adventures of China Iron" by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.
Read the New Guardian review here.
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Join Berlin poet Alistair Noon to launch Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers Press, 2023), a long poem with Luton Airport in it.
Discussing the book with him will be Berlin writer Lucy Jones.
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"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson.
Read the New Guardian review here.
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"The Years" by Annie Ernaux.
Read the New Guardian review here.
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Every 3rd Thursday of the Month, 7.30pm
Join us to discuss the book of the month in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Newcomers always welcome. Registration not necessary, just turn up at the right time and be prepared to discuss the book!
During the Summer, we will hold the book club outdoors in the area just in front of the shop.
We advise that you bring your own refreshments!
In the event of rain etc., we will move indoors.
09 November, 8.00pm
About Paradise Takeaway
Part memoir, part invention, Paradise Takeaway takes us along the bus and train routes of the London metropolitan area, not stopping at the
eponymous fast food outlet en route to Aylesbury. On the way you’ll meet the Spirit of Rail, the Lady of Passport Control,
a famous German philosopher, and other figures real and unreal.
Somewhere at the back of it all is ‘Germany: A Winter’s Fairy Tale’, Heinrich Heine’s long poem on returning to Germany for the first time after thirteen years in Parisian exile.
Drawing on thirty years of trips back from Berlin to the UK, and a lifetime of not always entirely healthy eating, Alistair Noon reflects on what it is to watch a country and a waistline changing.
And there isn’t a single mention of You Know What.
Alistair Noon grew up in Aylesbury and has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, bar a couple of years in China. His translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam have appeared in the Guardian and New Statesman as well as three volumes from Shearsman Books.
Paradise Takeaway is the third full-length collection of his own poetry.
Lucy Jones is a British-born writer and translator and has lived in Berlin since 1998. She has translated books by Brigitte Reimann, Anke Stelling and Theresia Enzensberger among others. Her writing has appeared in SAND, Pigeon Papers NYC, 3AM Magazine and LitroMag.
Wednesday 29 March, 8pm
The recent publication of Brigitte Reimann’s novella Siblings by Penguin Classics follows the translation over the past few years of the East German writer’s diaries into English. Both the novella and the diaries speak to the experience of a young, politically engaged woman in the GDR of the 1950s and 1960s. So why the interest now? Reimann’s translator Lucy Jones speaks with Paul Scraton about the importance of the writer’s work fifty years on from her untimely death, about how her work explores a society that attempted to position itself as far away from the horrors of Nazism as possible, and why she remains relevant today.