Broad Conversation

Events, news and opinion from Blackwell's, Broad Street, Oxford – one of the most famous bookshops in the world. Join the conversation…

January 17, 2013 • 9:30 am 0

Lars Iyers – Fresh, funky and very, very funny

“Iyer’s weird talent continues to grow, and the misadventures of his miserable characters are starting to seem like the brightest things in modern British fiction.” — The Guardian on ‘Dogma’

Every so often a new voice appears on the scene that refreshes my love of the written word. With ‘Exodus’ Lars Iyer completes a trilogy of novels that are fresh, funky and laugh-out-loud funny.

Each of the books – ‘Spurious’ is the first in the trilogy and ‘Dogma’ the second – is based around the sort-of-friendship-sort-of-enmity of two academic philosophers; Lars and W.

Comparisons are invidious but there is definitely a slug of Beckett – the meanderings of body and mind – mixed with a dash of Ballard and a sprig of Nietzshe. It all adds up to a unique blend called Iyers…

The novels are clever; a good thing that brings a warm and rewarding  feeling to the reader – perfect for the perishing cold days and nights. And funny, very funny.

Unsurprisingly I am just a little bit giddy that Lars is coming to the shop on Wednesday, 23rd January at 7pm In fact I’m so giddy that if you say ‘Utterly Spurious’ on the door WE’LL LET YOU IN FOR FREE!

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6464

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_03_018717.php

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, , , , , ,

January 10, 2013 • 3:09 pm 0

It’s a Dog’s Life : Capturing Animal Behaviour Through a Lens by Andy Hughes

In his first guest blog for Broad Conversation Andy Hughes, the author of ‘I, Jack Russell’, writes about the human-animal bond from a photographer’s perspective. All images are taken from Andy Hughes’ book, ‘I, Jack Russell’.

Andy will be joining us in conversation with renowned author  of ‘In Defence of Dogs’ Dr. John Bradshaw,  next week, on Wednesday 16th January at 7pm.  Tickets cost £3 and are available from our Customer Service Department, or over the phone on 01865 333623.

dog

 

Photographers, artists, writers and other ‘creatives’ are diverse in motivation, interests, experiences and insights. Much of my photographic practice deals with issues concerning the marine and coastal environment, however recently, I realized or perhaps discovered by accident that I had many more images of my two dogs than I did of my family and friends and this lead to a new field of research. I began this project about Jack Russell dogs by looking to find as many family snapshots, which included our dogs. I found a few and these are included in my recent book I Jack Russell which attempts to encourage readers to think about their own snapshots of dogs and about the dog human bond.

Many people come across images (photographic ones) in their daily life. Ubiquitous to some and unique to others there are millions of photographic images in the word today. In Roland Barth’s seminal book Camera Lucida he coined the term punctum, this denotes a type of ‘wounding’, a sort of personal touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. The re-discovery of my own family snapshots containing images my own pet dogs as a young child brought Barth’s concept sharply in focus and led me to enquire further leading me to a number of books which became key in my search to understand the relationship between people and dogs.
 
For instance, after reading John Bradshaw, Alexandra Horowitz and Mark Derr it became clear to me that my thinking about my own dogs and dogs in general was far from complete or fully developed. 

 
dog2 
As well as published material, social networks such as DogBook that have photographic images of dogs seem as important to us as do images of other humans on Facebook. Collections of these images can often be found in our own albums or more readily in this day and age on our mobile phones or via our personal webpages. One very interesting historical survey can be seen in the book Dogs by Catherine Johnson where one can look at hundreds of images of dogs; it is a book filled with amateur, anonymous snapshots of dogs from the turn of the century to the early 1950s.

In I Jack Russell my motivations were driven by something more than simply capturing a sense of likeness. Something more akin to Barth’s concept. In a wonderful precise and short essay titled ‘Dogs’ Robert Adams  [1] beautifully describes various relationships between artists and their dogs. Two sentences in particular resonate.

‘Art depends on there being affection in its creator’s life, and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible.’

‘Artists live by curiosity and enthusiasm, qualities readily evident as inspiration in dogs. Propose to a dog a walk and its response is absolutely yes.’ 

The bond between creative enterprise, artistic interpretation and the sciences are re-bonding and revealing new insights. Research into the relationship between the dog and human is set to continue  – we should all keep our nose to the blogosphere and bookshelf to help fully understand the dog and human world.

[1] Robert Adams: Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews, Aperture (1994)

Andy Hughes January 7. 2013-01-07

www.andyhughes.net

http://cabiblog.typepad.com/hand_picked/

Filed under: Guest Blogs, Literary Events

January 6, 2013 • 12:52 pm 0

Short Stories Aloud

Reading aloud is the new sexy according to this piece! We are blessed in Oxford to have a monthly event run by the ebullient Sarah Franklin. She explains all…

SSA_LogoHere’s a New Year’s Resolution that’s hard to beat and easy to keep. Come to the Old Firestation on the fourth Tuesday of every month for  Short Stories Aloud, Oxford’s friendliest literary night. Hear professional actors read stories by world-famous and up-and-coming authors.

 There’s wine, there’s cake, there’s a gorgeous softly-lit room where actors lift the stories off the page. There’s a chance to ask the authors questions in the Q&A afterwards, or just to scoff brownies whilst you listen to other people’s questions.

 Featured stories include those by bestselling novelists Ian McEwan, George Saunders, Catherine O’Flynn, Nikesh Shukla and Sophie Hannah, as well as exciting debut authors including Sarah Butler and Julie Mayhew.

 Tickets are a mere fiver on the door (£3 concessions): or free admission if you bring us a cake. See, told you we were friendly…

 The next Short Stories Aloud show is at 7:30pm on Tuesday, January 22nd at the Old Firestation, 40 George Street. Contact

shortstoriesaloud@gmail.com or @storiesaloud for more info. We’d love to see you there!

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Stories Aloud, ,

January 1, 2013 • 2:45 pm 0

What we are looking forward to in 2013

“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience:  this is the ideal life.”  

Mark Twain

As we face up to a fresh start, a new year, it is time for me to renew my bookselling vows. Primary among these is to find the ‘books of worth’ to put in front of our customers. Some of these books will garner much attention, some less so; some will sit atop the bestseller lists, some will only sell a few; some will have the full resources of a major publishing house put behind them, some will be published by a one man band.

Here then is the first tranche of books that I am looking forward to becoming acquainted with for the first time this year:

0007509162

A bittersweet recommendation this as it is the last complete work from that most-loved friend of booksellers Maurice Sendak. A veneration of his brother, Jack, this is guaranteed to have added poignancy with the death of the author last year. Due for publication on 31st January.

1408818302

From one of our greatest living historians comes the story of the first Anglo Afghan war. No doubt there will be parallels to be drawn between this disastrous episode and the current situation. As ever with Dalrymple you will get a rollicking history dripping in authentic detail

0224097113

James Wood is undoubtedly one of the pre-eminent literary critics of our generation. Expect this collection of 23 essays to fizz off the page – he writes about a variety of influential writers from George Orwell to Michel Houellebecq, Cormac McCarthy to Thomas Hardy. Due for publication on 7th February.

9781846145223H

 The author was a pioneer of web 2.0 but is now the most credible dissenting voice of the less appealing society that new technologies are likely to mould. Taking off from where his previous book, You Are Not A Gadget, left off this book is a political, technological manifesto for a better future. Due for publication on 7th March

9780224097574-large

If you like your writing to be imaginative, creative and thrilling then Anne Carson is for you. Her new book is a sequel to the verse-novel ‘An Autobiography of Red’ that was published in 1998. Quite a wait (although not as long a wait as a later entry in this list!) but I have no doubt that it will be worth it as the story of Geyron – “who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles” – carries on later in his life.

0224096893

This looks to be a beautiful book albeit with a salutary tale – this is taken from the author’s Bumblebee Conservation Trust  ’In the last 80 years our bumblebee populations have crashed. Two species have become nationally extinct and several others have declined dramatically’

0199922667

One for the bibliomaniacs to look forward to here – the story of a ring of thieves in 1920s America who stole thousands of rare books to order for secondhand book dealers

220px-Brian_O'Nolan

 From the brilliant Dalkey Archive Press comes an unexpected treat; a collection of shorts by Flann O’Brien, many included in book form for the first time as well as his last, unfinished, novel ‘Slattery’s Sago Saga’  I shall have a large glass of something full-bodied and round to hand in readiness for this

1444761161

Danny Torrance is back – 36 years after he survived The Shining. It is safe to say that this is the most anticipated novel of 2013. The quality of some of the writing of Stephen King is now, rightly, acknowledged as having literary merit above and beyond his extraordinary popularity. Due for publication on 24th September.

This is just a glimpse at some of the gems coming your way this year and, of course, we would love to hear what books are making you quiver in anticipation. Happy New Year!

1848547528Already the need to add to this list has arisen – and how! The concluding part of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s legendary 1930s walk as an eighteen year old from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople is being published in September. ‘A Time of Gifts’ and ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ are, rightly, revered as Travel Writing at its absolute best and although ‘The Broken Road’ is unfinished it is gleaned from an early draft he wrote and his diaries.

And then this 

There is no information other than this, but this information is enough to set many hearts afluttering…

Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed under: Beauty of Books, Book Reviews

December 17, 2012 • 4:05 pm 2

Blackwell’s Christmas Shopping Fundraiser Evening with Creation Theatre

We are thrilled to announce that we be holding a Christmas Shopping Fundraiser Evening, in aid of Creation Theatre, on Thursday 20th December from 6 till 9pm.

Along with Creation Theatre, we invite you to buy those last minute Christmas presents, at our late-night shopping extravaganza.  Not only will we be opening later on this night, we’ll also be providing the mince pies and wine for you to get into the Christmas spirit while you browse.

Following the wettest summer in 100 years, and a 50% drop in tourism to Oxford, Creation currently finds itself in great need of support to fund their future. Despite their best efforts, the bad weather has meant that unless they are able to raise £50,000 by the end of the year, they will be unable to proceed with plans for any more shows after their current Christmas show, ‘Aladdin and the Magical Lamp.’ It would be a great loss to the Oxford community if this happened, and so for this evening 20% of all book sales will go towards Creation Theatre.

They will also have a box-office set up on the night, so you can get your tickets to their current Christmas show, ‘Aladdin and the Magical Lamp’.

So join us on Thursday from 6pm, not only to get in some more Christmas shopping before the big day, but also to support one of Oxford’s most-loved institutions.

 Aladdin and the Magical Lamp

Thursday 6th December 2012 to Saturday 5th January 2013

The North Wall Arts Centre, Summertown Oxford

If you had three wishes, what would you wish for? This Christmas, Creation Theatre will whisk you away on a magic carpet ride with peasant boy Aladdin, Princess Badr-al-Budur, and a couple of mischievous, magical genies. Along the way you’ll encounter evil scorcerors, secret caves and an enchanted lamp, in this age-old tale of adventure that everyone can enjoy.

Tickets: £13.50 – £25. Box Office: 01865766266. Or book online at www.creationtheatre.co.uk.

 

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Creation Theatre, Uncategorized

December 14, 2012 • 1:50 pm 1

Something for the penultimate Christmas shopping weekend?

Eek! Time seems to have turned from a trot into a gallop. To give you a bit of help in seeing what appeals this Christmas here is a quick rundown of the books, DVDs, games & other things that we think will appeal to you. Included are some highlights from both our Music shop and our Art shop…

There’s still time to do your shopping but the tock is ticking. Loudly.

Filed under: Beauty of Books, Bestsellers, The Book Trade

December 7, 2012 • 4:57 pm 2

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century Bestiary

Guest blogger, Caspar Henderson, writes for Broad Conversation on his new book, ‘The Book of Barely Imagined Beings’. We will be holding an event with Caspar on Wednesday 12th December at 5pm. See below for more details.

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Luis Borges maps a good part of the terrain of myth and story that humans have ever dreamed up. Amongst his inspirations was the medieval European bestiary, or ‘book of beasts’, a genre that reached its full flowering in beautifully illuminated manuscripts, in the decades before the Black Death.

Bestiaries are full of allegory and symbol because, for the medieval mind, every natural creature was believed to embody a religious or moral lesson. Hume and Darwin discredited this way of looking at nature. Our new reality, however, is that as we humans increasingly shape the world through science, technology and our sheer numbers, such other living things as do thrive and evolve are increasingly becoming corollaries of what we love, value or neglect. In this sense, the world is becoming allegorical again.

Our times are more like the Middle Ages than we like to think. We still routinely mix rational thinking, mythology and spirituality, which can be good for us, with delusion and lies, which never are. We may have a vastly greater store of knowledge, and have made enormous strides in human health and political liberty, but it is far from clear that we are capable of using this knowledge wisely, as continuing blockages to rational action on climate change show.

Self-styled techno-optimists such as Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, suggest that we are as gods so we might as well get good at it. Agreed, industrial civilisation has given us awesome powers, but a better characterisation of how we handle those powers is made by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz in The Techno-Human Condition: We are as gods? No, for we have created the power but not the mind. We have got used to, even blasé about, the possibility of nuclear winter, in the way a two year old gets used to a loaded .357 magnum lying on the floor within easy reach.

A good starting point for a life well-lived is continual effort to enlarge the boundaries of one’s imagination and knowledge to all the dimensions and details of the real world. Henry Thoreau may have written that in wildness is the salvation of the world, but this environmental visionary and political radical was not a wooly thinker. It was Thoreau not the supposedly practical folk around him who refused to believe that Walden pond was bottomless and actually took the trouble to measure its depth with a plumb line. As Richard Feynman later said, our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

We know that the oceans, for example, contain creatures stranger than anything you will find in a medieval bestiary: beings as tall as men that have no internal organs and thrive in waters that would scald us to death in moments; others which are highly intelligent but able nevertheless to squeeze their bodies through spaces the width of their own eyeballs. We know that there is a vast world of cold darkness on this planet in which almost every creature glows with its own light. Some of the creatures you might find also appear in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a work inspired both by medieval bestiaries and the newest discoveries in science. I hope you can join us for the talk at Blackwell’s.

Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is published by Granta. @casparhenderson and barelyimaginedbeings.com

 Join us as Caspar will be discussing his book and signing copies on Wednesday 12th December at 5pm. This is a free event, all are welcome. We advise that you arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Guest Blogs

December 7, 2012 • 12:19 pm 1

Book Auction To Help Creation Theatre

The ‘Summer’ weather was the worst in living memory and coupled with the effect that the Olympics had on tourism outside of London was  bad news for our lovely friends at Creation Theatre. They fund their productions exclusively through their ticket sales so a 50% reduction in tourists visiting Oxford has hit them very hard.

We love Creation Theatre – not only are their productions innovative and great fun but they are, collectively, one of the most inspiring groups of people that we have ever worked with. Naturally we want to do what we can to help secure the future for such a culturally important organisation for Oxford.

You can help too by bidding in our book auction:

We have 5 specially signed and dedicated copies of Michael Palin’s ‘Brazil’  The dedication reads “Thank you for supporting Creation Theatre” and 5 signed copies of Philip Pullman’s ‘Grimm Tales’ that we are auctioning. All proceeds of the auction will go to Creation. Of course they would make delightful Christmas gifts but, more importantly, the money raised would help to ensure spectacles such as this are not lost to Oxford:

Faustus

Place your bid by emailing euan.hirst@blackwell.co.uk by Wednesday 19th December. Please spread the word along with the raffle that Creation are running, the great work that Barefoot Book and Whistling Cat Books are doing for the cause or by any of these other fundraising ideas. Of course helping to sell out every performance of Aladdin and the Magical Lamp will help too!

Thanks in advance for anything that you are able to do…

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Creation Theatre, , , , , ,

December 7, 2012 • 10:53 am 1

Friday Competition – Guess the Book

Morning all! I’m only after four book titles today from the following picture clues – the clues may be phonetic or literal… As ever answers to euan.hirst@blackwell.co.uk to have the chance of winning a modest prize. Good luck!

Answers revealed below – thanks for everyone who played, the winner as chosen by Alison out of the hat is Derek! Congratulations

 

Book 1

1     +      2

1.(Steve) Waugh + Peas (War & Peace)

 

Book 2

3    4   

 

2. Tom (Conti) Saw Year (Tom Sawyer)

 

Book 3

6  + 789

3. Pride + Pre Judge Ice (Pride & Prejudice)

 

Book 4

10 +11

4. Shots Miss (Marple) Cell NE (Schott’s Miscellany)

Filed under: Competitions, Guess the Book

December 7, 2012 • 10:30 am 6

Book of the Year for one of our booksellers

Ray has impeccable taste in contemporary fiction (he was the first of our booksellers to wax lyrical about New Finnish Grammar) and an unshakeable belief that the most worthwhile books are subversive. Here he shares with you the book that has rocked his world most this year:

This year there has been a veritable banquet of books that make reading more than worth it. If you don’t know what they are you haven’t been paying attention, but there is one particular book that has made it to these shores from the US I feel so evangelical about I want to run around screaming “YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK OR YOUR LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE”, in Billy Graham style.

A monumental debut, shining with a searing razor-edged intelligence, ‘ A Naked Singularity ‘ by Sergio de la Pava fizzes like a roman candle.

naked singularity

Casi, the main character of this book, is a New York public defender of Columbian descent, who describes his day-to-day existence and the people he is involved with, including clients, colleagues, family and flatmates. With an astonishing immediacy, de la Palma throws you into the murky waters of the US legal system at street level. It’s almost a soap opera for the thinker… but there’s a twist.

This being a big book, in every sense of the word, the author takes you into the grit of life in a way that is enthralling, engaging and compelling. He sparks up philosophical, scientific, social, cultural and political discourse until halfway through an almost 700 page book when it changes gear and becomes something more. This impacts on the adrenaline, heightening the novel to a level that carries you through to the end like a surfer riding the perfect wave.

Quite simply, it’s one of those books you want everybody to read and to tell everybody else to read. Or maybe…. just keep it to yourself?

This is not just the best book of 2012, it is an important book, a book which tackles brilliantly not just the moral dilemmas and ideas thrown up, but how we read what we read. I cannot find superlatives big enough to celebrate this novel. I just wanted to punch the air in victory at this guy’s achievment when I finished it.

An endnote… This powerful opus had to be self-published for almost 4 years as no publisher would pick it up. I suspect they cowered at their inability to define the genre it belongs to. More fool them, but all power to the University of Chicago Press for their insight. It would have been an act of almost criminal injustice to let this novel sink into obscurity. It’s just way too good for that, trust me.

Ray

Filed under: Book Reviews, The Bookshop, , ,

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