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We're celebrating 50 brilliant UK independent bookshops. If your favourite is missing, please add it to the list below...
In Neil Gaiman’s preface to Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores, he describes four bookshops from his childhood. One was a travelling school shop, one a local store staffed by a helpful hippy where he’d pick up 25p Tom Disch novels, another was a bus ride away and owned by a Grinch who’d glower at schoolchildren customers, and the last was a now-defunct Soho sci-fi and fantasy treasure trove. Four individual shops run by booksellers with distinct personalities and idiosyncratic tastes. All of which made Gaiman what he is.
That’s the joy of independent bookshops. Their personalities shape those of the people who visit them. They’re not homogenous. Their stock tends to reflect their passions rather than the year's best-performing unit-shifters. And their...
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We're celebrating 50 brilliant UK independent bookshops. If your favourite is missing, please add it to the list below...
In Neil Gaiman’s preface to Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores, he describes four bookshops from his childhood. One was a travelling school shop, one a local store staffed by a helpful hippy where he’d pick up 25p Tom Disch novels, another was a bus ride away and owned by a Grinch who’d glower at schoolchildren customers, and the last was a now-defunct Soho sci-fi and fantasy treasure trove. Four individual shops run by booksellers with distinct personalities and idiosyncratic tastes. All of which made Gaiman what he is.
That’s the joy of independent bookshops. Their personalities shape those of the people who visit them. They’re not homogenous. Their stock tends to reflect their passions rather than the year's best-performing unit-shifters. And their...
- 6/10/2016
- Den of Geek
Artist and musician named guest director for 50th edition.
The UK’s Brighton Festival has named artist and musician Laurie Anderson as guest director for its 50th edition, set to run May 7-29.
Known for her use of technology in music - from her 1981 hit O Superman to her appointment as Nasa’s first artist-in-residence - the Us artist most recently garnered acclaim for her first feature film in almost 30 years - Heart of a Dog - which reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother and her beloved dog.
Anderson, who previously attended Brighton Festival in 2011 and 2015, said: “I’m so happy to be serving as Guest Director of Brighton Festival in its historic 50th year. Our theme of home and place is especially relevant with so many people in the world on the move now looking, like all of us, for a place we can belong.
“I’ve been...
The UK’s Brighton Festival has named artist and musician Laurie Anderson as guest director for its 50th edition, set to run May 7-29.
Known for her use of technology in music - from her 1981 hit O Superman to her appointment as Nasa’s first artist-in-residence - the Us artist most recently garnered acclaim for her first feature film in almost 30 years - Heart of a Dog - which reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother and her beloved dog.
Anderson, who previously attended Brighton Festival in 2011 and 2015, said: “I’m so happy to be serving as Guest Director of Brighton Festival in its historic 50th year. Our theme of home and place is especially relevant with so many people in the world on the move now looking, like all of us, for a place we can belong.
“I’ve been...
- 1/7/2016
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
The diva of Dynasty is now a dame. Joan Collins, who played scheming, shoulder pad-wearing Alexis Carrington in the hit 1980s TV show, was made the female equivalent of a knight in Queen Elizabeth II's annual New Year's honors list. The star of potboilers including The Stud and The Bitch was recognized for her services to charity. Collins, 81, is a longtime supporter of nonprofit groups helping children. London-born Collins said Tuesday it was "humbling to receive this level of recognition from my queen and country, and I am thrilled and truly grateful." Actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who is due...
- 12/31/2014
- by Associated Press
- PEOPLE.com
The diva of Dynasty is now a dame. Joan Collins, who played scheming, shoulder pad-wearing Alexis Carrington in the hit 1980s TV show, was made the female equivalent of a knight in Queen Elizabeth II's annual New Year's honors list. The star of potboilers including The Stud and The Bitch was recognized for her services to charity. Collins, 81, is a longtime supporter of nonprofit groups helping children. London-born Collins said Tuesday it was "humbling to receive this level of recognition from my queen and country, and I am thrilled and truly grateful." Actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who is due...
- 12/31/2014
- by Associated Press
- PEOPLE.com
For the first time since it was established in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is open to authors from outside the British Commonwealth. And it shows, with only one author on the list of 13 coming from a Commonwealth nation. (That would be Australia's Richard Flanagan.) Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in April, was nowhere to be found. Joshua Ferris, U.S.To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Siri Hustvedt, U.S.The Blazing World Richard Powers, U.S. Orfeo Karen Joy Fowler, U.S.We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Richard Flanagan, AustraliaThe Narrow Road to the Deep North Howard Jacobson, Great BritainJ Neel Mukherjee, Great BritainThe Lives of Others Paul Kingsnorth, Great BritainThe Wake David Mitchell, Great Britain The Bone Clocks David Nicholls, Great BritainUs Ali Smith, Great BritainHow to Be Both Joseph O'Neill, Ireland (but lives in the U.S.)The Dog Niall Williams,...
- 7/23/2014
- by Gilbert Cruz
- Vulture
Hadrian's wall, Culloden, the poll tax, Jacob Rees-Mogg: yes, England has inflicted an awful lot of angst and pain on Scotland down the centuries – but, look, we still don't want you to leave
1 Sorry for calling every last one of you "Jock". We now know it's offensive, especially if you're a woman.
2 So sorry for the years of heartless Conservative governments that you never voted for that ripped the heart out of the Scottish mining, steel and shipbuilding industries, butchered public services and imposed an unwonted, dismal neo-liberal ethos on a land to which such a callous political and economic philosophy was inimical.
3 And for making you guinea pigs for Margaret Thatcher's disastrous poll tax, inflicting it on you a year before England and Wales, and then – somehow! – forgetting to backdate the rebate for the tax when it was abolished in the early 90s.
4 Sorry for the 1746 Dress Act that banned tartan,...
1 Sorry for calling every last one of you "Jock". We now know it's offensive, especially if you're a woman.
2 So sorry for the years of heartless Conservative governments that you never voted for that ripped the heart out of the Scottish mining, steel and shipbuilding industries, butchered public services and imposed an unwonted, dismal neo-liberal ethos on a land to which such a callous political and economic philosophy was inimical.
3 And for making you guinea pigs for Margaret Thatcher's disastrous poll tax, inflicting it on you a year before England and Wales, and then – somehow! – forgetting to backdate the rebate for the tax when it was abolished in the early 90s.
4 Sorry for the 1746 Dress Act that banned tartan,...
- 2/20/2014
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
- 11/24/2013
- by Ali Smith, Robert McCrum, Tim Adams, Kate Kellaway, Rachel Cooke, Sebastian Faulks, Jackie Kay
- The Guardian - Film News
Mark Lawson kicks off our 2012 arts special by looking at how the Olympic Games will highlight the cracks in our culture
A theatre director recently told me that he would not be applying for the currently vacant job of artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, because he wasn't sure what any of the three words in the organisation's name mean any more: monarchy, Elizabethan authorship and permanent acting troupes are all concepts currently in flux. In the same way, anyone seeking to promote "British culture" – a key marketing concept in the year of the 2012 London Olympics – faces the problem that the definition of the United Kingdom is contracting while the definition of culture is expanding.
Many things that would seem to qualify for a notional British pavilion in an entertainment fair soon require to be subject to qualification. The X Factor is definitely British – but is it culture? My Week with Marilyn,...
A theatre director recently told me that he would not be applying for the currently vacant job of artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, because he wasn't sure what any of the three words in the organisation's name mean any more: monarchy, Elizabethan authorship and permanent acting troupes are all concepts currently in flux. In the same way, anyone seeking to promote "British culture" – a key marketing concept in the year of the 2012 London Olympics – faces the problem that the definition of the United Kingdom is contracting while the definition of culture is expanding.
Many things that would seem to qualify for a notional British pavilion in an entertainment fair soon require to be subject to qualification. The X Factor is definitely British – but is it culture? My Week with Marilyn,...
- 12/30/2011
- by Mark Lawson
- The Guardian - Film News
Miles, a man nobody knows well, goes to a dinner party and locks himself in the hosts’ guest room for months, and nobody knows what to do. There But For The’s premise is slight, even silly, but in Ali Smith’s masterful hands, it rapidly gains momentum, turning a simple tale into something ambitious but grounded. The story is structured in four acts, each corresponding to a word from the novel’s title. Each also uses a different point-of-view character, a person who knows Miles, but not well. The first and most affecting story comes from Anna, a woman ...
- 9/21/2011
- avclub.com
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