I grew up reading Enid Blyton, wondering what was ginger beer and desperately wanting some for my own “secret island” and other adventures. So it’s unsurprising that I understood the value Proust placed on the taste of a madeleine, decades before I tasted one myself, decades before I read
Seeing that some of my reading habits had shifted unexpectedly at the end of last year, I scribbled a note to peek mid-way this year, just to see how my ideas about my reading compared to my actual reading. The short version of my plans included reading from my
On the 18th of August, 1903, Dorothy Edwards was born in the mining community of Ogmore Vale in southern Wales, to Edward and Vida, who met when he was a headmaster and she a teacher in the Tynewydd Infants and Juniors Mixed School. Dorothy’s fiction is an ironic choice
For ReadIndies this year, hosted by Kaggsy, I’ve written about presses from Minneapolis Minnesota, during the democratic crisis unfolding in the United States: Graywolf Press | Coffee House Press | Rain Taxi Magazine. (I should have included Milkweed Editions there!) Presses that push the boundaries and invite readers to
Perhaps independent presses are most vital in their willingness to confront, to engage with ideas and possibilities that make readers uncomfortable. Consider Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s book about reading James Baldwin and William Styron, which opens with this epigraph from Raoul Peck’s J’étouffe: “Forgive me in advance,
