Book Club #7: April
but if a look should april me
-but if a look should april me,
some thousand million hundred more
bright worlds than merely by doubting have
darkly themselves unmade makes love- e.e. cummings
April is the cruellest month, especially if you’re a poetry student who’s just had your discipline forcibly redefined by Taylor Swift, but it’s also National Poetry Month AND World Book Day today! Wasn’t it World Book Day last month, you ask? that was UK World Book Day, but others choose to celebrate on April 23, which is the day on which William Shakespeare was probably born/died and also the day Miguel de Cervantes was buried, which the Spanish celebrate as Día del Libro. Anyway, no harm in having Second World Book Day. Think of it as having Second Breakfast.
What's up
Harvard will remove binding made of human skin from 1800s book
Small Press Distribution shutters, leaving hundreds of small presses in the lurch
PEN America cancels award ceremony after backlash over Gaza response
What's on
Murder by the Book, an Agatha Christie exhibition (Cambridge University Library, till Aug 24)
Stratford Literary Festival (Stratford-upon-Avon, May 1 to 5)
Hay Festival (Hay-on-Wye, May 23 to June 2)
Dialogues Across Diaspora with Elaine Chiew, Wiz Wharton and Melissa Fu (Camden Chinese Community Centre, May 23)
What's out
Salman Rushdie blazes back onto the literary scene with Knife, the memoir about his horrific stabbing onstage in 2022.
In Booker-shortlisted Sanjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, a union leadership election gets mixed up with a love story.
On the fantasy front, Leigh Bardugo heads to Renaissance Spain with the darkly magical The Familiar; Sylvie Cathrall’s debut, A Letter to the Luminous Deep, is an epistolary romance set under the sea (I have read this and it is delightful! like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, but underwater).
Released in a fortnight is The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which I’m already calling as one of my top books of 2024: the British government experiment with time travel by plucking historical figures out of their timelines, among them 19th-century Arctic explorer Graham Gore, who is monitored by the narrator, a British-Cambodian civil servant. It’s a time travel thriller, a dark workplace comedy, a love story and so much more - I adore it!
Next up...
The book club will be reading Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian for our next meeting on May 8, 8.10pm, in Freddie’s. (Content warning for explicit sex scenes and issues of consent.)
Do get in touch if you would like to suggest a short story for the book club.
Happy reading,
Olivia
(I'm on Instagram with more book reviews - @ohomatopoeia)