Heron Books

A box arrived on Tuesday. This is not unusual; it happens two or three times a day. On opening the box, a heavenly scent emerged. This is not unusual; the number of people who comment on the aroma of new books has led us to discuss developing a perfume. The box was full of coral pink copies of An Opinionated Guide to Bristol from the tasteful Hoxton Mini Press. This is new. ‘I wonder if we feature in this,’ I joked to Harry, flicking through the luxurious pages. Well, it turns out we do. Heron Books is in a book. Surrounded by great company too. (The Garden of Easton, Swoon, Temple Cycles,…

I offer a short newsletter this weekend with two imperatives: You may do these in varying orders. You could read Berger, then come to poetry. You could come to poetry, then read Berger. You could make an inverted Berger burger, if you like: Berger-poetry-Berger. Poetry is tonight at 5pm and we are hearing from three Bristol poets. (I am calling them that even if one has a distinctly American accent and says “moss” with a minimum of two syllables.) Lisa Lopresti and Maisie Franklin are writers whose tone and insight I always admire and find moving. I am so looking forward to the chance to hear more from them. Tony D’Arpino’s…

Last week, I had Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady, on the brain. This week, it’s short fiction. Not that the contrast is as stark as that would suggest: Brennan’s columns in The New Yorker were concise where most New Yorker articles make The Domesday Book look like a raffle ticket.* The real contrast has been in moving from the observation of diners in New York to depictions of picnics and cricket in the English countryside. For I found myself indulging in The Rabbits, a collection of sketches by A. A. Milne, originally published in Punch, of an utterly silly group of friends. The narrator, instigator of ill-planned sailing trips and…

Magnolias line my route to Clifton each morning – both that really deep purple-pink kind which looks like velvet and the paler sort with delicate, watercolour veins. Evidence of spring and yet parts of Bristol were beset by snow yesterday morning and it has been generally too wet and cold to venture out more than for necessary book purposes. I have thus spent the last few days in the company of Maeve Brennan. Her essays, published in The New Yorker under the byline “The Long-Winded Lady”, offer wry insights into what she observes and overhears in restaurants, on the streets and from the windows of the various hotel rooms she called home in…

In the midst of awards season for many different media, it can be hard to keep up. The PEN Translates list, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Nero Book Awards, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Yoto Carnegies, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the Bread & Roses Award for left-wing non-fiction, the Klaus Flugge Prize for picture books, the Bread & Circuses Award for satire, the Catch-22 Award which none of the longlistees can win… OK, a couple of those are made up but you get the idea: there is a lot to celebrate. That the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has announced its longlist is…

With the publication of Wrong Norma by Anne Carson, I’ve been thinking a lot about book blurbs. Not keen on such things, Carson has supplied the following quotation for the cover: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert… The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.” I hear a rather sardonic tone as Carson replies to her publisher’s request that she permit them to write the copy. A collection of writings about different things… No fooling. Blurbs are sometimes generic and tell one little more than to expect a coming-of-age story or a gory police procedural for example. Sometimes they forego detail and offer…

I’ll be up front with you. I’m going to mention the Feast of Saint Valentine in this newsletter. Some of you will immediately begin muttering about such brazen commercialism. Some of you will roll your eyes, go for a coffee with a friend and discuss all the issues with people assuming romantic love must be everyone’s aim. Some of you will glance at your partner nervously and make a note that you ought to slip out to pick up something, after last year’s claim that they ‘didn’t want anything’ turned out to be more complex than it seemed. Some of you have already sorted the roses, the chocolates, the theatre…

The start of each month in 2024 holds great promise thanks to the excellent idea from fellow heron, Harry, that we should (re-)read Seamus Heaney’s twelve poetry collections in order of publication, one per month. And so, as January faded, I dug myself out of Death of a Naturalist and into the furrows of Door into the Dark. It feels quite the right thing to read early on a blustery morning, looking for light in the grey. The Nero Book Awards have this week announced the winners of their four categories: fiction, debut fiction, non-fiction and children’s fiction with an overall winner to be named on 14th March. I can’t…

Radio 4 this week have been playing a gorgeous selection of stories from Scenes From A Childhood by Jon Fosse, read by John Mackay. I had not read the book before discovering the adaptation and thus when I did turn to the physical object I found that I read it with Mackay’s voice in my head, which lent itself perfectly to the minimalist tone of the writing. Some of the stories are only a few lines but contain a full and wide-reaching narrative. All of them together build to so much more than the sum of their parts. Yet I thought I must share one of these parts with you:…

In these rather chilly January days (it’s a two hot chocolates per afternoon kind of a temperature) I have enjoyed escaping to other realms in film, theatre and books. I won’t detail my foray into film too deeply: The Boy and the Heron has beautiful music and sparing, careful dialogue but I was somewhat troubled by the heron… If you’ve seen it, you’ll know why. Not quite the elegant creature one thinks of when standing on one leg. A highlight was Lemn Sissay’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis at Bristol Old Vic. The experience was especially resonant having read My Name Is Why, Sissay’s account of the abusive childcare system he…