The Reader Online

The Anthony Walker Foundation Festival 2009 is taking place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th August 2009, at Greenbank Sports Academy, Greenbank Lane and Sefton Park, from 9am till 6pm.

It is a free two day festival of sport, music, art and education which works to encourage racial harmony and better community relations. There will be workshops promoting social and life skills, football tournaments, art workshops, music and dance performances, plus much more!

For more information on the Festival, please visit the Anthony Walker Foundation Website, where you can also view the Festival brochure.

If you would like tickets for the AWF Carnival at Alma De Cuba, please email: info@anthonywalkerfoundation.com

All three sections of Mary Weston’s short novel The Junction, as published in The Reader 31, 32 and 33, are now available to download – for free! – from The Reader Organisation website.

The Junction tells the story of Captain Peter Scott, paralysed and dying of a nervous disorder, just as the First World War is coming to an end. After losing consciousness in the Mawdsley Hospital Peter wakes to find himself in a mysterious village called The Junction, where he encounters intense recollections from his past. Curiously, the inhabitants of The Junction seem to have been expecting him…

In Mary’s own words:

The thought behind this story came to me when I was in the Wallasey tunnel, on my way to one of my Get into Reading groups, in the summer of 2005. I don’t know where it came from, or what to call it – an intuition, delusion, realisation or fantasy.

The idea was that if there was an afterlife, most of the stuff that I think of as me wouldn’t get there. Even the most spiritual-seeming parts of myself are rooted in the psycho-physical being that’s going to end when I die. If there’s anything more to me…would I even know what it was?

The good thing about writing fiction is that it means you don’t have to translate ideas like that into a world view or religious belief – you can just make a story around it. Originally The Junction was a 70,000 word long novel. In 2007, Phil Davis asked me to turn it into a three to five episode serial. At first I thought I would be able to do it by condensing and cutting. It was his advice to stop the first episode where it stops now that made me understand the whole shape of the story was going to have to change – this taught me more about plot than anything else I’d ever heard or read.

 

Download The Junction here

Did you know that you can download previous issues of The Reader magazine from our website?

Did you also know that it’s completely free to do so?

Issue 33 is now available to download

This means that you can now access the past four issues of The Reader– that’s a whole year’s worth, for free! Just follow the link above, and enjoy all The Reader has to offer.

Trafford Council is currently hosting a four-week celebration of literature, Trafford Wordfest, which began last Monday. All events are literature-related, and range from informative sessions on how to get your work noticed by publishers, to interactive poetry performance workshops, and a Chicken Licken puppet show for 3-6 year olds!

Events are being held at Sale Waterside Arts Centre and surrounding libraries, as well as many other venues across the borough. Although many events are free, booking is essential.

You can find specific details of events, plus information on how to get tickets, by following this link to the festival homepage.

If you’re the kind of person who dithers over what to read next features like Amazon’s recommendations and ‘People who bought this also bought …’ have a lot going for them. The only problem with it is that if you buy something for someone else (say, a present for a baby) you end up getting pestered to buy similar items in perpetuity. Enter What Should I Read Next?, a book (and music and movie) recommendation service that tailors itself to your reading preferences.

All you have to do is enter the title and/or the author of a book you’ve just read and enjoyed and the database makes suggestions based on other users’ reading lists. You can use it without registering (entering Catch-22 came up with Bernard Malamud’s The Natural among several other things) but the real benefit comes when you register and build a reading list of your own. That way the database can develop according to your tastes.

Here’s the link again.

Posted by Chris Routledge

The Reader in association with BBC Radio 3 is running two “Book at Breakfast” events on 10th and 11th November as part of the 2007 Free Thinking Festival. We are offering the chance to attend these invitation-only events. Just complete the contact form below, including a postal address and we will send you a copy of the extract under discussion, directions to the venue, and your free invitation.

1st Book at Breakfast: [Please note that this event is now fully booked]

Saturday 10th November 10.00am – 11.30am
at BBC Radio Merseyside on Hanover Street, Liverpool.
Adam Phillips in conversation with Philip Davis

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of eleven previous books, including Side Effects and Houdini’s Box. He writes regularly for The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The Observer, and is General Editor of The Penguin Freud Reader (Penguin Modern Classics Translated Texts).

2nd Book at Breakfast:

Sunday 11th November 10.00am – 11.30am
at BBC Radio Merseyside on Hanover Street, Liverpool.
Rose Tremain in conversation with Jane Davis

Rose Tremain was named by Granta as one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 1983, and was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1988 and in 2000. She reviews and broadcasts regularly for press and radio and lives in Norfolk and London. Her novel, The Colour (2003), set in New Zealand at the time of the West Coast gold rush in the 1860s, was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest books are a collection of short stories, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (2005) and the novel, The Road Home (2007). She was awarded a CBE in 2007.

BBC Radio 3 will record the event for broadcast but you will not be asked to speak directly to a microphone unless you are willing do so. Places are limited.

When filling in the form below please state how many invitations you need and which of the two events (Saturday or Sunday) you wish to attend. Tickets now available for Sunday only.

Back in July we highlighted Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan as one of our ‘recommended reads‘ (To read the recommendation click here) Publishers Bloomsbury have been good enough to offer us three copies of the book to give away free to the first three people to take out a year’s subscription to The Reader magazine. Simply click here to register for a one year subscription and if you are one of the first three people to subscribe, not only will you receive four issues of the new look Reader magazine, packed with recommendations, reviews, poetry and fiction, you will also get a lovely copy of Poppy Shakespeare sent straight to your door. Thank you Bloomsbury!

Read more of our Recommended Reads here.

Today marks the 800th anniversary of Liverpool’s town charter and publisher Capsica is celebrating the event by giving away the entire 5,000-copy print run of Longing, the third in its Mersey Minis series. Mersey Minis contain writing about Liverpool and the River Mersey from the past 800 years. The final two volumes, Loving and Leaving, will be launched in September and November respectively. Names already featured in the series include Charles Dickens, John Lennon, Will Self, King John, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Courtney Love, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Tracey Emin.

Copies of Longing, which includes new writing about Liverpool by over 80 authors, will be handed out at over 50 different venues across Merseyside on August 28th and The Reader is helping to give away copies of the book. Everyone who emails us on Tuesday 28th August will get a free copy of Longing. Just send an email including your postal address to us using the contact form in the menu above. All new subscribers to The Reader magazine will also get a free copy of Longing until all our copies are gone. Deborah Mulhearn, editor and compiler of Longing is featured in The Reader Number 28, which will be published at Christmas 2007.

More information about Mersey Minis is available here. You can subscribe to The Reader here.