It's November - we hope everyone had a good October. We're not too impressed with the clocks changing and it being dark by 5pm, but fortunately we've got some great events, and great books, coming up to lessen the misery:
You may have heard about the word-of-mouth sensation that is David Eagleman's
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. He's flying over to the UK for two very special events - the first being a discussion panel with former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway. They will be discussing
Sum and Eagleman's fantastic imaginings of lives after death and there will be a special broadcast of readings by writers, actors, musicians including Nick Cave, Stephen Fry, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno and
The Wire's Clarke Peters. It's on 11 November at the
Traverse Theatre (7pm).
The Sum event in London is already sold out, but we can tell you that it will be similar, except that Eagleman will be talking to Philip Pullman and there will also be a few live readings. Everyone who's read Sum has loved it, and this little book is getting the attention it really deserves.
The next event we're terribly excited about is our somewhat-quarterly club night, Irregular. We're going to be at Edinburgh's The Voodoo Rooms once again, and this time we've got the Forward Prizewinning Don Paterson, new talent Chris Killen and more. There will be readings, live music, DJs and (according to Irregular organiser Francis) tequila - lots of tequila. We hope to see you there.
But we're publishers, so what are we publishing this month?
We were thrilled to land the rights for Oliver Postgate's memoir, Seeing Things. His name may not be too familiar but his creations Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog and The Clangers are well-known and -loved. The book looks great and we're so excited about publishing it, especially with the BFI and BBC doing big retrospectives of Postgate's work in December.
And we're sad to report that the Paris Review Interviews vol. 4 will be the last collection for the foreseeable future - but the series is definitely going out on a high. In this volume there are interviews with William Styron, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, E.B. White, P.G. Wodehouse, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman and Marilynne Robinson.
We hope you have a good November, and we'll be back in December to tell you a little more about the Canongate titles we're recommending for Christmas.