the city-lit cafe

From Berlin and Jerusalem to New York and Beijing: The Spirit of Cities - Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age

We don’t often read academic works and Daniel A Bell and Avner de-Shalit say they don’t normally write left-field (academia-wise) books like The Spirit of the Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age. It meant we were going to be a perfect match with our respective passions for global cities.

The authors argue that contemporary thinkers haven’t given cities their due. States and nationalism, yes, but oddly not the urban centres where most of us live, which are the greenest and most sustainable places to live, have a disproportionate influence on all our lives and are just, well, so huge. An independent London, as we all know, would be the fifteenth largest economy in the world. With other global cities it offers an exciting alternative to globalization (immigration as the lifeblood of economic, social and cultural progress of course excluded). As states become more uniform and the free market diminishes the role of particular cultures and values, creating a single culture of consumerism, cities are the last bastion of pluralism and diversity of cultural ideas and alternatives.

So the authors set out to discover the ethoses of different cities they were familiar with and, in the process, find a defining theme in each. From Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism) and Beijing (political power) to Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance) and New York (ambition), the themes are perhaps unsurprising but the mixture of personal and political detail is fascinating.

Avner de-Shalit’s Jerusalem – he teaches at the city’s Hebrew University– brings out movingly the religious conflicts down the ages but also the faith that makes it a strange beacon in the modern world. Montreal as trodden by Daniel A Bell is seen as a city that has eventually found a way ahead from its linguistic divide – and has founded a new kind of tolerance. Berlin his created an oasis of uber-liberal diversity and alternative living by refusing to hide its nightmare past while New York is just New York in all its teeming Big Appleness (and is the chapter which most successfully uses the wealth of literary writing about the city to evoke its ethos). Singapore didn’t convince as an interesting city but the reader was left with many insights into both its successes and failures as a global city. Beijing and Hong Kong were seen as representing two sides of modern China in terms of power politics and family-oriented capitalism.  Paris somehow seemed more clichéd than the other cities but perhaps Paris has become too much its own stereotype, while Oxford came across as rather smug and annoying and liking to keep its poor well-ghettoised.

The authors apologise for their ‘impressionistic’ flaneur ways of recording their experiences but there are rich and suggestive ideas in plenty. For this city lover their book was a passionate, profound and inspiring journey to the heart of the contemporary urban experience. In the future expect to hear less about national patriotism and more about urban pride – ‘civicism’ as the authors suggest is so the most civilised way ahead.

 

Now you can buy city-lit PARIS p&p free in the US and Canada at www.bookdepository.com

Great news for our US and Canadian customers - all city-pick titles are available on www.bookdepository.com But that's not all: there are also some nice discounts and everything is post and packing free. What's not to like!

Happy Maslenitsa! *A Russian Bookshop opening in London next week!

Viv Groskop reports on a specialist Russian bookshop that has opened within the flagship Waterstones store

Tolstoy: Soon to be found in the original Russian at Waterstones Piccadilly. 

By Viv Groskop

5:25PM GMT 24 Feb 2012

Comment

It’s what all good art is supposed to do. But Russian literature does it spectacularly well. It gives us something we didn’t know we wanted. Now a lavish new bookshop in central London will try to do the same. The twist? Most of the 5,000 titles are actually in, um, Russian.

This space at Waterstones’ flagship Piccadilly store is an interesting move, eccentrically optimistic in the climate of falling print sales. With independent bookshops in decline for the third year running – and more than 70 closing in the UK last year – surely The Russian Book Shop at Waterstones, a 1,200 sq ft boutique devoted to the heirs of Pushkin in the original Cyrillic, is the last thing we need?

Waterstones’ new owner, Alexander Mamut, disagrees. He is the man behind A&NN Group, the fund that bought Waterstones’ 314 stores last year for £53 million. A former adviser to Boris Yeltsin, he is a friend of the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and media mogul Evgeny Lebedev. The target clientele? London’s growing population of expat Russians (an estimated 100,000 and rising), who feel so at home here that they joke of living in “Moscow-on-Thames”.

Ahead of Russia’s presidential elections on March 4, there is a new impetus for a cultural renaissance as many popular Russian novelists join the anti-Putin bandwagon. The bestselling author of detective novels Boris Akunin has become a significant figure in the opposition and is a founding member of the League of Voters, public figures promoting public participation in politics.

Many in Moscow argue that if Russia is to stand any chance as an emerging democracy, it needs to reassert itself as the cultural force it was in Tolstoy’s day.

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The Russian language books on sale are sourced direct from Russia with assistance from both Boris Kupriyanov, the owner of Moscow’s Falanster and Tciolovskiy bookshops, and Academia Rossica, the Russian culture and arts foundation based in London.

Not quite ready for War and Peace in the original? The Russian Book Shop will also stock a large selection of books in translation. Thirty-seven titles are longlisted for the 2012 Rossica Prize for best translated work from Russian, awarded in May, with new translations of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov by Roger Clarke, Tolstoy’s A Confession by ADP Briggs, Bely’s Petersburg by John Elsworth and, one of my favourites, Bulgakov’s science-fiction story The Fatal Eggs, translated by Michael Karpelson.

The list also includes two new titles by Vasily Grossman (Everything Flows and The Road, both translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova), whose long-overlooked masterpiece Life and Fate was recently treated to a lavish BBC Radio 4 adaptation featuring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant.

Others worth seeking out in translation include Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Sergei Kostin, Victor Pelevin, Dmitry Bykov or the mega-selling “king of the vampires” Sergei Lukyanenko. This year’s American book jamboree in New York in April will feature the largest representation of Russian literature in the US with 40 authors heading over.

The Russian Book Shop at Waterstones will launch at a glitzy, invite-only champagne reception on Thursday – 200 guests will receive a limited-edition print inspired by the poetry of Pushkin. The party will be catered by Russia’s Mari Vanna, a restaurant brand with international aspirations. The New Yorker has called the Mari Vanna experience “a fairy tale”. Let’s hope the magic rubs off.

* The Russian bookshop at Waterstones will be open to the public from March 3

* Maslenitsa is the Russian Sun Festival celebrating the end of winter and the start of spring.

city-pick St Petersburg (£9.99, paperback) is published by Oxygen Books on October 25 2012

Four global cities. Four teams of writers. One 24-hour book for World Book Day

On Wednesday 29 February 2012 London's Spread the Word is bringing together four teams of writers and editors in London, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur and Vancouver, to create a unique novel. The project is an experiment in collaborative writing, using digital technology. The book, which will be written by multiple authors, operating in different time zones and countries, will be launched at noon on World Book Day, Thursday 1 March 2012.

How to get involved

Facebook: ‘like’ our page: www.facebook.com/pages/24hourbook, post your inspirational ideas before the day, and pop in on the 29th to see how things are going, respond to our writing challenges, and support our writers across the globe.


Twitter: Follow us @STWevents using the hashtag #24hourbook. We’ll be asking questions throughout the day and we’d love you to tweet us your answers.



Our London Writing Team
Shamim Azad was born in Bangladesh and moved to the UK in 1990.  Since 2004, she has worked in London as a poet and storyteller and a heritage animator in the UK creative industry. She has written plays and published novels, collections of short stories, poems and essays. www.myspace.com/shamimazad



Yemisi Blake writes poetry and short stories. He has been commissioned to create new work by Southbank Centre, The Wellcome Trust and Oxford University. He had been published in Spread the Word's Flight: Anthology of New Writing and in 2011 was one of 66 writers commissioned by The Bush Theatre to create a contemporary response to the King James Bible.



Sarah Butler is fascinated by the relationship between writing and place. She has been writer in residence for the Central Line, on the Greenwich Peninsula and at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Her debut novel will be published by Picador in Spring 2013.



Robert Collins is the author of the thriller Soul Corporation (Arrow) and is currently writing his second novel, set in London and Brazil. His journalism has appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and the Financial Times. He is the Assistant Literary Editor of The Sunday Times. www.soulcorporation.com



Cath Drake is an Aussie lured to literary delights of London who has been published in anthologies and magazines in UK, Australia and US. She has performed her work in cafes, bookshops, theatres, festivals, at Southbank, Tate Modern, and for unsuspecting passers by. She's also a non-fiction writer and award-winning journalist. cathdrake.wordpress.com

Romesh Gunesekera’s Booker short-listed Reef  and his other Granta books were reissued in September 2011. His new novel The Prisoner of Paradise is published this month by Bloomsbury. He writes without ink. More at www.romeshgunesekera.co.uk



Shaun Levin is the author of five books, the most recent of which are Snapshots of The Boy and Trees at a Sanatorium. He teaches creative writing on The Complete Creative Writing Course and makes chocolates and marshmallows in his spare time (or when he should be writing).

Aoife Mannix is an Irish writer and poet based in the UK.  She is the author of four collections of poetry and a novel.  She regularly features on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live and has been poet in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  www.aoifemannix.com



Femi Martin is a flash fiction writer and performer. Her ongoing collection, 'This Didn’t Happen', is comprised of more than 150 tiny tales. Femi has been a featured performer at numerous events including Literary Death Match,  UpRise Festival, Theatre Local (Royal Court Theatre), and the Southbank Centre. She is currently Spread the Word's Young Writer in Residence at the Charles Dickens Museum. www.femimartin.com



Chris Meade is Director of if:book UK. He writes, gives talks around the world, co-ordinates the if:book cafe writers, a group collaborating to make and sell new digital forms of literature, and is working on his own fiction project, The Nearlyography.  www.futureofthebook.org



Ben Payne is a writer, director and dramaturg with a background in theatre writing and production.  He is Co-Director and Co-Founder of Ministry of Stories, a writing centre for young people aged 8-18 in East London. www.ministryofstories.org

Saradha Soobrayen is the reviews editor for Modern Poetry in Translation. She was born in London where she works as a poetry editor, mentor and coach providing professional development for emerging and established writers and artists. She is widely published in anthologies. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2004.

Simon Cole's alternative Olympic tour takes in Hackney's art, history and fashions

As the Olympics loom, Alexandra Topping takes a tour within sight and sound of the London 2012 site

Interactive: an alternative tour around the site

guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 February 2012 16.27 GMT

Article history

An alternative tour of the Olympics area takes in filter beds and football pitches, street art and the former Matchbox factory, as well as the swoop of the Aquatic Centre and the unromantic bulk of the media hub. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

The Olympic Stadium gleamed in the winter sunshine: imposing, elegant and, best of all, complete. But from the vantage point of the Greenway path, all around the signs of construction rumbled on.

Damien Erni, visiting the Olympic site with his family from Switzerland, looked impressed, if slightly concerned. "It's quite amazing how they are constructing all these buildings which will be used for different things afterwards," he said. "But we did kind of wonder ... is it going to be finished on time?"

Despite the lorries, high wire fences and men in hard hats, visits to the Olympic site are booming. Jo Hoad, chair of the Blue Badge 2012 tours, said: "People from all over the world are genuinely interested in the chance to see and hear about the Olympic Park for 2012. Over 34,000 of the public have been on the walking tours since April 2010 – the majority of these are proud Brits."

On a weekday trip, the viewing area is packed with visiting groups: a group of older women from Wimbledon, an army of small, very excited children and a batch of hungover students among them. Myrtle Linberg, 76, on a private tour with a Wimbledon ladies' group, admitted she wouldn't normally venture to this part of the city. "It was such a poor area before, wasn't it? But look at it now," she says, pointing at the stadium. "We've just been told there are more than 10,000 toilets in there."

Official tours run daily and cost £9, but some private companies are taking a more lavish approach. The Blue Tiger Company offers a 30-minute private helicopter flight above the site, lunch and tour for £350 a couple. "We get a lot of corporate and private clients, entertaining clients from the far east and Russia, but most people are from the UK," said Mia Patel, the sales director.

Simon Cole, tour guide and Hackney resident, has a different take. For him the Olympic boroughs – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Newham, Greenwich and Barking and Dagenham – are worth discovering on their own merits. "To a lot of people, the idea of east London conjures up images of industrial decay or gun crime," he said. "But there is an incredible amount to discover here – you can look back 200 years and to the future, without having to move."

Cole gave the Guardian an alternative tour of the Olympics, taking in filter beds and football pitches, street art and the former Matchbox factory, as well as the swoop of the Aquatic Centre and the unromantic bulk of the media hub.

Starting the tour at the Princess of Wales pub on Lea Bridge Road in Hackney, he led the way into a little-known east London delight – the Middlesex Filter Beds, built after London's worst cholera outbreak struck in 1852. When they were closed a century later, the beds became an inner-city wildlife haven and today provide a pocket of tranquillity. Rushes rustle in the wind and the rumble of traffic can only be faintly heard behind the birdsong. A short walk further on to the expanse of Hackney Marshes – the spiritual home of Sunday league football with more than 80 pitches – provided a particularly urban bucolic scene – with centuries-old trees surrounded by tower blocks and former power stations. It is an area packed with historical significance: in the ninth century part of the Danelaw boundary between the Saxons and Vikings, later a haunt of highwaymen. Edward Walford wrote in 1878: "In the Marshes towards Hackney Wick were low publichouses, the haunt of highwaymen and their Dulcineas. Dick Turpin was a constant guest [...] and few police-officers were bold enough to approach the spot."

Following the walk along the Hackney Cut – an artificial channel of the Lee Navigation canal built in 1770 to improve transport links – towards the Olympic Stadium takes the explorer though the East End's former industrial centre. The area has its own wildlife – the lesser-spotted hipster, to be found among the street art and identifiable by thrombosis-inducing trousers and bear-like overcoats. "Walking around here gives you a timeline of London history," said Cole. "This was the beating heart of industrial east London but in recent years has started to transform and now has the highest concentration of artists in Europe, with more than 600 studios."

After passing the media centre we entered the Olympic zone: security fences grow higher, canary-yellow sentry posts appear along the route and urban ramblers – slightly incongruous with walking poles and backpacks – stomp by. Random facts from different and competing tour guides fill the air: "The Olympic Park is two and a half square kilometres – that's the same size as Hyde Park!"; "At the peak of construction more than 10,000 people were at work here"; "The Aquatics Centre is made from 2,800 tonnes of steel."

From the Greenway, the Olympic Stadium, which will seat 80,000 people during the games and may afterwards, legal wrangling permitting, be the home of West Ham, fills the horizon.

More than 800,000 tonnes of soil were removed and 33 buildings demolished before construction could begin, with 5,250 workers taking three years to finish the stadium on time and within budget. A little further along the path you see Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre, with its wave-shaped roof and detachable wings for spectators that will be removed after the games, the concave roof of the Velodrome and the temporary bubble structure of the Basketball Arena, which will glow at night.

Next to the stadium, Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit – Britain's largest public sculpture – rises like the world's most frightening rollercoaster, promising the best view of the Olympic Park.

Still, those looking on from the Greenway don't seem to mind this next best option.

There is a sense of fizzing anticipation, which seems set to keep visitors streaming to the site right up until the Olympic flame is lit during the opening ceremony.

"It's something a bit different to do, for certain," said Erni. "And even though it looks a bit like a building site at the moment, it is really quite exciting."

Simon Cole also appears in city-lit Berlin (£8.99) published by Oxygen Books

city-pick New York one of March's best reads ('excellent') in Lonely Planet Magazine

city-pick Nottingham: a call out for Nottingham writing from Left Lion!

If you can say it in under 500 words then Oxygen Books want to hear from you. Words: James Walker

 

Oxygen Books' city-pick series. 

 

Calling all scribes in Nottingham. Have you got a piece of writing that, for you, perfectly sums up Hood town and its surrounding areas, past, present or even future? It could be a poem you’ve penned about overheard conversations on Mansfield Rd, perhaps you’ve been keeping a secret diary about those elusive gigs at Rock City or maybe you simply wish that areas in Nottingham looked like they sound; Forest Fields, the Meadows…  

Whatever it is you’ve got to say, take the opportunity to say it now and save us from forever being remembered as that place where folk get shot and merry men prance about in green tights. Oxygen Books want to hear from you as they’re putting together a special event for the Lowdham Book Festival in June 2012 (as well as the Manchester Literature Festival and Cambridge Wordfest on similar projects). Oxygen Books’ city-pick series features some of the best writing on favourite world cities, from New York, Berlin and Paris to London, Amsterdam, Dublin and Venice.

 

Quite surprisingly, they’re not publishing a book about Nottingham. Maybe asking why not could be your first response? This is a city that recently planted six apple trees in Sneinton market and called it a redevelopment, that pays security guards to keep the public off the steps of the council house while inside making decisions that cut back on services, and who could not admire the hubris of naming a chippy Moulin Rouge. What more do we need to do?   

 

‘We know there’s a wealth of writing out there about the city,’ says Oxygen’s publisher, Malcolm Burgess. ‘We’d love readers and writers to get in touch with us with their choices, ideally 500 words maximum but they could be even shorter, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, on- or off-line, and if they can give us reasons for their choices that’s even better. We’d love to see any new published writing too about Nottingham. All contributors will be fully acknowledged at our festival event.’

 

Oxygen Books will be presenting city-pick Nottingham at the Lowdham Book Festival, together with a well-known actor. A city-pick Nottingham pod-cast will also be available. Any ideas should be sent to malcolm.burgess3 (at) btopenworld.com. Or contact him on 01277 263770. 

 

Oxygen Books website

www.leftlion.co.uk

Write on. Publisher seeks best writing about Manchester

Feb 14, 2012 | Comments: 0

If Manchester were a book, how would you describe it? A thumping good read? An industrial novel? Perhaps a Gothic horror (Oldham Street on a Friday night, we are talking about you).

However you’d describe Manchester, there’s no getting away from the fact that it is home to one of the liveliest writing scenes in the country. And it’s for this reason that indie publisher Oxygen Books, along with our friends at the Manchester Literature Festival, have launched a competition to find the best writing about the city.

Oxygen knows urban writing; its City Pick series regularly collates the best and has thus far published anthologies for New York, Berlin, Paris and London. Naturally, its attention was drawn next to Manchester – and it needs you to suggest or submit your favourite writing about the city.

The publisher is fairly relaxed when it comes to the kinds of writing it will consider. The New York anthology included F Scott Fitzgerald, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, Edmund White and Jan Morris. Oxygen Books reckons it’ll look at any genre, fiction or non-fiction, historic writing or brand spanking new, and either online or in print. The only restriction is the word count: 500 words maximum.

Get your suggestions across to Oxygen now – the best will be featured in a podcast and reading list, which in turn will be launched during October’s Literature Festival.

Image: courtesy Manchester Literature Festival and Henry Liddon.

www.creativetourist.com

From city-pick New York ... to city-pick #Nottingham: a call out for writing about Nottingham!

Can you recommend any writing that, for you, perfectly sums up Nottingham and its surrounding areas, past, present or even future?

This is the ‘ask’ from a publisher that’s putting together a special event for the Lowdham Book Festival in June 2012.

Oxygen Books’ city-pick series features some of the best writing on favourite world cities, from New York, Berlin and Paris to London, Amsterdam, Dublin and Venice and has been called ‘wonderful’ (The Guardian), ‘superb’ (The Times) and ‘sublime’ (The Sydney Morning Herald).

Now the book publisher is working with the Lowdham Book Festival and supported by Arts Council England to find the very best writing about one of the UK’s top literary cities.

‘We know there’s a wealth of writing out there about the city,’ says Oxygen’s publisher, Malcolm Burgess. ‘We’d love readers and writers to get in touch with us with their choices, ideally 500 words maximum, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, on- or off-line, and if they can give us reasons for their choices that’s even better. We’d love to see any new published writing too about Nottingham. All contributors will be fully acknowledged at our festival event.’

Oxygen Books will be presenting city-pick Nottingham at the Lowdham Book Festival, together with a well-known actor. A city-pick Nottingham pod-cast will also be available.

 Any ideas about Nottingham writing should be sent to malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com. For more information about the city-pick series see www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

For more information or pictures please contact Malcolm Burgess: tel: 01277 263770/ 07964979819

 

The night bus, where London's heart truly beats

A lovely piece by the London Evening Standard's Richard Godwin on travelling on a London night bus.

Admittedly, you need to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the London night bus. An evening's worth of alcohol usually does the trick.

Ideally, it should be Friday or Saturday night, about 2.30am. Then your fellow passengers will not be the sensible ones who have traipsed home early - but neither will they be the ones who have stayed to the bitter end. Any later and their thoughts will be on their beds, or their comedowns, or whoever they've dragged home with them. At around 2.30am, there's still life in the evening.

The optimum position is standing on the top deck.

The best buses are the ones that ply Kingsland Road (the 149, the 76, the 67), though the N29 from Camden has its moments. Still, it should be cold enough outside for there to be condensation on the windows, and when the bus moves it should feel as if you're sailing.

The ideal mood is bittersweet. Perhaps you have left the club too soon; perhaps it didn't quite work out and you're nursing a slight regret. Either way, you should carry a sense of the sorrows and pleasures of city life, its infinite possibilities and the impossibility of following them all.

If most of these conditions are met, then you can lose yourself in the scene. The French girl in the Harry Potter glasses, chirping away to her friend (French seems to be the second language on east London night buses); the black girl draped over the white guy, who's tracing the mysterious word KRUDE into the window mist; the Irishman on the stairs, holding a bottle of blue raspberry rotgut, singing some embarrassing pop song (Boyzone?
Actually: didn't he used to be in Boyzone?); Portuguese, Polish and possibly Vietnamese are audible. Someone is furtively chomping a burger, someone is rolling a spliff and a girl in a cowboy hat towards the back is laughing at you laughing at all of this...

Of course, London is not the only place with night buses. Still, there aren't many other cities where you find so many people so touchingly intent on having a good time - and a transport system so geared up to helping them do so. On certain top decks, you find a sort of cosy mayhem that's London at its most distinctive and best: tolerant, madly varied, infectious.

It rarely lasts all the way home. Soon after the Harry Potter girl gets off, somewhere in Dalston, you gain a seat and lose your vantage point. The singing gets annoying, there's some aggro downstairs and then the bus stands at a stop for ages. The couples huddle closer, the single people lose themselves in their iPhones, the spell is broken.

It's precious while it lasts, though. You may be the sentimental side of several pints but you're proud to call London your home