Oxygen Books

citypicktures - imagine the very essence of your favourite world city in a few hundred words

 

The very essence of St Petersburg

 

Remember that writer's phrase, that word, that perfectly sums up a city to you?

Can you imagine what would happen if dozens of these words and phrases became part of a poem that gave you instant essence of the city in question?

This is just what our new citypicktures series has been created (or do we mean curated?) to do.

Heather Reyes, the editor of our city-pick urban travel anthologies, has created a mini-version of each of our books. Scouring our titles for some of the most telling and evocative phrases and images. Then shaping them into poems that try to 'bottle the essence' of each city in a few hundred telling words.

The first 'poem portrait' is of St Petersburg. Join Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Malcolm Bradbury, Orlando Figes, Viv Groskop, Anna Kovalova, Dmitry Likhachev, Helen Dunmore and many others in this oh-so-atmospheric evocation of Russia's most beautiful city.

It's the next best thing to stepping out into Nevsky Prospect  ....

Heather Reyes is the editor of city-pick St Petersburg, £9.99, Oxygen Books, featuring over sixty writers on the city

Oxygen Books awarded Arts Council grant for world writing project A Year of Reading Dangerously

Ann Morgan, Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer, Harvill Secker. See Ann on Thursday March 26 2015 in Chelmsford, Essex www.essexbookfestival.org.uk

From Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist to Joanne Harris's Chocolat, so many of us enjoy reading novels about other countries.

It's this enthusiasm that has led Oxygen Books, well known for its offbeat city-pick urban travel anthologies, to come up with an exciting  new Arts Council funded project called A Year of Living Dangerously.

The project's aim is simple: to introduce a wider public to the joys of writing in translation from a range of countries.

Working with library authorities and book festivals across London and Essex, A Year of Living Dangerously will involve an extensive touring exhibition highlighting some of the best writers from India, Africa, China, France, Turkey, South America, the Netherlands, Russia, Scandinavia and Japan.

A website, including interviews with key translators and podcasts, special bookmarks, visits to book groups across London and Essex, stock promotions and new links between cultural agencies and libraries will all help to raise the profile of world writing among general readers. 

Also, a series of events in which well known writers and commentators discuss their own work and books from particular countries which have inspired them, will make writing in translation even more accessible.

Across 2015 and 2016 these will include an evening of Russian writing with Orange Prize-winner Helen Dunmore, exploring books and writers from every country in the world with Reading the World author Ann Morgan, a celebration of Asian poetry with award winning poet Moniza Alvi and an evening of Scandinavian crime featuring a well-known Scandinavian crime writer in discussion with Professor Amanda Hopkinson.

'We want this project to entertain and enthrall our readers as we journey across the globe with them,' says project manager Malcolm Burgess from Oxygen Books. 'Writing in translation doesn't have to be heavy or worthy: in fact there's something for every possible reading taste.'

For more information about A Year of Reading Dangerously: http://ayearofreadingdangerously.com  

 To speak to the project team: malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com; 07594490216/ 01277 263770

 

 

Book club resolution to try something different? city-pick has something for you - with discounts to match!

Love reading about foreign places? Like the idea of reading about a favourite city but not sure where to start? Or even thinking about getting your book group to branch out with something a bit different?

You might be interested, then, to know more about Oxygen Books' city-pick series.

Each of our titles on cities from Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London and Istanbul to Venice, Dublin, St Petersburg and New York has over sixty specially hand-picked writers on their city.

In our Paris title, for example, you'll find well-known writers like Kate Mosse, Joanne Harris and Stephen Clarke (who's also written a drole introduction) beside Proust, Hugo and newer contemporary writers - all helping to evoke the truly Parisian experience.

 

Over 60 amazing writers on all things Parisian

But it's not just novelists (including those in translation and some of the best new ones around) that you'll find in our books.

There's also plenty of non-fiction, whether it's from historians and travel writers or journalists and bloggers.

We've researched far and wide - with lots of help from co-editors and translators in our cities and from readers themselves - to come up with what we believe is some of the best writing on these amazing cities.

But don't take our word for it. The Times has called the city-pick series 'superb ... it's like having your own phone loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages, bite-sized chunks, just perfect to dip into.' The Sydney Morning Herald has called it 'a great idea! A sublime introduction.'

We're offering a special direct from publishers discount on all orders over ten copies (P & P free and an even better discount than Amazon).

Please contact Oxygen Books at malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com for more details.

If your book group resolution is to read something a bit different in 2015, we'd love you to try the city-pick way ahead.

Just check out Paris here Download 9780955970009 short version (3) to give you a taste of what to expect with your favourite city. 

Love reading about & visiting cities? Check out city-picks' favourite recent features, links & videos

Love reading about and visiting favourite world cities? This is the first in Oxygen Books city-picks' regular round-up of our favourite features, links and videos on a whole range of cities from Berlin and Istanbul to New York and Paris. The focus is on the best books and writing but we do like to stray as the flaneurish way takes us.  

 

First to wonderful 1920s New York, where Literary Traveller (a site well-worth checking out for all things about writers and travel) has unearthed a brilliant documentary from the early sixties about the legendary Algonquin set. Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George F Kaufman et al and some very dry martinis ...

 

Next Paris in the company of crime writer Patrick Modiano winner of 2014's Nobel Prize for Literature. Nouvelle Observateur has created a Google Map showing all the Paris locations used in Modiano's novels. Most of the writer's novels are set in Paris and we hope to include some excerpts in the next edition of city-lit Paris. There's also a lovely piece by Israeli journalist Moshe Gilad in Haaretz.com doing a flaneur's walk across Paris visting Modiano's locations.

  Patrick Modiano's Paris

'Tis the season to be in Dublin it seems with a plethora of festivals, literary and lots of others, through to the Spring reports Kevin McKenna in the Observer. This includes One City, One Book run by the library service, in which the whole city will be encouraged to read one book. This year it's Roddy Doyle's The Barrytown Trilogy.

Dublin's Temple Bar

 

Come to the cabaret too in Berlin in the company of the very best writers on the city according to The Culture Trip. Agree? Disagree? Or a bit in the middle? Do let us know.

Christopher Isherwood and friend

What's biting Venice? This is the leading question one of our leading novelists on Venice Michelle Lovric asks in a recent blog entry and her answers are as fascinating as they are fearsome.

Venice: Byzantine stone circle

 

Writers and writing about Amsterdam is really amazing. But don't take our word for it - check outthis video featuring a stroll around literary Amsterdam in the company of writer and translator Victor Schiferli

 

  

Orhan Panuk is probably the best-known modern Turkish writer and, unsurprisingly, Istanbul features in many of his books, including his non-fiction Istanbul. You can read all about Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul from a recent feature in the New York Times.

                                                            Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

St Petersburg's cultural wonders don't begin and end with the Hermitage writes Tim Stanley in Guardian Travel. St Petersburg's contemporary art scene more than offers a rival attraction for visitors.

  St Peterburg art gallery

Oxygen Books is the publisher of the city-pick series featuring some of the best writing on world cities. 'Superb ... it's like having your own phone loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages, bite-sized chunks, just perfect to dip into' The Times

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Is your St Petersburg guide book leaving you out in the cold?

Berlin, St Petersburg, London, Paris, Vienna: Radio 3's Free Thinking: European Cities on the Brink of War

As part of Radio 3's Music on the Brink, Free Thinking takes the cultural temperature of Paris, Berlin, London, St Petersburg and Vienna in the years leading up to the First World War.

The novelist AS Byatt, the film expert Neil Brand and the cultural historians Alexandra Harris and Philipp Blom have chosen artworks and artefacts from the period and will use them to explore, with Anne McElvoy, the ideas and spirit of the European capital cities on the brink of World War 1.

Roger Fry, a landmark silent film version of Les Miserables and Freud's understanding of the Viennese practice of Gschnas give us glimpses of a rapidly changing world.

Another of the choices is, apparently, Andrei Bely's brilliant symbolist novel, Petersburg which is featured in our city-pick St Petersburg.

Radio 3, 10.00pm, Tuesday 7 January 2014.

Vienna, Paris, St Petersburg, London in 1914: Hear Radio 3's The Essay: Cities on the Brink

On June 2 1914, Picasso accompanied his friends Georges Braque and Andre Derain to Avignon railway station. Picasso was Spanish and couldn't be called up. He waved his fellow painters off. Then, he was left alone on the platform. The war that had just begun would change Europe's cultural life forever.

One small (or large) event that would be multiplied a thousand times across Europe's capitals on the eve of the First World War.

As part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Music on the Brink’ season examining the cultural life of Europe in 1914, this weeks Essay sees five BBC News correspondents evoke the capitals of the major European powers involved in the Great War.

Stepping back exactly a hundred years, BBC News correspondents present personal perspectives on the capital cities of the major European powers that, later in 1914, would face each other in the Great War. We start in the capital of the Habsburg Empire and the rich multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa.

In this first programme, Bethany Bell, the BBC's Vienna Correspondent, evokes both the public face of Austria-Hungary's capital and the simmering tensions which underlay its multinational empire on the eve of the greatest conflagration the world had yet seen. Taking us on a richly evocative tour of the embodiment of Mitteleuropa, she recreates a world that was soon to be torn asunder but of which telling elements remain.

It is all too easy to forget, she reminds listeners, that within months Vienna was home to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Siegmund Freud and Josef Broz (later Marshal Tito) - figures who defined the 20th century.

For the multiple nationalities of 1914 Vienna, indeed, the chronic weaknesses and divisions of this polyglot empire were painfully familiar, but the programme also reveals what has survived to this day of Vienna's glory, sophistication - and radicalism - in the era of Zemlinksy and Schreker and of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.

Subsequent programmes cover Paris with Hugh Schofield as he tells the story of the pacifist Jean Jaures assassinated on the eve of war; Berlin as Stephen Evans takes listeners to a city already seething before war even began; St. Petersburg in 1914 as Steve Rosenberg revisits an event that would define modern Russia; and London as Allan Little steps back a century and evokes the sharply divided imperial London of 1914.

Cracking the nut of St Petersburg: snow, Tschaikovsky and a live Nevsky Prospect webcam

city-pick St Petersburg,  Oxygen Books

Christmas. It always makes me think of Russia - all that snow (so proper Christmas), and childhood trips to see Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet. When we brought out our city-pick: St Petersburg anthology in time for last Christmas, we knew we wanted a snowy cover ... though one of the many things I learned in the process of editing the collection was that 'Peter' (as the locals call it - something else I learned) really isn't as snowy as most of northern Russia: squally rain is more typical, apparently ... so there are quite a few showers in our book.

 In fact, my original ideas about the city underwent a number changes in the process of reading and selecting the extracts for the book. I admit to starting off with an over-idealised picture of the city, and this suffered a number of reversals as I gradually cracked its architecturally elegant, smooth, hard shell and reached the more problematic kernel - hard to chew, some of it sticking in the teeth and making one cough. Or feeling, behind the exquisite elegance of a Kirov ballerina, the pulled muscles, the sore toes, the endless practising ...

And yet, by the time I'd finished putting the book together, I was back in love with the city again - but for different reasons from my earlier, more naïve love. It was now based on respect, wonder, and admiration. A love of the city's physical beauty - of which I have been reminded throughout the year by the wonderful St Petersburg calendar given to me by my Russian co-editor, Marina Samsonova - became awe at its very existence, its survival against all the odds, and the indomitable spirit of its people.

For a start, I discovered that, just as New York is not 'America', so St Petersburg is not 'Russia' - and was never meant to be. As one of the world's newest cities, it didn't evolve as a result of being where trade routes crossed or any of the other usual stimuli to city growth, but was decreed into existence by Peter the Great, in 1703, to be a 'window onto Europe'. Having travelled much throughout early Enlightenment Europe, Peter was determined to bring his vast and largely backward country into the modern world, shifting his from Moscow as soon as the new city was sufficiently established. There has been acrimonious rivalry between the two cities ever since, Moscow still being very much the heart of Russia and St Petersburg, on the watery edge of the vast land mass, more outward-looking and absorbing influences more readily from the world beyond.

Despite St Petersburg changing its name to Leningrad, in Soviet times, to honour the leader, Lenin himself hated the city and all it stood for and moved the capital back to Moscow - a great piece of good luck, according to tour guide Galina in Malcolm Bradbury's novel, To The Hermitage, because it saved the city from 'those dreadful pointed ministries, the silly towers, the great Marxist steeples'.

Before starting the book I had, of course, heard of 'The Siege of Leningrad', but my knowledge of the unimaginable scale of the suffering and destruction visited upon the city during the Second World War was in for a very brutal expansion in the course of my reading. The way the city's people worked to save their magnificent cultural heritage - packing up the Hermitage's countless treasures almost literally over night - was outdone only by the individual and collective instances of courage in trying to keep the city fed, and to keep humanity alive by continuing to give musical and theatrical performances, even as the artists were dropping dead, one after another, from cold and starvation. And then, after 900 days (yes, the Siege was that long), to begin clearing the rubble of the German continual shelling of the city's beautiful buildings, and to find the courage to rebuild the city to its former beauty, brick by brick, leaves one groping for words to express one's admiration.

Towards the end of preparing the city-pick anthology/guide for publication, I discovered (I can't remember how) that one could view the most famous Petersburg street - Nevsky Prospekt - on a live webcam. I became obsessed with it for several days, watching the Russian people going about their shopping and visiting the bank and waiting for buses, and entering and emerging from the metro. It could have been Oxford Street, except that the children were more bundled up in warm clothes. And then, one day, it began to snow. As traffic jams built up and the blue-flashing lights of emergency vehicles were much in evidence and I watched a drunk weaving precariously in and out of slithering vehicles and another man trying uselessly to board over-full buses and finally deciding to risk the slippery pavements rather than die of hypothermia by waiting any longer, I felt a strange kind of tenderness for the city and its people. It wasn't the romanticised love I'd started out with: it was much, much deeper - the result of immersing myself in the city for months on end, trying to find the best words of the best writers to sum up the beauty, tragedy, endurance, resurrection, and fierce, creative individuality of the remarkable city of St Petersburg.

 

 

The best books on Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Istanbul, Venice, Amsterdam, St Petersburg and Dublin are here

Read what they say about the city-pick series:

'Brilliant ... the best way to get under the skin of a city. The perfect read for travellers and book lovers of all ages' Kate Mosse, bestselling author of Labyrinth

'Superb ... it's like having your own iPhone loaded with different tomes, except only the best passages' The Times

city-lit Berlin £9.99

'We love the city-pick books. They're right up our street! Lonely Planet Traveller

'There are some books that you spot and immediately curse under your breath - "Why didn't I think of that? What a great idea!" The city-pick series is one such idea' The Sydney Morning Herald

city-lit London £8.99

'Tired of the usual guides? Can't be bothered with apps? Meet the alternative' Wanderlust

'city-picks's method of including blogs, novels, letters and memoirs of famous artists, filmmakers and writers is endlessly inspiring' Scotland on Sunday

'The beauty of this clver series is the breadth and reach of its contributors' Real Travel Magazine

city-pick New York £9.99

'Essential - slip it into your bag alongside a Rough Guide' Waterstone's Books Quarterly

'A unique way to explore the ever-changing landscape of a city, through the voices of those who know it intimately' Rachel Lichtenstein, author of On Brick Lane

city-lit Paris, £9.99

'The excellent city-pick series which uses descriptions of a city penned by writers, both living and dead, to illuminate the metropolis in question' Conde Nast Traveller

'A new breed of city guide ... it makes for some delightful discoveries' Time Out

city-pick Amsterdam, £8.99

'All of a sudden the traditional travel guide seems a little dull ... a more soulful guide to the metropolises of the world in the company of journalists, musicians, playwrights, bloggers and novelists past and present ... Oxygen Books is restoring intellectual discovery to travelling' The Good Web Guide

'If you haven't yet discovered the city-pick series you are missing something very special. The concept is pure genius' Hot Brands Cool Places

city-pick Istanbul, £9.99

'An inviting new series of travel guides which collects some of the best writing on European and other cities to give a real flavour of the place ... Such an idee formidable, it seems amazing it hasn't been done before' The Bookseller

'These snappy literary collages of the world's most written-about cities combine erudition with inspiration, bookishness with approachability, and a near-encyclopaedic range of reference with a canny appreciation for whatever it is that would make you want to visit a city in the first place' Booktrust

city-pick St Petersburg, £9.99

city-pick Venice, £8.99

city-pick Dublin, £8.99

... And what they're saying about Heather Reyes's An Everywhere: a little book about reading and Miranda Road, published 11 April 2014:

'A brilliant travel guide to the city of books ... I love Heather's passion for reading and her blend of erudition and intimacy' Helen Dunmore, author of The Siege

'This is a gem of a book, one to read and re-read and to carry around like a bible - not just as a guide to great literature but as a reminder that reading is the highest form of religion' Cheryl Moskowitz, founder of Lapidus

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, £8.99

'Hugely readable and quietly profound, Miranda Road is about family in the most modern sense ...a sensitivity that is both lyrical and deeply moving' Beatrice Colin, author of The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite

Miranda Road, Heather Reyes £8.99

Oxygen Books titles are available as paperback originals from all good bookshops. Buy them from Amazon or FREE POSTAGE & DELIVERY wherever you live in the world from Book Depository.

Editorial: Heather Reyes, Tel: +44(0)1277 213849 heather@oxygenbooks.co.uk

Marketing & Sales (UK and Europe): Malcolm Burgess, Tel: +44 (0) 1277 263770 malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com

UK Sales Agency: Compass-DSA sales@compass-dsa.co.uk

Distribution (UK, Europe & British Commonwealth): Central Books, Tel: +44 (0) 845 4589911 orders@centralbooks.com

Australia & New Zealand sales and distribution: Peribo, Tel: +61  (0) 9457 0011 michael.coffey@peribo.com.au

'city-pick St Petersburg answers perfectly my curiosities about the city' - Llana on the Road

TRAVEL BOOK RECOMMENDATION: CITY-PICK ST. PETERSBURG

I haven’t been to St. Petersburg (yet) but I am fascinated by this city, mostly due to my literary wanderings together with authors like Andrei Belîi or Daniil Kharms. I am not a great fan of Raskolnikov, but I do love Oblomov. The city has all the ingredients to attract tourists interested in history and arts and the City Pick Guide edited byHeather Reyes and James Rann answers perfectly my curiosities and confirms my thoughts about the city. 

Founded relatively recently at the scale of history, in 1703, and aimed to be Russia’s Western window to the world, St. Petersburg was inspired by Amsterdam and a bit of London. ‘Architects in Amsterdam and Rome were cramped for room in which to slot their buildings. But in Petersburg they were able to expand their classical ideals’. (p. 20, The Cultural History of Russia). Vasilevsky Island, for instance, was designed by Le Blond ‘as an ideal citadel town which would incorporate all life’s essentials’. (p. 28)

Russian and world famous literati – Truman Capote, Theophile Gautier, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, among others – were there and wrote their memories about the city, with love, admiration or realism. ‘(…) sometimes this city gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with its own appearance’, said Joseph Brodsky. Belîi’s St. Petersburg is a Chagall world, when the characters seem to fly brought by the fast forward movement of the busy century. 

A city of splendour and great expectations, cruel and loveable, the St. Petersburg of the literary world is either the result of short visits, long-term interaction with the city and its inhabitants or purely the result of literary imagination. As in the case of other guides edited by Oxygen books, it is based on a selection of relevant fragments from important authors, covering the architecture, different stages of history – I was expecting a more detailed presentation of the city today, including by the mention of the details of contemporary literary life; the fragments dedicated to the city under siege moved me to tears though -, main personalities and cultural benchmarks – as the world of music and dance.

For a long time, it was a serious competitor to Moscow, and it succeeded to be in cultural terms for a long time. Here, for instance, was opened the first public museum in Russia by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Nowadays, it is a source of resources for the political establishment and a city most sought by curious cultural tourists.  

Reading the description of the grandiose welcome and attendance for the Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in 1942, in the middle of the siege of the then Leningrad, with a mass of people in locks, sometimes without other proper eating than the neighbour’s cat made me more curious about at least seeing the city once in my lifetime. Understanding is as challenging as some of Belîi’s stories.