The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email [email protected].
A quick note to say The Godot Company is performing Marguerite Duras' La Musica at Bookshop Theatre, 51 The Cut, SE1 8LF, (opposite the Young Vic), Monday - Saturday (not Thursday) at 7.30 pm, till December the 9th, £7/£5 - well worth a look.
Wednesday
We kick off this week with the Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories with James McConnachie. Expect UFOs, no planers (too soon!) and the truth about the tube door "open" button being only a placebo. 6.30pm in the Gallery at Foyles.
Thursday
Penned in the margins: Michael Horovitz reads from A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium, a verse and prose deconstruction of contemporary political, moral and ecological degeneration. Afterwards, Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg reads from Enemy Combatant, his account of three years spent in captivity at Guantanemo Bay detainment camp, Cuba. 5pm, £5/£3, Everyman Cinema Club, 5 Holly Bush Vale, Hampstead, London NW3 6TX.
Mark Gatiss (pictured), the actor, comedian, writer & co-creator of The League of Gentlemen (and who we saw most recently in BBC4's high camp Fear of Fanny), discusses his second Edwardian crime novel in the Lucifer Box series, The Devil in Amber. Portraitist, dandy and terribly good secret agent, Lucifer Box is sent to New York, hot on the heels of a fascist leader, but things are not all that they seem in the snowbound Big Apple... Read an interview with Mark. 6.30pm, Tickets are free, but must be reserved ([email protected]), The Gallery at Foyles
Sunday
Mark the Day of the Imprisoned Writer with a service at St Bride’s, the printers’ church on Fleet Street. The St Bride’s church choir will take part in the service and wine will be served afterwards. The service is free but a collection will be taken in aid of the Writers in Prison Fund. Speakers at previous events have included Ronnie Harwood, Antonia Fraser, Alec Guinness, PD James, Anna Massey, Kim Aris (Aung San Suu Kyi’s son), Harold Pinter, Prunella Scales, Julie Christie, Ben Okri, Helena Kennedy and Richard Eyre. This year’s speakers are TBA. 6.30pm, Tickets are free but call 020 7713 0023 to book, St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, EC4Y 8AU.
Monday
In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel looks back at the unresolved events of her Derbyshire childhood, and at the medical mishaps and neglect that left her childless, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Bringing the House Down is David Profumo’s memoir is of his parents — of their courtship, his father’s affair and of how their marriage, and their love, somehow survived in a world turned upside down. Both will discuss the motives that drove them to write in intimate detail about their own families, and the challenges they faced in doing so. 7pm, £5, the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Somerset House, Strand, WC2.
