Mwhahaha. The Book Grocer rubs her hands together greedily as she contemplates the week ahead. Festival season kicks off this week, and its offerings may be summarised with one word: excellent. Tuesday: VS Naipaul fans will want to head to Daunt Books tonight to hear Patrick French and AN Wilson discuss French’s recent biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, The World Is What It Is, heralded as a “magnificent achievement” (7pm, £5). Also on:......

What do an ex-Python, Martha Stewart, and a woman in the running for first female poet laureate all have in common? Come on now, use your deductive reasoning skills. They all somehow feature in this week’s Book Grocer, of course! Monday: Novelist David Benioff has a few recognisable names on his CV – he’s both collaborated with Spike Lee and written the screenplay for The Kite Runner. Tonight Benioff is at Foyles to discuss......

Diaries out, bibliophiles. Festival season is almost upon us. No, not the festival season that will have you rolling around in mud or throwing your pants at the stage (well, you could throw your pants at the stage, and we’d certainly provide moral support for that endeavour). We’re talking literary festival season – Christmas in July for the book geeks among us. Let’s start with the little guy first. London Lit Plus launched just......

Happy Bloomsday, friends. If on this, the 104th anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s epic wanderings around Dublin, our column is even less coherent than usual, don’t blame us and our second-rate attempts to mimic the master. On the other hand, maybe you should. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. Come, mess. Bloomsday: Alright, so perhaps you have no idea what we’re babbling on about because (GASP!) you’ve cracked the cover of......

June’s here, and we’re feeling a bit slack. But although the summer blockbusters have rolled into town to lessen the load on our addled brains, literary London keeps on cranking out the heavyweights. Lightweight summer reading? Not here, not yet. Tuesday: You might have inferred that we love London. We do, we really do. Which places us in the company of many a great poet: Wordsworth, Blake, Lawrence. Poems by these and plenty of......

A happy Bank Holiday Monday to you, friends! Can’t bring yourselves to leave the flat and venture out in this stormy weather? Neither can we. But really, we appreciate whatever excuse we can use to dip into the ever-growing pile of books on our bedside table. A look at the week ahead in literary London: Tuesday: Booker-shortlisted author Tim Winton will at the Australian High Commission for the launch of his latest novel, Breath,......

Yet another reason our love runs deep for literary London: this happy little subculture is as diverse as the city itself. On offer this week is an eclectic mixture ranging from an Asian literature festival, to a panel discussion of the utility of creative writing courses, to a talk with a well-known American memoirist. As always, the difficulty is in choosing which events we just can’t bear to miss. Monday: Blame last week’s summer-like......

Tra la, it’s May, the lusty month of May – and we, apparently, feel like singing. Is it the gorgeous weather? The lovely literary events in our diary? Our trips up and down the too-hot-to-trot Northern Line? The Pimm’s coursing through our veins? (No, surely not that.) Need to ramp up your own book lust for the week? Then have a gander at our groceries: Wednesday: Your choice of poetry events today: As part......

Is it just your imagination, or is Londonist going all literary on you for the second time today? No, it’s true: we’re just that geeky. But if the Bard’s birthday bash doesn’t have you all hot and bothered this week (speaketh it softly, or surrender thine literati creds), here are a few alternatives to keep you otherwise engaged. Tuesday: If you haven’t booked already, there are still a few seats left to hear Isabel......

Dispensing with the (attempts at) witty chitchat this week and diving right in... Monday: Still time to get tickets for the Last Tuesday Society’s Hendrick’s Cocktail Party tonight. And should you wonder what tenuous connection we’re trying to make between gin and literature (we won’t play the Snoop Dogg Gin and Juice card just yet), hang on there! It’s not so tenuous. On tap at tonight’s party, along with an abundance of Hendrick’s, is......

Cadbury creme eggs! Don’t you just love ’em? Ha ha, the book grocer sure does! Advance apologies if this week’s serving is full of even more exclamations than usual – we just might be hyped up on milk chocolatey goodness right now. Eventually we’ll crash, feel a bit ill, and begin to suspect that the beady little eyes on those choco bunnies are watching our every move. If the same happens to you (or......

We began this week with a great big gaping void: the very excellent London Word Festival has come to an end (though you can watch highlights here), and our nearly 40-day-long combination chocolate and carbon dioxide fast has left us, well, a bit snippy (we’ll certainly be biting the heads off those cloyingly cute Lindt bunnies come this weekend). In short, we didn’t have great expectations for the week. Yet, after taking a look......

There are just too many good events around town this week for us to narrow our picks for certain nights. Thus we present you with multiple options and leave that difficult choice to you. In the meantime, we’ll be brushing up on our science fiction in an effort to figure out how to move quickly from event to event. The solution? Teleporting. Clearly. Monday: writLoud returns to RADA tonight. We like this event, as......

March already? How did that happen? The perils of having our head buried in a book so much of the time, no doubt. If we must emerge this week from our cosy little book-enclosed chrysalis, it’ll likely be to head to the following events. Monday: The RSL-sponsored TS Eliot Memorial meeting brings together award-winning poets Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie for an evening of readings from their work. Both have been lauded for the......

Will we please shut up about these books already? Yes, we will. But not before telling you one last time just how much we enjoyed Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and how much we look forward to reading Apples by Richard Milward and Submarine by Joe Dunthorne. Our enthusiasm was reaffirmed Thursday evening at Bardens Boudoir, where Milward, Dunthorne, and Ferris each read from their debut novels, as part of......

Blogophobia: an irrational fear, intolerance of, or aversion to the blogosphere. Martin Amis has been accused of far worse, but after hearing him talk at RADA yesterday evening, this was the only accusation we felt it safe to lodge against him. The offending remark came early in the evening when, during his reading from the recently published The Second Plane, Amis effectively dissed Londonist and its ilk as “semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere”. Gauntlet,......

Even on its quietest weeks, London is something of a happy haven for bibliophiles such as ourselves, though we may be doing nothing more than perusing one of the city’s many lovely bookshops. This week, however, we’re in a veritable book geek heaven, as the London literary scene goes all glittery, playing host to some major names and fantastic events, leaving us tongue-tied and weak at the knees. Do we gush? Very well then,......

Hang on to your TLSs. Literary London is a lioness roaring in a few weeks ahead of her regularly scheduled appearance in March. With both the London Word Festival and Jewish Book Week launching this week, we’ve got enough events in our diary to keep us busy until spring. Keep an eye on this space as we highlight our favourites from these festivals over the next couple of weeks. Monday: You want poetry? RADA’s......

The book grocer’s coffers are chockfull of goodies this week, so let’s jump right in and get shopping... Monday: Crikey. Take a look at author and critic George Steiner’s publishing credits and you have to wonder whether the man has actually slept in the past fifty years. Yet the premise of the prolific writer’s most recent work, My Unwritten Books, is that there are actually some subjects that Steiner has purposely left unexplored. Join......

Greetings, FOBGs (that’s Friends of the Book Grocer to the uninitiated), and a belated happy new year to you all! After an extended holiday slumber (bad, lazy Book Grocer), we return to bring you our weekly picks for the best of London’s literary(ish) events. And so, without further ado, let’s jump right in, shall we? Today: One too many spoonfuls of sugar this holiday season? Counteract it with a Spoonful of Poisoning at Rhythm......