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 it’s always seemingly shrouded in mystique. What can you expect? Students from the Birkbeck creative writing programme reading from their work in various genres and disciplines, along with a “well-known” guest writer. Keeps us guessing. Free, 6.30pm.
Tuesday: Ambit Magazine hosts a reading at the Bath House. Among the writers featured are Angela Kirby, Dai Vaughan, Christopher Nield and ... YOU?! If you so desire, yes – readers from the floor are welcome. Doors open at 6.30pm for a 7.30 start, £5 tickets, £4 concessions. Or head to the Acton Library to hear Antony Clayton discuss Decadent London, his exploration of the bohemian world of the city in Victorian times. 7pm, £2. If neither of those strike your fancy, how about the PEN-sponsored Easy Come, Easy Go at the Guardian Newsroom? Featuring writers George Szirtes, Marina Lewycka and Daljit Nagra, the event will look at the role of immigration in creativity and literature. 7pm, £5 PEN members, £7.50 nonmembers.
Wednesday: The London Word Festival draws to a close this week – if you haven’t yet had a chance to check it out, there are a few more opportunities to do so. Ben Borek will be at Gramophone tonight to read from Donjong Heights, his novel-in-verse. Set in a South London tower block, it’s the epic tale of the ... quest for the perfect Christmas party? In which Lord Byron makes an appearance. We’re intrigued. 7pm, £3 tickets. Also on tonight: Justine Picardie reading from her recently released novel, Daphne, which combines both fact and fiction as it weaves together stories of the Brontes, Daphne du Maurier, Peter Llewelyn-Davies (he of Peter Pan fame), and a modern PhD candidate researching the connections among them all. At the Muswell Hill Bookshop, 7pm, free.
Thursday: What does the future of the book look like? How much longer before the publishing industry throws the printing press out the window and forces us to curl up in bed with those awful digital book readers (and how will we take notes in the margins)? When can the bloggers at Londonist expect their first book contracts? These and other questions to be answered (we hope) at the London Word Festival’s Book Futures at the Bishopsgate Institute, 7pm, £7. Or you can head to Waterstone’s Gower Street for James Geary’s Aphorisms and Aphorists juggling show. Juggling! Of words and balls! Free, 6.30pm.
Saturday: Not for the faint of heart or the empty of purse, Foyles hosts Vintage Classics Day from 10.30am to 5pm. The lineup includes signings by Salman Rushdie and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin author Louis de Bernières, workshop-style sessions on navigating the publishing industry, panels discussing literary heroines and the process of adapting a classic novel for the screen, and features, among others, AS Byatt, Adam Thirlwell, and BAFTA-nominated screenplay writer of Pride and Prejudice Deborah Moggach. £20.
Know of an event that belongs in the Book Grocer listings? Please e-mail us at londonist-at-gmail-dot-com and let us know!
Image courtesy of miss hay’s photostream via the Londonist Flickr pool
