First up this week is Twenty
Years of talkSPORT (£12.99, pb, 978 0956328410).
Celebrating the 20th anniversary UK's favourite sports radio station, this is a
laugh-out-loud, behind-the-scenes, warts-and-all look at the station and its
presenters. It brilliantly captures the funniest stories right from the early
days and is a highly entertaining read, with contributions from all the top
presenters and tales from trips to World Cups and European Championships where
the talkSPORT team got into all sorts of scrapes and situations, And of
course there are classic clips from callers, presenters, and newsreaders with
many hilarious slips and gaffes. There have been ads for this title in the Sun
and the Times and this book is an absolute no-brainer gift for sports
fans over Christmas. There will definitely be more publicity to come. There were
just too many classic stories to fit them all into the 279 pages of “solid gold’
as talkSPORT describe it. So if you’d like to hear one that didn’t quite
make the book, here
is
Ray Parlour talking about Kolo Toure taking out Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp,
and Arsene Wenger.
A torrent of “threats” and “abuse”,
allegedly levied against Waterstones in Brighton, allegedly resulted in
the cancellation of the launch of Pluto’s title Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public
Belief (£14.99, pb, 978-0745340661) on 23 September. Pluto expressed its “disappointment”
that “external pressure” had resulted in the cancellation of the event but
James Daunt said “we had an event which was being chaotically done,
causing quite a lot of emotion and that needed to be handled professionally on
our part.” There’s quite a lot to take in about this story, and you can
read more about it in The Canary here.
The
book’s launch was held at the Rialto Theatre instead. Bad News for Labour is
described by Pluto as “a ground-breaking study on the reality behind
the headlines.” It examines the impact of the media coverage on public
beliefs about Labour, replacing media hype with the rigorous analysis of
evidence. Raoul Martinez, called it “a necessary corrective to widespread
media distortions. Scholarly and persuasive, it rescues the facts from a storm
of misinformation.”
A three-part Mail on Sunday serialisation
for And What Do You Do? What the Royal Family Don’t
Want You to Know by Normal Baker (£20, hb, 978 1785904912) is starting this weekend (29th
September) and will run through to the 6th and 13th October. This is a
hard-hitting analysis of the royal family, exposing its extravagant use of
public money and the highly dubious behaviour of some among its ranks, whilst
being critical of the knee-jerk sycophancy shown by the press and politicians. What
makes this book so unusual is that Baker is himself a member of the Privy
Council, the body that officially advises the monarch. He also considers the
wider role the royals play in society, and the constitutional position of the
monarch, which is important given Prince Charles's present and intended
approach.
PopMatters
have just reviewed Helen McClory's new
edition of The Goldblum Variations: Adventures of
Jeff Goldblum Across the Known (and Unknown) Universe (978 1912489244, £7.50, pb) saying "McClory
has crafted a very fine, lushly sensitive, gently moving series of portraits of
a cultural icon." You can read the whole piece here.
They
call it “the best book I have read this year. And it's September, so that's
really saying something. The book is marketed as pop culture/humour, and more
loosely as absurdist fiction. It's also very fine hybrid poetry, or flash
essays, or any other number of mixed genre labels.” It’s published by 404ink
on 24 Oct and you can see the mighty Goldblum himself reading from the book here. Helen McClory was
listed as one of Ali Smith’s favourite underrated authors in the Guardian
recently, and you can expect lots more publicity for this title when Penguin publishes
it in the US in October; there is big interest in Jeff Goldblum at the
moment, he’s become a bit of an icon! This title is a perfect Christmas gift
book and talking of gifts, the first five booksellers to email laura@404ink.com with their name and bookshop address and
Goldblum in the subject line will get a free reading copy!
There’s quite a buzz building for Anseo: A Memoir (pb,
12.95, 978184840749) by Úna-Minh Kavanagh
which is published by New Island on 24 October. This is a contemporary
and unconventional memoir of adoption from Vietnam to Kerry, the love of a
small family and the power of the Irish language to overcome loss, racism and
online trolls. You can find her on Twitter at Úna-Minh (is my first name)
Caomhánach@unakavanagh.
A great review for The Dressing-Up Box (£14.99,
hb, 978 1912697212), David Constantine’s
latest short story collection in last Friday's Daily Mail calling it “inventive
… incredibly moving … and darkly funny.” You can read that here.
It’s published by Comma.
Many congratulations to Heather
McDaid and Laura Jones from 404Ink who were named
by Margaret Atwood in the Sunday Times recently as two of her “Women Who
Are Shaping Our Future”.
Palestine +100 was reviewed very well by PopMatters,
that’s here,
who
said the collection was "richly imaginative" and "a deeply
rewarding addition to the sci-fi canon."
Kei Miller’s
In Nearby Bushes (£9.99,
pb, 9781784108458) published by Carcanet is the Telegraph Poetry
Book of the Month, you can see that here.
This highly anticipated new collection from a Forward
Prize-winner was published by Carcanet at the end of August and contains
sequences and single lyrics exploring landscape, legends and histories.
We were very excited to see Signs Preceding the End of the World (pb, 978-1908276421, £8.99) by Yuri Herrera included
in the recent Guardian feature The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century,
you can see that here. They wrote “Makina sets off from her
village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her
brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US
examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the
blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return."
This week sees the publication of True Profit Business by
Karen Skidmore (£14.99, pb, 978 1788600842) and The
Resilience Dynamic® (£15.99, pb, 978-1788601085) by Jenny Campbell from
Practical Inspiration, with guest posts and reviews lined up for both. Skidmore’s
mission is to give every small business owner a plan and a process to grow
their business, without burning out along the way. The
Resilience Dynamic® illustrates, with practical tools, how to
develop resilience as a buffer to stress and how it can transform how you lead
change and increase performance in a complex and uncertain world.
Who loves Taskmaster? Me, me, me
and here
are
the top ten funniest moments. One of the current series contestants is Katy Wix who is
doing pretty well! But did you know that
she has two books published by Oberon? No, I thought not. The Oberon Book of Comic Monologues (£9.99, pb, 978 1849434287) and The Oberon Book of Comic Monologues for Women Volume 2 (£9.99,
pb, 978 1783199235) are collections of hilarious and original audition speeches
which fill a significant gap in the market, as although are many monologue collections
out there, very few provide good material for comedy. The brevity in length (each
is two or three minutes) makes these ideal for auditions or showcases and the
variety in age and style encompasses different comedic approaches; from the
very quirky to the more traditional. Katy Wix’s
profile is definitely on the rise, and I think these would sell well if
displayed.
And fifty years after the release of Abbey
Road, here's
a brand-new remix of Here Comes the Sun,
which has notched up more than a million views in less than 24 hours. I think
this is just what we all need to see in these contentious times!
That’s all folks, more next week!
This weekly blog is written for the UK
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