Join The Second Shelf and Granta to celebrate the re-issue of Diana Athill’s Don’t Look at Me Like That.

Originally published in 1967, and based on Athill’s own experiences of 1950s London, Athill’s only novel tells the story of Meg Bailey, the daughter of a poor rural vicar who goes to art college in Oxford, then moves to London. Meg builds a new life for herself in the city as an independent working woman, but in the process finds herself betraying an important figure from her past. 

To discuss the novel, Athill’s other writing, and her career as at editor at André Deutsch Ltd – where she worked with authors including Molly Keane, VS Naipaul and Jean Rhys – Lucy Scholes, The Second Shelf’s Managing Editor, will be in conversation with writer and editor Elena Lappin, and Sinéad O’Callaghan, assistant editor at Granta Publications, Athill’s publishers.

£6

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Scarlett Thomas will be discussing her riotously enjoyable new novel Oligarchy with  the literary journalist Alex Peake-Tomkinson.

Join us in welcoming the vivaciously original novelist Scarlett Thomas (author of The End of Mr Y and PopCo) to The Second Shelf to discuss her riotously enjoyable new novel Oligarchy. This blackly comic novel set in a girls' boarding school satirises the hysteria of the diet industry, Instagram and young women's behaviour but it is not without heart. The Times has said of Oligarchy: “Wickedly funny … Thomas has great fun with the familiar components of the boarding school yarn, even as she subverts them. Her writing is spikily humorous and controlled … This jet-black novel begs to be dramatised”. Scarlett will be in conversation with the literary journalist Alex Peake-Tomkinson, discussing excess and appetite and how she managed to make Oligarchy so hilarious and compelling at the same time. There will be a short reading by Scarlett from Oligarchy. There will also be time for audience questions and for Scarlett to sign copies of Oligarchy which will be on sale on the evening.

£6

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Join us in welcoming Mo Moulton, author of Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women to The Second Shelf. Mo will be joining The Second Shelf’s Managing Editor Lucy Scholes in a discussion about the book. This will be followed by a short audience Q&A.

Mutual Admiration Society is a fascinating group biography of the renowned crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers and the Oxford women who stood at the vanguard of equal rights. In 1912, Sayers and five friends founded a writing group at Somerville College, calling themselves the ‘Mutual Admiration Society’. These women remained lifelong friends and collaborators as they battled for a truly democratic culture that acknowledged their humanity. Despite the casual cruelty of sexism that limited women’s choices, they pushed boundaries in reproductive rights, sexual identity, queer family making, and representations of women in the arts.

Mo Moulton is an author and commentator on twentieth-century British history and is currently a senior lecturer in the history department at the University of Birmingham. Their previous book was the runner-up for the Royal History Society’s 2015 Whitfield prize. They live in Derbyshire. 

£6

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Sarong Party Girls is a brilliant novel about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore. Join us in welcoming author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan for reading and discussion.

In Sarong Party Girls, Jazzy - razor-sharp and vulgar, yet vulnerable - fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband and have ‘Chanel’ babies, but her story reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed? Vividly told in Singlish - colourful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang - Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of a young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.

£6

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Join The Second Shelf and Weidenfeld & Nicolson to celebrate the re-issue of Susanna Moore’s magnificent In the Cut, a book that Kristen Roupenian, author of ‘Cat Person’, describes as “compelling, shocking, hot, scary”. Originally published in 1995, this chilling erotic thriller, now considered a cult classic, has been out of print in the UK for over twenty years. Lucy Scholes, The Second Shelf’s Managing Editor, will be in discussion with writers Megan Hunter, Sophie Mackintosh, and Olivia Sudjic, considering the importance of In the Cut both in the 90s, and why it still strikes a chord with them today, two and a half decades after it was first published. Moore, who lives in New York City, is the author of eight novels and two works of non-fiction. In 1999, she received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006, she received a Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Berlin.

£5

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Women Writing and Picturing War:  a Conversation with Lara Feigel, Lara Pawson and Susan Finlay. Chaired by Jennifer Hodgson.

From Lee Miller posing in Hitler’s bathtub to Rukmini Callimachi's recent expose on the abuse of Yazidi women female writers and artists continue to shape our perception of war - and yet their voices are often occluded. Academic and author Lara Feigel, former foreign journalist, and memoirist Lara Pawson, and artist and novelist Susan Finlay discuss their own approaches to tackling this complex subject matter, as well as the women who have inspired them. Women Writing and Picturing War is an important and timely way to celebrate books by women and bring out this crucial strand of feminism.

£6

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August is Women in Translation Month, a time to ask whose voices are – and aren't – heard in literature.

Women and nonbinary people are translated less than male writers, and Western writers are translated more than non-Western writers. So who gets translated and who gets to translate? How are linguistic and literary decolonisation linked? And how do these questions manifest for women and non-binary writers and translators? 

Writer-activist Khairani Barokka and others will be exploring some of these questions in a special event organised with English PEN and Tilted Axis Press.

Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist. She has also been a highly prolific practitioner of think/do advocacy in the arts, particularly on the ways in which innovation in storytelling can increase inclusion and access for and by disability cultures and feminisms (both of which she is happy to be a part of). Born in Jakarta, Okka works, teaches, and is published internationally. Her first book as sole author, a poetry-art production entitled Indigenous Species, was published in December 2016 by Tilted Axis Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, Rope, was published by Nine Arches Press (UK) in 2017. Okka is currently poet-in-residence at Modern Poetry in Translation.

Hannah Trevarthen is the Interim Director of English PEN. She joined English PEN in January 2015. Previously, she worked for four years as Assistant Programmer at Edinburgh International Book Festival. She manages PEN’s year round programme of high-profile events. Hannah has an MA in Cultural Policy and Management from Sheffield Hallam University.

£5

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Join The Second Shelf and VINTAGE to celebrate the latter’s re-issue of six of the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s greatest and most timeless novels. This summer VINTAGE is celebrating great books by women. Revisit your favourites, discover new writers and fill your bookshelf and your summer with women’s voices. Published to commemorate Murdoch's centenary, these special editions feature new introductions by some of today’s best writers: Bidisha, Garth Greenwell, Sophie Hannah, Daisy Johnson, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Perry.

The event will feature short readings from Murdoch’s novels, followed by a panel discussion in which The Second Shelf’s Managing Editor Lucy Scholes will be joined by broadcaster, critic and journalist Bidisha, Man Booker Prize shortlistee Daisy Johnson, and Man Booker and Baileys Women’s Prize longlistee Charlotte Mendelson, after which there will be an audience Q&A.

£6

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Ariana Reines X The Second Shelf X How to Wear It X The Sand Book

We are ecstatic to welcome poet Ariana Reines to The Second Shelf to celebrate the publication of The Sand Book, as well as the publication of The Second Shelf's first poetry broadside, "How to Wear It" printed by Hurst Street Press. 

The poem was first commissioned and published in our first magazine and was inspired by Sylvia Plath's tartan skirt, which is for sale and will be on display.

We then had it printed as a broadside by Hurst Street Press and it will be signed by Reines for the first time, shipped to customers who have pre-ordered (or who would like to pick up in the shop.)

Reines will be in conversation with writer and The Second Shelf proprietor A. N. Devers. We are wildly excited and consider this a wrap party for the first magazine, a celebration of our bookshop, of one of our favourite poets and her new book A Sand Book (released in the US by Tin House 18/06/19, forthcoming in the UK). 

We will also have a number of first editions of Reines's work for sale.

£6

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Join us in welcoming Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias, to The Second Shelf. Esmé will perform a reading before joining A N Devers in discussion about the work. This will be followed by a short audience Q & A.

'Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain. What happens when your whole conception of yourself is turned upside down? When you're aware of what is occurring to you, but unable to do anything about it?'

Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir The Collected Schizophrenias and the novel The Border of Paradise, which was one of NPR's Best Books of 2016. She received a 2018 Whiting Award, was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and was the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize in 2016. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, Esmé lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

£5 or £14 with discounted book.

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Lucy Scholes, cultural critic and Managing Editor of The Second Shelf's magazine, will be in conversation with lawyer-turned-novelist Sara Collins, the author of the debut novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton (which was published by Viking in April), a thrilling homage to classic Victorian gothic fiction about a romance between a former slave from a Jamaican plantation and her white mistress. 

Drinks and great conversation included!

£5 or £15 with discounted book.

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The Second Shelf and Ache invite you to an evening of readings by women about illness, health, bodies, and pain.

Featured writers include Kirstie Miller, Sharlene Teo, Olivia Sudjic, and Thea Hawlin. Drinks and conversation included.

£5 or £10 with discounted copy of Ache Issue 1.

Get your tickets here.