My list is short this year, and I’m going to admit I’ve done significantly more reading of cookery books than actually cooking from them, which is very much reflected in my choices. You can take as read that the new

Dylan Jones's new book The Wichita Lineman explores the magic and mystery of the greatest song ever written. Penned in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, and made famous by Glen Campbell's woozily wonderful recording, ‘Wichita ...

Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai was published in 2000, loved by a small batch of devoted readers, overshadowed by the bad Tom Cruise film of the same name, and fell into print-on-demand obscurity a few years later. I ...

The best thing that’s happened in the cookbook world this year is the rehabilitation (in the minds of the British anyway – I don’t think anyone else needed it rehabilitating) of German cuisine, thanks to the ...

Welcome to the second in an extremely sporadic series in which I make a doomed attempt at constructing a pub walk based on a book published in the 1960s.

Taking The Ballad of Peckham Rye by our Author of the Month ...

Our bestselling food and drink book this year is from the indispensably brilliant Bee Wilson: This Is Not a Diet Book approaches healthy, balanced eating in a wonderfully sane and digestible way. Rejecting fad diets in ...

There’s an exhibition of Alasdair Gray’s art currently on at Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia. On display are beautifully delicate line drawings – many never shown publicly before – and joyfully powerful female ...

Officially, the Eurovision Song Contest is an apolitical event. In reality, it’s anything but. Chris West’s new book Eurovision!: A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest, just out from ...

This blogpost was originally written to explain Gayle's LRB Screen Bookseller's Choice, but since the whole thing was inspired by reading Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others, we thought we may as well recycle it in ...

For the second year running, our Food and Drink section has been dominated by Jay Rayner and his tiny paperbacks, last year’s My Dining Hell and the follow up The Ten (Food) Commandments. The top three is completed by ...

CUSTOMER: Do you have any signed Ian Rankin?

CAT, behind the till: Sorry, he hasn’t been in to sign for a while, I think we’ve run out.

CUSTOMER: Oh, that’s such a shame, I’m such a huge fan.

CAT: Well… if ...

Back in July, Keira from the Edinburgh Bookshop spent a week with us in the Bookshop. Next week, our Gayle is completing the exchange by travelling up to Edinburgh to work with them. You’ll be able to follow her ...

I’ve always hated tennis. As a kid, all Wimbledon meant to me was two horrible weeks every summer when BBC One didn’t show Neighbours. I got over my childhood aversion to most sports fairly quickly – first, ...

Tomorrow's screening of The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s 1984 adaptation of Angela Carter’s fairytale, promises a truly gruesome werewolf transformation scene. I can’t wait. In anticipation, here’s my top ...

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is possibly the most unfilmable of all unfilmable books, but Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story, which we're screening on Friday 22 January, is a valiant ...

You clearly all need some encouragement this year, as the bestselling book from our Food & Drink section by a country mile is Jay Rayner's My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways to Have a Lousy Night Out, which isn't a cookbook at ...

If you haven't yet been gripped by #ferrantefever and are wondering where to start, allow me to suggest Ferrante's second novel, Days of Abandonment. A slim volume (perfect for those who are unsure about committing to ...

It was only when I started exploring London's suburban northern edges that I really began to love this city. Maybe it’s that it reminds me of where I grew up: whether in London or out in the duller stretches of the ...

Summer is here (more or less), so it's the perfect time to get out and explore this wonderful city of ours. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be guiding you around London in all its vast and perplexing glory, from ...

Distance: About three miles, with all the twists and turns taken into account

Time: an extremely leisurely four hours, including pub stops. Best done on a weekday, to ensure everything’s open. (We learned the hard way ...

Gayle originally wrote this post for BookMachine, who have generously agreed to share. Check out their site for news, views and interviews from the publishing community.

If you spend a lot of time in the London Review ...

It didn’t take much bookselling nous to predict that The Bloomsbury Cookbook was going to be our bestselling cookbook this year. Jans Ondaatje Rolls’ look at the gastronomic side of the Bloomsbury Group is a ...

Concerning the question of who invented the frite, a bitter dispute still rages. The wider world might have settled on the 'French fry', but according to the Belgians, the ignorant American servicemen of WWI are to blame ...

Suddenly straw bears are everywhere. The one that has been looming from our front window since the beginning of August was originally built to celebrate Tate Britain’s exploration of British Folk Art, in pale imitation ...

It seems natural to assume that footballers aren’t big readers. I’m not making a lazy point about footballers being stupid: as professional athletes, they’ve been concentrating on doing one thing, really well, ...

I wasn't quite born when 18.5 million people watched Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis battle on into the small hours in the 1985 World Snooker Championship Final. Snooker as a wildly popular and glamorous sport is only a ...

My recollection of childhood is, for the most part, fairly hazy, but one memory that, for reasons unknown to anybody, remains diamond sharp in my mind is that of my nine-year-old self remonstrating with my mum in a ...

The strangest thing about The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. II is the photo on the cover. Taken in 1855, it shows a wonderfully stern-looking 20-year-old Twain, and while I absolutely approve of that fabulous sweep ...

I didn’t mean this to be about food and cooking, but as always, it’s somehow turned out that way. One of my favourite books of last year was Michael Pollan’s Cooked, a memoir-slash-call-to-arms about the history of ...

For as long as I can remember, there has been a battered old Penguin paperback of English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David that lives on the counter in my mum’s kitchen. It’s often accompanied by a ...

When buying books, my brain must make some kind of subconscious words-per-penny calculation, because I seem entirely unable to buy myself books if they are mostly made up of pictures, even though that’s always the ...

We receive a lot of post from our customers - thank you cards, Christmas cards, the odd Canadian $5 bill - and we appreciate every bit of it. But it's going to take an awful lot to top the card we received this morning. ...

As excuses to demand lovely new cookbooks from people go, there’s nothing quite like Christmas. Here’s my recommendation for what to put on your Christmas list this year.

For classic French cooking, the late Richard ...