A couple of weeks ago I compiled a (short incomplete) list of what was open in Bloomsbury - here are some updates.

Lunch

First, and most importantly, Franx Continental Cafe is back open. It isn't really in Bloomsbury - ...

Declan Ryan's debut pamphlet was published as part of the Faber New Poets series. His second pamphlet, Fighters, Losers, was published last year by New Walk.

Bar Italia

for Hugo Williams

I know the place. Rarely in ...

Life is gradually starting to return to Bloomsbury; if you’re planning to spend an afternoon pottering round the neighbourhood, here is a partial list of what’s open and what’s changed.

Other Bookshops

On ...

We’ve had a lively time over the last fortnight getting the shop in a fit state to reopen. To record how we did it for post-COVID posterity, I’ve been charged with creating a photo diary of the process.

There was ...

1. Changing the till roll on the till roll printer
2. Getting new till roll from the cupboard downstairs
3. Forgetting to order more till roll and having to borrow some from Bury Food and Wine
4. The satisfying heft of a bag of ...

Claudine Toutoungi's first collection, Smoothie, was published in 2017; Two Tongues will follow this autumn. As well as poetry, she writes plays for stage and radio.

Shipwreck

Leitmotifs of gorgeous hempen verisimilitude ...

This week's Poem of the Week is by Dai George, whose first collection, The Claims Office, was published by Seren in 2014. His debut novel, The Counterplot, is available as an Audible Original here. His next collection, ...

Adam Crothers' debut collection Several Deer was published in 2016, and won the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. A second collection, The Culture of My Stuff, will be published in May.

Nope

Try or try not, there is no ...

Our third Poem of the Week is from Sarah Fletcher. Fletcher's two previous pamphlets are Kissing Angles (Dead Ink) and Typhoid August (Smith Doorstop); a new pamphlet, Caviar, is forthcoming from Outspoken Press later ...

One of the poetry collections I’ve been looking forward to most this year is Country Music, the debut from Will Burns, and our Book of the Week. Will had very kindly invited me to DJ a country set at his launch, which ...

Our second Poem of the Week is from Rebecca Watts; her first collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published in 2016, and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection. A follow-up, Red ...

Over the next few weeks, we'll be using this blog to highlight poems by poets whose upcoming collections we're excited about; and as today is National Poetry Day it seemed a good day to kick things off. Our first poem is ...

A lot of people have been asking us recently, ‘what is the scientifically-proven best book to read while you’re self-isolating?’ Following a long evening of till-sponsored ‘research’ (e.g. shooting the bull and ...

Here's this year's Christmas Quiz. Email your answers to books@lrbshop.co.uk, using the subject header CHRISTMAS QUIZ ENTRY - the first correct answer drawn from a hat on the 6th January wins a 'relevant book'.

1) What ...

Here's some new poetry in translation I've been enjoying.

Un cuerpecito son muchas partes / A little body are many parts, by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and translated by Abigail Parry, is one of my favourite books of the ...

On the 9th January next year, Penguin will publish the 75th and final Inspector Maigret novel, Maigret and Inspector Charles. It’s been a remarkable project - the series has been entirely retranslated (wherever I’ve ...

It's absolutely terrifying that we're already halfway through 2019. Here are my favourite poetry pamphlets I've read this year.

Nobody Represents Me (Clinic)
Zeyar Lynn, trans. Zeyar Lynn, Ko Ko Thett and Vicky Bowman ...

Lieke Marsman's collection The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion Press), translated from the Dutch by Sophie Collins, is one of the most anticipated collections of the year: poems written in the months ...

Our Christmas Quiz this year is themed around 'Australian mammals', including mammals from all three of the main groups: monotremes, eutheria, and metatheria. Each round focuses on a different mammal. Answers should be ...

That tiresome uncle, who absolutely loves T.C. Boyle and has read every T.C. Boyle except for The Relive Box
SUGGESTED GIFT: a copy of The Relive Box by T.C. Boyle

That second cousin you haven’t seen since 1999 who ...

Mid-August, the dog days of summer - the perfect time to sit back and enjoy an evening with old friends: spicy snacks, good country music on the stereo, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, and last but not least, some literary ...

Good Morning.

My name is Prestell Jaffe, former CEO of Blockbuster Video and editor-in-chief of 1997 - the journal devoted to poems about films released in cinema's best ever year, 1997. There's a brief introduction to ...

Emily and I have been really enjoying the series of children’s books illustrated by Ingela P. Arrhenius, beginning with Where’s Mr. Dog and continuing through to Where’s Mrs. Zebra (published this year by Nosy ...

In January I started six months' parental leave to look after a lively seven-month-old called Emily. Here's what I've been reading. I've divided it into several categories and left children's books off it altogether ...

Peter Guillam climbed once again the familiar staircase in the familiar Mitteleuropa backwater where George Smiley had holed up for yet another go at retirement. The door was ajar; Smiley was in the bedroom packing his ...

Which literary characters are potentially vampires? We surveyed a wide audience on Twitter and elsewhere, and the following names kept recurring. Obviously we wouldn’t tell the Watcher Council how to do their business, ...

Good Morning.

My name is Prestell Jaffe, the former CEO of Blockbuster Video. Since retiring in 2009 and disgrace, I’ve long been thinking about my next project. I’d like to introduce you to ‘1997: A Journal of ...

Starting from the bookshop, how many poets' houses is it possible to visit in a single lunch hour? I decided to find out.

35 Boswell Street

35 Boswell Street - Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost, W.W. Gibson and Harold ...

There’s a strong case for 1993 being the second-best year in the history of film (behind the annus mirabilis 1997): Jurassic Park, Cool Runnings, Demolition Man, the unexpectedly excellent Hocus Pocus, bookshop ...

Our Twitter Competition to find the King of the Hunks among those smouldering figures of the page and screen, Andrei Platonov, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe and Shaun Evans, has concluded in a draw; as (some might ...

• Last year’s merger of Carcanet and Anvil was just the beginning; 2017 will be a Year of Consolidation. Picador and Cape will merge into a single terrifying conglomeration, Capador. Chatto & Windus will finally settle ...

Around this time last year, Natalia, the capricious manager of the LRB Bookshop, decided it would be a sensible business to set up a Shop Twitter Account. Over the subsequent twelve months, the account has gone from ...

As has become our custom, we present the Shakespeare Rankings for 2016 (Arden only). This year we also present the Shakespeare Big Nothings: the works of the Bard which have not sold a single copy in the past year. This ...

Superintendent Bright looked up from his desk and cocked his head. ‘Morse!’ he called, shrilly. ‘You like poetry, don’t you?’

The dashing Endeavour Morse filled in the answer to 3 down. ‘I do, sir. My ...

As a bookseller, there’s one question that I can be sure of hearing every year, round about now: ‘John, have you put up the Christmas opening hours blogpost?’ I smile every time I hear it, because it means one ...

If the Booker Prize had begun in 1900 - rather than in 1969 - who would have won each year? This is a provisional set of answers: if you have better suggestions, please email us, or tweet us using the hashtag ...

Pippa Middleton writes:

Now that summer is finally here, there's nothing I like more than to head to my local bookshop for a European Poetry Picnic! I've come up with a few hints to help you plan your own.

• Go for ...

Simon Armitage will be at the shop with Bernard O’Donoghue to read from and discuss his new translation of Pearl, the Middle English masterpiece from the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

There is ...

Natsume Soseki is the bookshop’s author of the month for May, and in celebration of his adventures as a student in London we are proud to present the Soseki Lunch Challenge. Starting from the Bookshop, our young hero ...

William Empson wrote The Face of the Buddha in the 1930s while teaching in China. After the war, he sent off the only copy of the manuscript to the publisher and son of a failed pepper speculator John Davenport, who ...

Morning found you lying…

a) In a sledge packed deep with straw, the fateful matting scarcely covering you
b) In a bunk bed above Nikolai Gumilev, your first husband
c) In a bunk bed under Anna Akhmatova, your ...

Donut Press are our Small Press of the Month: here's four of their best titles.

Colette Bryce, The Observations of Alexsandr Svetlov
Alexsandr Svetlov is an elderly Russian widower and poet. Bryce’s creation and ...

For the third year running, we’ve remembered to make a Christmas list of which Shakespeare plays have sold best in the bookshop. Normally the results are counterintuitive and point to strange undercurrents in ...

The bookshop quiz this year consists, as usual, of 28 pictures of chins. This year, however, there is an important difference – each chin is accompanied by a cryptic clue, which will reveal the name of its owner. ...

What do you get if you eat the Christmas decorations?
Such persons are hungry; the rival / ventures his life in deep water, the reddish gold / glints in the shadows of our lustful solitude.

Who is Santa’s favourite ...

‘So it exists,’ said David, as Christopher Ricks produced a brown A4 envelope from the folds of his copious jacket and passed it across the table. I held it up for a moment: Not Until December 2015, read the ...

From The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Iona and Peter Opie, (1958):

Also deserving of remark, though marked much less than it was formerly, is the 22nd October, the day of the T.S. Eliot Prize Shortlist ...

Tomorrow, so I am reliably informed, is both National Poetry Day and the eighth day of the London Review Bookshop’s Italy month. Author of the month, small press of the month and now country of the month – it’s all ...

The hacks filed grumpily back into the press room. ‘I wish I knew what this was about’, muttered the Daily Record’s Science Correspondent to a chorus of affirmation. ‘Fly us out here to announce they’ve found ...

The experience of reading J.H. Prynne’s Al-Dente is utterly sui generis; from the baffling collision of particles which begins ‘Morning’ (‘To the or so then for all for on, both for / these an or then…’), to ...

John Hartley Williams was little-known enough that, reading him, you felt party to a great literary secret, like stumbling across an astonishing restaurant down an unpromising back alley. I started with his ...

It’s a long-running bookshop tradition, when Carcanet release one of their marvellous New Poetries anthologies, for us to release a blogpost comparing each poet to a classic country album. This feature has been called ...

Due to their utter spinelessness, there’s always a risk of poetry pamphlets getting lost on the shelves – which is a real shame – there’s some wonderful stuff in the shop at the moment. Especially exciting are ...

This is a ranking of all G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, which to my taste are the best short mystery stories I’ve read. I admire their freedom with genre and setting, jumping easily from Gothic horror ...

The Forward Prize for Poetry shortlist has been announced, always an exciting time in the bookshop, as it gives us a chance to wheel out our literary tipster 'Lucky Jim', who for the rest of the year is kept frozen in ...

From Empire Antarctica:

• It is possible to taxidermize a baby penguin using carpet tacks, a toffee hammer, rolled-up tissue paper, wood glue and marbles (for the eyes).
• Early whaling vessels used penguin corpses as fuel ...

A chilly wind blew through the inexpertly stoppered keyhole, and in the basement the lights fizzled and dimmed. The staff of the LRB Bookshop were gathered around the fancy table, together with Fox and Dana, two ...

I amar prestar aen. The world is changed. Han matho ne nen. I feel it in the water. Han mathon ned cae. I feel it in the earth. A han noston ned gwilith. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now ...

Paul Durcan has found a style like no-one else’s, a style that it is hard to imagine anyone else making anything out of: wildly varying line lengths, faux-naïve rhyming, conversational banalities, adjectives piled on ...

Karl Ove Knausgaard's latest volume, Dancing in the Dark, gives us Knausgaard aged 18, moving to the small town of Håfjord in the Arctic Circle to become a high school teacher. It joins the pantheon of books taking ...

Newly arrived in the bookshop: 80 short and wonderfully chosen books from Penguin, selling for a mere 80p a pop, to celebrate the publishing house’s 80th birthday. Just to show how heartily we approve, here is our ...

The first time I read Elaine Feinstein’s poetry I was in a filthy temper because the mustard in a bratwurst I’d been holding at an angle had escaped onto my trousers earlier that afternoon, and then a thunderstorm ...

Gloomy prognostications about the future of the book trade are ten a penny; what's missing is a hearty dose of out-of-the-box strategy. This ten-point plan would allow the industry to adapt to the changing marketplace, ...

Probably it’s best for small presses to aim at doing one thing really well. Rack Press, run by the indomitable Nick and Sue Murray, has for ten years coming up this February produced lively, interesting poetry ...

In the tradition which has been called 'without question, the most important critical project in Shakespeare studies today' (Professor E.G.C. Kipling) and 'an astonishingly accurate barometer of Shakespeare's ...

A breathless hush settled over the basement, as the assembled throng took last gulps of white wine, rehearsed speeches in their heads (not that they thought they were going to win, but just in case, just in case), or ...

Ahead of our pickle competition, John has racked his brains to come up with some of the finest instances of pickles in literature, from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. He analyses his findings here.

From Shakespeare:

...

• ‘Neither fish, nor fowl, nor good Red Herring’ is an expression long overdue a revival. It might be valuable for books that can’t decide which section they belong in, like Simon Gough’s novel-cum-travel ...

The Forward Prize for Poetry was announced last night: Kei Miller won the Best Collection award for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Liz Berry won the Best First Collection award for Black Country, and Steven ...

The London Review Bookshop has announced today that it will be opening a franchise in the popular block manipulation world of Minecraft. The surprise move followed the LRB Hackday, or Company Jaffabout, held in the ...

In advance of our Book of the Week on Friday (NO SPOILERS), here’s a contentious list of the ten greatest short stories in English. It’s especially contentious because I’ve got particularly firm criteria for what ...

Find out with our Father's Day quiz!

1) Some fathers never get out of their armchairs; others can’t be extracted from their sheds. Where are your children most likely to find you?

a) There, on your sad height
...

The shortlist for the Forward Prize for Poetry has been announced, accompanied by much tiresome doomsaying from Jeremy Paxman and the Guardian. ‘[Paxman’s] words come as official figures show a decline in poetry ...

The name of Pied Bull Yard, the hidden court behind the London Review Bookshop, cannot be traced back earlier than 1827, we learn from the indomitable Londonist. An earlier map of 1746 gives it as ‘Stable Yard’, ...

Adam Foulds is in conversation with Andrew Motion at the Bookshop on Wednesday 12 March. We asked him a few questions about research, ideas, prose and poetry.

In The Wolf’s Mouth, like The Broken Word and The ...

Weather and the Northern Line permitting, in the morning I like to get off the tube at Euston and walk the last mile into work. The back way into the bookshop (through the hidden cut into Pied Bull Court) takes me along ...

To celebrate the Chinese Year of the Horse, a composite horse made up of quotations from poets born in the Year of the Horse:

I’m dreadf’lly concerned for Matilda,
Who seems to believe she’s a horse,
a stuffed ...

Congratulations to Sinéad Morrissey, whose fifth collection, Parallax, was last night awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. It’s well-deserved; the book is fantastic, a favourite among the bookshop staff for its ...

Email your answers to the Book Shop - the first correct set of answers drawn out of a hat on 31 January will win a copy of Meeting the Devil, the new collection of the personal essays and memoirs from the London Review ...

Looking through our Biography section on a whim, I noticed something odd about cover photos. It’s fairly common for the subject of the biography to be facing straight forward; equally, there’s plenty of photos where ...

Something to read in the bath on Boxing Day: How had I not come across E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels before? They look incredible: two scheming provincial ladies battling over the minutiae of village politics. ...

The results are in, and here are the ten bestselling Shakespeare plays in the London Review Bookshop so far this year (Arden Edition league).

In joint fifth place: Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of ...

Mihály, the hero of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight, ought to be one of the most frustrating characters in literature; vacillating, weak-willed and constantly misjudging the situation, he blunders from one ...