LibraryPicks | The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie & Brian Ireland | Manchester University Press

The Hippie Trail: A History by Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland is a rollicking and riveting read, chock-full of vivid anecdotes and insights. It is perfect for armchair travellers dreaming of happier times. How gentrified and commodified the world seems today!

“You can’t trust anybody who’s wearing a tie,” Jefferson Airplane

Gemie and Ireland appraise the broader social and political context, alongside the psychological and cultural worlds of the famously hirsute travellers. The resulting narrative is a blend of analysis and dialogues with eighty authors and interviewees who went on the trail in the late 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s on a quest for adventure, spirituality and escape from monotony, ending up – though not always – in Nepal. By the 1970s, Kathmandu was known as “the Benidorm of the dope trail”. (p. 104) 

Continue reading LibraryPicks | The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie & Brian Ireland | Manchester University Press

Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh must be one of the strangest examples of tourist literature ever written. Its focus is about visits to ‘the Zone’: the radioactive Exclusion Zone around the devastated nuclear power plant at Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling of the place). Markiyan Kamysh describes his frequent illegal visits to the Zone during the 2010s, before the Russian invasion. At first, these sound unbelievable. Why would anyone want to crawl through barbed-wire fences, run from border guards and — in winter — suffer below freezing temperatures as they spent days and nights sleeping rough in decaying apartments and collapsing industrial machinery?

Continue reading Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

Review | Rosa’s Bus, Fabrizio Silei, illus. Maurizio A. C. Quarello | Darf Publishers

Rosa’s Bus by Fabrizio Silei, who refers to himself as a “researcher of human stories and events”, is a perfect early learning book for children from the age of seven upwards. Beautifully illustrated by Maurizio A. C. Quarello, and sensitively translated from the Italian by Siân Williams, it is both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

What does Grandpa want to show Ben?
Why is Ben being told such a scary story about men in white hoods with eyeholes?
What happened to the dignified lady taken off the bus in handcuffs like a criminal?
Why did her one action and the protest that followed change history?

Continue reading Review | Rosa’s Bus, Fabrizio Silei, illus. Maurizio A. C. Quarello | Darf Publishers

News | Celebrating Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, 7pm 18 January 2023, Irish Cultural Centre, London

A celebration of 25 years of Banipal Magazine translating and publishing contemporary Arab literature in English is being held at 7pm on Wednesday 18 January 2023 at the Irish Cultural Centre 5 Black’s Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9DT.

All are welcome however registration by way of an RSVP to the editors of Banipal Magazine via this webpage is essential in order to be included on the Guest List and gain entry.  Continue reading News | Celebrating Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, 7pm 18 January 2023, Irish Cultural Centre, London

Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Take Six: Six Spanish Women Writers, (eds) Simon Deefholts & Kathryn Phillips-Miles | Dedalus Books

This welcome collection contains twenty-seven short stories by six influential Spanish women writers, written over the past one hundred and twenty years. The translations are fluent and easily readable, the editing ‘light-touch’ and unobtrusive.

One surprising feature of the stories is the constancy of the themes they address. The stories concentrate on marginalized, frustrated women, their lives stunted by male prejudice and violence. While the formats change, the key issues remain.

Continue reading Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Take Six: Six Spanish Women Writers, (eds) Simon Deefholts & Kathryn Phillips-Miles | Dedalus Books

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