Although The Children’s Bookshow hits the road in the Autumn, tickets to many shows have already sold out and the remainder are selling fast. All performances include a free book for every child.
Marina Warner, the historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer, forms a persuasive case for fairy tales being a crucial repository of human understanding and culture in her very short introduction published by OUP. After all, they have the same core ingredients as most adult fiction: archetypal characters, conflict, desire, injustice, high octane drama, overcoming challenges, hope and heroism, beauty and blissful immersion in alternative worlds which reignite creativity and inspire new ideas. Their surreal magical quality and captivating illustrations make for a visual feast and offer a form of escapism from the real world around us.Continue reading Tours & Series | Top 5 Reads from The Children’s Bookshow 2023 | line-up 3
The Children’s Bookshow is back! The writers and illustrators of children’s literature touring the regions of England this year will be offering a fantastic variety of entertaining performances in which artists share stories, poems and live drawing, and talk to children about how they create. Siân Williams, founder of the tour back in 2000, was admirably astute in the way she took author events out of bookshops into much bigger venues, offering a great afternoon out to schoolchildren. The events are not organized from the point of view of the publisher and bookseller whose focus is just on selling books, so the atmosphere is like a gig or stand-up comedy performance and everyone has lots of fun!
#BookBlast is delighted to share with you the first line up of authors and illustrators and their books on show this year. More to follow . . . National treasure, Michael Rosen, will be performing again too.
See Michael Rosen in person: Peterborough – Wednesday 4 OctoberBOOK TICKET(S)
The Children’s Bookshow brings the joy of books and reading to schoolchildren across the UK each autumn. This year, the much loved and hugely popular national tour of writers and illustrators of children’s literature features an exciting line up of authors and illustrators celebrating 21 years on the road.
“Stories can be like magic. Sometimes they’re the only way to make sense of the world,” Michael Rosen
The beautifully written-and-illustrated books showcased in the 2023 Children’s Bookshow feature a wide variety of stories and endearing characters. A favourite is Stone Age Boy by author and illustrator Satoshi Kitamura. A little boy walking along trips up, stumbles and falls into the Stone Age! He meets a girl his own age, and her tribe, and learns all about their way of life. He watches them make tools, clothes, weapons . . . He sees how they hunt, fish, cook, celebrate, and how they paint on the walls of caves. But when a furious cave bear attacks, he wakes up back in his own time where everyone tells him it was only a dream . . . Or was it?
Our eclectic November top ten reads rejoice in strong women and have a radical, cosmopolitan flavour. We continue our celebration of 15 years of the Childrens’ Bookshow, highlighting two more books featured in this year’s tour. Happy reading! Georgia @bookblast
Strong Women
Rasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi (Pushkin Press) buy here Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France, Anne Marie Jackson
“A semi-literate peasant and a counsellor to the Tsar, a hardened sinner and a man of prayer, a shape-shifter with the name of God on his lips. They called him cunning. Was there really nothing to him but cunning? I shall tell you about my two brief encounters with him . . .” Teffi’s portrait of Rasputin, and her description of his unwanted advances, is a disturbing reminder of how sex-pests using positions of power to get their dirty way are not a new phenomenon. All of the women saying #MeToo on Twitter are standing on the shoulders of the women who came before them.
Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya – who wrote under the pseudonym Teffi – was born in 1872 into a family prominent in Saint Petersburg society. An essayist, poet and playwright, she became so popular that there were Teffi sweets and a Teffi perfume. She supported socialism and the 1905 revolution, and worked for the first Bolshevik paper, New Life, which was later shut down by the Leninist authorities. She left Russia in 1919 and settled in France, where she died in 1952. Her engaging, witty and empathic writing belies a bleak undertow of loss and nostalgia for lost worlds as she writes about life before the revolution, fellow writers, emigration, and life in Paris.
Oriana Fallaci by Cristina de Stefano (Other Press) buy here Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss
Our monthly round up of deliciously eclectic, mind-altering reads to see us into the Autumn now that summer is over.
Uncovering a Parisian Life
The Madeleine Project by Clara Beaudoux, translated by Alison Anderson (New Vessel Press) buy here
A young woman moves into a Paris apartment and discovers a storage room filled with the belongings of the previous owner, a certain Madeleine who died in her late nineties, and whose treasured possessions nobody seems to want. In an audacious act of journalism driven by personal curiosity and humane tenderness, Clara Beaudoux embarks on The Madeleine Project, documenting what she finds on Twitter with text and photographs, introducing the world to an unsung 20th century figure. Along the way, she uncovers a Parisian life indelibly marked by European history. This is a graphic novel for the Twitter age, a true story that encapsulates one woman’s attempt to live a life of love and meaning together with a contemporary quest to prevent that existence from slipping into oblivion. Through it all, The Madeleine Project movingly chronicles, and allows us to reconstruct, intimate memories of a bygone era. Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | September 2017
Rasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi (Pushkin Press) 
