With the loosening of lockdown restrictions allowing all shops, stores, and close contact services to reopen from the 26th of April, it will be hard to not be overwhelmed by the amount of retail therapy that will soon be available. Above all, I am most looking forward to getting inside a bookshop again. Online shopping […]
As a lover of literature, I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t attended many book clubs before. Perhaps because I, like many others, enjoy reading as a solitary activity to escape having to interact with other people. But last week I attended the lovely Lighthouse Books’ queer writing book club, ‘Other Fruit’. This week’s book […]
As I settled down in my living room on Wednesday night to watch Eileen Myles chat to Rosa Campbell about their new novel on writing and craft titled For Now, I feared that I might be a tad disappointed with the live discussion. Whilst I am a huge fan of Myles, the topic of discussion […]
CW: Gender-based violence As Carolina Orloff, co-founder of Edinburgh-based Charco Press, softly reads the epilogue to Selva Almada’s Chicas muertas (‘Dead Girls’), the effect is piercing. Though panels such as this have had to migrate to the virtual sphere and audiences are quite literally muted, the silence that accompanies Almada’s devastating list of only a […]
Haunted Voices is an anthology of Scottish horror, featuring 31 diverse tales told by new and established oral storytellers. To celebrate its launch, brand new indie press Haunt Publishing invites the audience to Lighthouse Bookshop for a thorough spooking to usher in this fine selection of Scotland’s new gothic fiction. We hear from five of […]
Here are the top five places to read in Edinburgh – that are not the National Museum Balcony Cafe, because if we are honest, it is pretty, but it is expensive and the chairs are not comfy. Libraries Reading? In a library? How novel (sorry). Libraries are one of the only places left where you […]
On March 6, Lighthouse Bookshop played host to a night of poetry reading from the newly released book Multiverse: Science Fiction Poetry. For a night on which the rain seemed to be endless, this was a soothing retreat. The size of the bookshop meant that an audience no larger than thirty could be accommodated, allowing […]
The irony in the Kurdish situation, asserts Thomas Schmidinger, is that they only attract our attention by virtue of their enemies. When so-called Islamic State (IS) reached its threatening peak in 2014, it seemed that the Kurds were the only force capable of stopping them. As Syria’s miserable and messy civil war enters its 7th […]