// BOOKSACTUALLY RECOMMENDS //

The Promise Bird
by Zhang Yueran
translated by Jeremy Tiang

//

( An excerpt from The Promise Bird by Zhang Yueran )

“She sat over a tableful of bright seashells. They had been polished by a silk cloth until they glowed, like coral, like a young girl’s cheeks. My eyes still clouded by sleep, I thought I saw little highly-coloured skulls, vibrating gently in the wind that came from who-knows-where. Her normally dry eyes moistened, like lighthouses dappling the surface of an inky sea. Only at times like this could I see her pupils clearly. Such beautiful pupils, no one could think they couldn’t see.”

“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand other people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them.” 

― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

VINTAGE CLUEDO COFFEE TABLE

* have a good strong cuppa while solving the crime !

// BOOKSACTUALLY RECOMMENDS //

Stories To Get You Through The Night

with stories from Chekhov, Woolf, Munro, Murakami, Yates and many more
and an introduction by Henlen Dunmore

//

( An excerpt from On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl by Haruki Murakami )

“Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

‘This is amazing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.’

‘And you,’ she said to him, ‘are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.’

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not alone anymore. They had found and had been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, ‘Let’s test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is exactly what should we do.’

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test that they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.”

IN THE HAIRY ARMS OF WHITMAN
poems by Bill Kushner

FANCY CLOTHES

Don’t let the fancy clothes fool you.
Underneath I wear nothing but the 
truth, but what is true? That I grew
raised on macaroni & dreams, you
can bite me anywhere, & ouch you 
do. Do you always eat naked in
your socks, or what? Sometimes
when I look up, your face explodes
sun here, moon there, so I have no
idea. Sometimes, when I wonder 
who you are, really are, a you hand
me an olive, wet & green, & I bite
hard down, mmm delicious, oh pardon
my stare. Me, I’m just one lip, waiting
for one other. This is my story. This
is my song. Times when you’re awful 
& running, & when you tell me just of
enough to, & I can appear visibile, but only
to you. Then we put on our best shoes. Then
oh, we do put on airs, the music of the spheres.

SPINOZA DOESN’T COME HERE ANYMORE
poems by Colette Inez

UNLIKE MINDS

“God is not a mathematical diagram,”
Blake shouted, grappling with Newton’s 
insistence on reason.

The poet preferred cavorting
with cherubim and foolish virgins
in his garden.

What affects the apple affects the moon.
The vigil of science and the church 
converted to dust while worms grooved

their path towards Sir Isaac,
inventor of the laws of motion
before naked Blake claimed he and his Catherine

were Adam and Eve when the pastor came
and all conferred in the garden
of imagination with six-winged angels.

“ALL TEACHERS GREAT AND SMALL tells the true story of Andy Seed’s first year at Cragthwaite Primary School - how he bravely negotiated the vagaries of the local dialect, made disastrous bids to provide a family home, naively and hilariously tried out new-fangled ideas in a school stuck in a 1950s time warp, and ultimately discovered a little part of England he was proud to call home.

Warm, touching and very funny, All Teachers Great and Small transports you to a time that may be gone but has never been forgotten.”

All Teachers Great and Small

by Andy Seed