emilycleaver.net

Fiction, reviews & articles

A Tale of Two Libraries

Latest blog post for Litro magazine… This month’s Litro has a bit of an East London thread running through it, which is appropriate for me, as I’ve been trudging the streets of the East End looking at libraries. Five years ago today, the old Whitechapel library closed its doors and made the controversial move a [...]

Word Hunting: A Language-Lovers Sport

Latest blog post for Litro.co.uk… There are some words that are worth keeping, I’ve always thought. Everyone has their favourites – my friend Neil always swears by cornucopia. Defenestration seems to come up quite regularly. I’ve heard a case made for infinitesimal, although I’ve always had a soft-spot for chevron. But there are thousands of [...]

A Week of Whales

Latest blog post for Litro.co.uk… I’ve been haunted by whales this week. It all started with Dave from my writing group trying to list songs about whales, which spawned an eclectic playlist. Then I turned on the TV to be confronted by a whale being dissected.  (They’d just gouged out something called the glove finger – [...]

Judging books by their covers: 75 Years of Penguin Sci Fi

Latest blog post for Litro Magazine… The main characteristic of the Penguin paperbacks we have on sale at the secondhand bookshop I work in is scruffiness. They’ve usually been read, re-read, loved, kept in pockets, stuffed under pillows and carried round in bags before being passed on to that great secondhand bookshop in the sky [...]

Torquemada and the Torturous Literary Puzzle

Latest blog post at Litro.co.uk… It might be a sign of the digital times, or an indicator of economic gloom, but working in a second hand bookshop can be slow. We have many techniques for passing the hours: Theatre-Direction Bingo (works especially well on a Saturday night in the West End), Weirdest Book Title competitions [...]

Book Clubs: Gangs In Fiction

Latest blog post at www.litro.co.uk… Gangs – it’s a great theme. Hasn’t everyone been in one at some point? We obsess about gangs as kids – starting them, desperate to be included in them, mortified at being barred from them. (Mine was called The Bourne Lane Bunch. We met in secret in the hen shed. [...]

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