Cheerio – The Bell Bookshop

Shopping lists

Emma — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

F****** genius!’ – Stanley Tucci. Some years ago, Ingrid Swenson began collecting found shopping lists from the same North London Waitrose. Enlightening and funny, fascinating, and poetic, these private notes to self-detailing someone’s weekly shop – rocket and antibacterial wipes, treacle and prawns, fags and milk – invite us to speculate on and imagine the private universes of their authors. They are, in effect, domestic haikus, scribbled on the back of letters and bills. Having formed the basis of an exhibition at the Art Workers’ Guild in 2017, Shopping Lists documents a consuming fascination – of both Swenson’s and her subjects’ – providing an amusing, insightful and occasionally profound insight into the lives of ordinary Londoners.

Kit

Emma — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy […] Kit reaches places other books don’t.’ – Max Porter’An extraordinary experience … It is work and voices like Megan’s we have to fight for.’ – Maxine PeakeMegan and Kit met in their early twenties. Their friendship was intense, wild and true. Years later, when Kit becomes desperately unwell, Megan tries to pull her old friend back from the precipice, navigating the difficulties of revisiting a relationship conceived in the great freedom of youth, whilst attempting to remain fully present in the messy beauty of her family life. Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication – and precariousness – of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end. Told in a spare, winding prose-poem, with a voice reminiscent of Max Porter, Elizabeth Smart, Kae Tempest and Rebecca Watson, Kit is a splintered, powerful work of empathy, friendship and unconditional love.

Bacon in Moscow

Emma — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘A rollicking cultural adventure… fascinating and true’ Grayson PerryThis funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious attempt by James Birch, a young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking retrospective of Francis Bacon’s work at the newly refurbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988. Side-lined by the British establishment, Birch found himself at the heart of a honey-trap and the focus for a picaresque cast of Soviet officials, attachés and politicians under the forbidding eye of the KGB as he attempted to bring an unseen western cultural icon to Russia during the time of ‘Glasnost’, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.Bacon in Moscow is the story of the evolution of an exhibition that was at the artistic and political heart of a sea of change that culminated with the fall of the USSR. ‘A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties’ Grayson Perry