Читать книгу Tales From Another Country - Группа авторов - Страница 5

Welcome to Tales from Another Country, an extension of that strange realm, the Another Country Bookshop. Showcased here are the winners of The Reader Berlin’s 2012 Short Story Competition. From Neil Bristow’s “The Inheritance”, which went on to win the competition and be published in The EXBERLINER, to the marvellous tales dreamt up by Ambika Thompson, Johanna da Rocha Abreu, Brittani Sonnenberg, Pippa Anais Gaubert and Marcus Speh, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to discover the work of such talented writers.

This project has been in the pipeline for some time now – time moves more slowly in Another Country – and since then The Reader Berlin has hosted all kinds of workshops and events in the creative writing sphere. It’s wonderful to see that Berlin continues to foster and attract authors from all over the world.

Some of our courses take place in the bookshop and I never come through the doors without experiencing a thrill of pleasure that such a place exists. It is, after all, the kind of bookshop one finds in books: ramshackle, pungent, full of odd finds. The librarian is herself a magical creature – part sphinx, part oracle. She of the roast bird-in-a-bird and dazzling non-sequiturs. You can eat, drink, smoke even, and there is a gratifying lack of signs telling you not to touch something. On a pile of books, papal purple, clasped tight as a rosebud, is a cabbage intended for Friday’s supper. Someone is having a nap by the radiator downstairs. Sophie busies herself creating questions for the quiz as customers recline in armchairs or roam the shelves.

Once upon a time there seemed to be more of these places, small kingdoms run according to the owner’s passionate enthusiasms, that you couldn’t imagine making a profit and yet which seemed to be there year after year. There is something magic about them, and these days we are less comfortable with magic – perhaps it reminds us too much of what we have lost – which is perhaps why they grow scarcer.

I would like to thank Sophie personally, not only for her support for The Reader Berlin, but on behalf of all of those who have over the years found in the bookshop, not only a source of reading matter (or, at the other end of the scale, sexual partners) but welcome, haven and society. She once told me with cheerful acceptance that not everyone who comes through her doors – for a book, or a workshop, or a Friday night feast – becomes a bookshop person, but I would like to imagine that they do, that that is the spell Another Country casts, and that no matter where they go and what they do, her customers will remain bookshop people, and I hope that this particular book will help them remember that.