3:AM recently teamed up with Rik Haslam and his long-running lit night Anything But Hackneyed, to bring Londoners readings from Toby Litt, Heidi James [3:AM’s arts editor] and Lee Rourke [3:AM’s reviews editor]. Ellis Sharp ventured into the “curious place” that is Hackney and writes:
The Broadway Bookshop turns out to be the kind of place I didn’t think existed any more – an independent shop run by a warm, friendly, knowledgeable owner with a fabulous choice of reading matter. Apart from one missing title, that is (for a local perspective, see Lara Pawson).
I would have had no problem spending £100 there but I disciplined myself to buy just one book (the Books I Must Read Next piles are already too big). The Broadway Bookshop supplied the perfect setting for the readings: intimate, book cluttered and on two levels. I purred with pleasure as I realised the back of my head was just inches from Finnegans Wake and the rest of Joyce’s oeuvre. With not enough seats and people sitting on the steps leading down to the back part of the shop, the ambiance was suitably enthusiastic for the readers. These consisted of Lee Rourke reading his sex-on-the-roof story (which if you are alert to contemporary writing you will already have read on the net), from his forthcoming collection of stories Everyday [Social Disease]; Heidi James reading from her forthcoming novel [Carbon, Wrecking Ball Press] – mesmerism, a girl growing up, memory and time, irruptions of the fantastic (among my loose impressions – plus some striking figurative language); Toby Litt reading a short extract from the start of his new novel Hospital, followed by the unpublished fairy story which supplies the book’s hidden key but which he discovered wouldn’t fit the published text, followed by the comic list of characters in Hospital (two of whom, he explained, are real people, who made a donation to the Medical Foundation for the care of victims of torture in order to appear in his novel, but neither of whom, he sardonically noted, had contacted him since its publication).
