Nina Mingya Powles and friends will be reading stories, essays and poems about food, to celebrate the launch of Nina's food memoir Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, published by The Emma Press.

Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food and belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.

Nina is joined by Pema Monaghan and L. Kiew.

£6

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The Second Shelf and Handheld Press are delighted to announce another book launch at the shop, once again recovering women's writing for new generations of readers to enjoy. Melissa Edmundson will be in conversation with writer and The Second Shelf proprietor Allison Devers and Handheld Press publisher Kate Macdonald to discuss Women's Weird, her new anthology of forgotten Weird fiction by outstanding women writers, originally published from 1890 to 1940.

Thrill to the terrifying visions conjured up by Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, May Sinclair, Mary Butts and D K Broster.

£6

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Join The Second Shelf and Weidenfeld & Nicolson to celebrate the re-issue of Susanna Moore’s magnificent In the Cut, a book that Kristen Roupenian, author of ‘Cat Person’, describes as “compelling, shocking, hot, scary”. Originally published in 1995, this chilling erotic thriller, now considered a cult classic, has been out of print in the UK for over twenty years. Lucy Scholes, The Second Shelf’s Managing Editor, will be in discussion with writers Megan Hunter, Sophie Mackintosh, and Olivia Sudjic, considering the importance of In the Cut both in the 90s, and why it still strikes a chord with them today, two and a half decades after it was first published. Moore, who lives in New York City, is the author of eight novels and two works of non-fiction. In 1999, she received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006, she received a Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Berlin.

£5

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Handheld Press joins The Second Shelf to launch their reissue of Rose Macaulay’s lost classic What Not. Introduction by Sarah Lonsdale.

Rose Macaulay's What Not is a lost classic of women's science fiction raging against eugenics and extremist ideologies in a new age of media manipulation. 

Published in 1918, What Not was hastily withdrawn due to a number of potentially libellous pages, and was reissued in 1919, but never regained its momentum although it notably preceded Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by 14 years. It is now republished for the first time with the suppressed pages reinstated.

Lucy Scholes (The Paris Review, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Granta and managing editor of The Second Shelf), will moderate a discussion about the text. Sarah Lonsdale, senior lecturer in journalism at City University London, will join us to introduce the work. 

Handheld Press has been nominated for the Bookseller's Small Press of the Year award, for the south-west of England.

£5 or £15 with discounted book.

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