Book Salad

Please note, we will meet slightly earlier this month, at 6:15pm.

This is so we can escape quietly before our Alissa Timoshkina event starts, at 7:30pm.What is Book Salad? It's a book group.

We meet at the end of the month, usually on a Tuesday, and you're very welcome to join us.

To make a salad you put together different things you'd like to eat, and we do the same with reading.

We try all kinds of books, by all kinds of people.

We limit numbers to fifteen attendees and it's very friendly and informal.For our October book we will read 'The Impostor and Other Stories' by Silvina Ocampo, which has a strange and dreamy front cover with a pale hand reaching out of a snail shell.

We haven't read a book of short stories before, and I know nothing about Silvina Ocampo apart from that she was a Surrealist painter who also wrote odd stories, and was part of a group of Argentine writers including her sister Victoria (she had five sisters in total), her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges.This is one of those times that I've chosen a book because it's leaned forwards off the shelves and looked at me.Here's the blurb:" Fantastical, unnerving short stories from a Surrealist master of the form.Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs.

A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace.The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten woman writers.

Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, and much else that is mad, sublime, and delicious.With an array spanning the length of Ocampo's career, these haunting stories are among the world's strangest and best."What we might read nextHere is a provisional reading list for the next few months but I've more or less made it up based on books that have been winking at me from the shelves.

There will definitely be changes.November: 'The Topeka School' by Ben LernerDecember: 'Death Takes Me' by Cristina Rivera GarzaJanuary: 'Zone One' by Colson WhiteheadFebruary: 'Love In The New Millenium' by Can XueMarch: 'Pereira Maintains' by Antonio TabucchiApril: 'Landscape With Landscape' by Gerald MurnaneMay: 'Where Reasons End' by Yiyun Li