The Reader 45 has arrived

The first 2012 issue of The Reader magazine has sprung to life and is full of robust, stimulating things to revive you in time for spring.

The actor and director David Morrissey is interviewed about being the dark and ‘locked in’ Bradley Headstone in the television adaptation of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, a role he reprised in December for our Penny Readings here in Liverpool. He also talks about playing Macbeth in the Everyman theatre and his how his childhood love of libraries continues to this day.

 There are two unsettling new short stories by Drummond Bone (late of the University of Liverpool) and Olivia McCannon; and a rattlebug of beautiful, bite-size poems by Carolyn Waudby, Sean Elliott and Richie McCaffery. Have you ever read a poem that actually looks like a tiny little bird, hopping among the hedgerows? Mark Leech’s ‘As a Wren’ embodies this precious, tough little thing –its trilling and peeping come alive when you read this poem aloud.

As ever, tales from The Reader Organisation give much to think on: Casi Dylan on the balance and play between prose and poetry in Get Into Reading groups; Beverley Laroc and Eleanor Stanton’s discussion on reading with older people and the place of libraries in the current climate; Lynn Elsdon on harnessing technology via TRO’s first online Evening Read-In (the second, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, starts 8^th March); and Natalie Evans’ elegant thought-piece on reading Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and its prescience to her and, more broadly, today’s youth unemployment crisis.

And that’s not all: Monday’s Featured Poem here on the blog will be from this issue’s ‘Poet on His Work’ – the wonderful and insightful Bernard O’Donoghue.  Pop back on Monday for this tantalising taster, or, better yet, get ahead of the game and subscribe now!