Among the fiction presented in The White Review No. 30 is Preti Taneja’s ‘Hotel Stationary’, a capacious, closely patterned work of linguistic invention in which one woman’s nocturnal wanderings reveal the city as a site of memory and connection, and ‘Tuscan Leather’ by Laura Grace Ford, a portrait of care, vulnerability and hope set in an unmoored London of pirate radio stations, glowing pylons and hollowed-out pubs. The two writers will discuss their stories, and the challenges and possibilities of writing about urban life, in conversation with TWR editor Francesca Wade.

 

LAURA GRACE FORD is a London-based artist and writer concerned with the politics and poetics of place.

 

PRETI TANEJA’s novel We That Are Young is published by Galley Beggar Press. Hotel Stationary, the story of Maria, sister of Sabine, and Is, a hotel bellboy, was begun in London in December 2017, in a hotel notebook found while on tour for the novel. It travelled with her around the world over two and a half years, though the nature of hotel rooms often made it feel like she had stayed completely still. This gave the story its title, its subtitle and its form, and the constraint to keep writing until the notebook ran out of pages. Though the story takes place over a handful of days and nights, it was not finished until early 2020, in a hotel room in New York, just as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. The notebook was full; Preti returned to England to lockdown.

 

A Zoom link will be sent to all attendees on the day of the event. The event is free to attend, but please consider donating to support the work of The White Review and its writers. Sign up via Eventbrite here.