Another delicious literary guide…

Quick Post: New literary travel guide from Oxygen Books

This is by way of a brief ‘thank you’ to Malcolm at Oxygen Books for my lovely copy of the latest in the City-Pick  series: St Petersburg (edited by Heather Reyes, Marina Samsonova and James Rann). I have had it tucked away for a wee while and have only now started dipping into it. I began with some pieces on the Marinsky Theatre, Anna Pavlova and extracts from Truman Capote’s visit to the city on a cultural exchange tour in 1957.  After reading about St Petersburg in the snow I am feeling quite Christmassy already.

My first City-Pick guide was the Dublin guide which I originally wrote about for Hackwriters and which has seen plenty of wear in the meantime. If you want to read this piece I have now tweaked it and re-posted. (here). Similarly you might like to take a look at Amsterdam (here) which I wrote about after a weekend trip in 2011. Now all I need is a holiday in Russia….

Update ( June 2013) – I have been sitting on the Istanbul guide for a while and have been inspired to take it out after seeing the Bollywood film Ek Tha Tiger (Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif) in which part of the action takes place in this lovely city. Whether the book contains any anecdotes about secret agents (of any stripe) remains to be seen though. Mind you the plot of the film began in Dublin, so if there’s ever a revised edition of the Dublin guide perhaps it might include reminiscences from the Bollywood film crew. Now there’s a thought…

‘perfect gems of city writing’…