memoir – Stanfords Blog

Free Badiani Ice Cream with ‘You Deserve Good Gelato’ by Kacie Rose

You may have seen her hilarious TikTok videos about the everyday culture shocks of being an American living in Italy, now Kacie Rose has collated her experiences into a new book; You Deserve Good Gelato.

To celebrate the launch we’ve teamed up with DK and our neighbours Badiani for a delicious collaboration.

Visit Stanfords Covent Garden Store and get a FREE Badiani gelato voucher with your purchase of You Deserve Good Gelato between 28th May – 4th June

– 10% discounted gelato when you take your copy of You Deserve Good Gelato to any Badiani store across the UK from 28th May – 4th June.

An extract from Allegorizings by Jan Morris

The Stanfords November Book of the Month is Allegorizings by Jan Morris. Published one year on from her death, at the age of ninety-four, it is the final despatch from one of the greatest chroniclers of the Twentieth Century. To give you a taste, here is an extract from Allegorizings:

Paradise Somewhere

If paradise is the stuff of the conventional promise, all sweetmeats and complaisant houris, then I certainly have never experienced it. But a nirvana of a different kind I did transiently enter long ago, when I was on my way back to Kathmandu, in Nepal, out of the Himalayas. I was travelling with a Sherpa friend of mine. His name was Sonam. We had come out of the mountains fast, and when we got down into the foothills I began to feel ill and weak – the reverse of altitude sickness, I suppose. The monsoon had broken upon us, and the endless rain did not help, but ‘Come with me to my home village,’ Sonam said, ‘and we will make you better.’

An extract from ‘On Gallows Down’ by Nicola Chester

The following is an extract from On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2021) by Nicola Chester and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Bird in a Landscape

It is St George’s Day, late April, two days shy of my birthday. The sky is the colour of a pheasant’s egg and skylarks are singing against it at such a height I can’t see them. A just discernible shimmer of heat blurs the near horizon of orange gravel that marks the old runway of this former US airbase. I am sitting on my hands on top of an old American fire hydrant, its once-smooth sides speckled with rust and yellow and red paint curled and crusted like lichen. I can’t quite reach the ground and sit swinging my legs, a toe occasionally reaching a knobbly chunk of flint to kick away. I think I’ve been stood up.

The Long Field by Pamela Petro

Wales, and the Presence of Absence – A Memoir

by Pamela Petro

The Long Field burrows into the Welsh countryside to tell how the small country of Wales became a big part of American writer Pamela Petro’s life. Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue – Touring the World Speaking Welsh, writes about herself and Wales through the lens of hiraeth, a Welsh word famously hard to translate. (It can mean, literally, “long field.”) Hiraeth refers to a bone-deep longing for someone or something–a home, culture, language, a younger self–that you’ve lost or left behind or that was imaginary to begin with, hovering always in the future. It’s a name for the presence of absence.