London Review Bookshop Podcast

Holly Pester’s Cafés (Fitzcarraldo) continues the trajectory which, since her debut Comic Timing, has made her one of the most exciting poets writing. An elegy for lost communal space, and a stylish political intervention, Francesca Wade has described Cafés as embodying ‘a public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester's brilliance builds this cafe up and invites us in to linger’. Pester was in conversation with Luke Roberts, lecturer at King’s College London, co-director of the small press Distance No Object, and author of (most recently) Bad Omens (Book Works). You can buy a copy of Cafés from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, they began to meet regularly, to talk, to eat and to swim. What would it be like, Baume wondered, to write a book in the style of Mollie’s painting? Opening Night is the result. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days. You can buy a copy of Opening Night from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a series of provocative essays encompassing Marilyn Monroe, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats, Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now, seeks to put the femme back into feminism. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. She was in conversation with novelist and poet, Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. You can buy a copy of Femmephilia from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To call Elizabeth Bishop one of the greatest female American poets of the 20th century is to make too many qualifications. Increasingly, critical opinion has converged with Dwight Garner’s assertion that she was perhaps ‘the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century’. To mark the publication of his new book, Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing, Andrew Dickinson was in conversation with the poet and critic Peter McDonald. Poet Mark Ford, actor Juliet Stevenson and writer Lamorna Ash will also read from a selection of Bishop’s work. You can buy a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Colin Grant and WritersMosaic writers have travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather the voices and experiences of immigrants living in Britain. In What We Leave We Carry we meet, amongst others, a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, and a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. Grant was in conversation with the author, broadcaster and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin Maglaque’s first book, Presence, explores the hidden history of the female body through deep archival research: fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries come together to make tangible a vanished past, unfamiliar because of its deliberate suppression. The artist Celia Paul has described Presence as ‘a landmark book’, which makes the female body in the past ‘real as never before’. Maglaque was in conversation with Hannah Dawson, a historian of political thought at King’s College London and the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. You can buy a copy of Presence from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The kitchen has always been a complex space for women: a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself? In The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo Press) Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships and what it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. Davies was in conversation with Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires and editor at Vittles magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Prize, the Costa, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus) is the eagerly-awaited follow-up: Saba Sams has described it as ‘gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny’. Long read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Howe, poetry editor at Chatto, whose own second collection Foretokens was published last year. You can buy a copy of Sparrow on the Rooftop from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Michael Bracewell’s new novella The Smiths an anonymous narrator recounts the impact of the iconic pop group on his life. Accompanied by the French actress Carole Bouquet he embarks on a picaresque journey from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood, via a park bench in Cavendish Square. Deeply romantic and laced with comedy - not unlike the band themselves – The Smiths is an affectionate celebration of a pivotal episode in popular music history. The author read from his work, and discussed it with the novelist and journalist Leo Robson. You can buy a copy of The Smiths from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot. Dark Night (Penguin Classics) gathers all of John’s poetry, together with a selection of his prose. The book’s translator, poet Martha Sprackland, joined LRB contributing editor James Butler for a discussion of the life and work of John of the Cross, and his abiding influence. You can buy a copy of Dark Night from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Venice, September 1974. A chance meeting between a young English artist and Danilo Donati, production manager for Fellini and Pasolini, leads us into a tale of queer love, political intrigue and brutal murder. Emily Watlington wrote in Art in America ‘In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing's novel feels eerily timely.’ To mark the paperback publication of The Silver Book Olivia Laing was reading from their work, and in conversation with Jack Parlett, author of Flamboyance, Fire Island and The Poetics of Cruising. You can buy a copy of The Silver Book from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power Lauren Elkin uses her own experience of training as a young soprano in the 1990s as a springboard for a powerful investigation of the female voice, from Maria Callas to Beyoncé and beyond. Part manifesto, part cultural history and all full-throated celebration, Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms and hymn of praise. Lauren Elkin was in conversation with writer, academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari. You can buy a copy of Vocal Break from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s new book Said the Dead is part history, part ghost story and part unreliable memoir, exploring the lives, presences and forgotten voices of a derelict Victorian mental asylum in Cork. Ní Ghríofa, whose previous book A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was in conversation with Rachael Allen, author of the poetry collections Kingdomland and God Complex. You can buy a copy of Said the Dead from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular LRB contributor Daniel Trilling has been researching and writing about the far right in Britain and beyond for more than a decade. His latest book If We Tolerate This (Picador), published ahead of the momentous English local, Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections on May 7, is a short and powerful polemic examining how far right ideas have come to dominate the political agenda, and outlining a strategy for how we might combat them. Pankaj Mishra writes ‘Combining forensic enquiry with moral passion, Daniel Trilling has emerged as one of our most intrepid and resourceful reporters.’ He was in conversation about his work with William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of This Is Not Normal and Nervous States. You can buy a copy of If We Tolerate This from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The great M. John Harrison – ‘The closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ according to the New Statesman – returns to the shop to present his latest novel The End of Everything. In a post-apocalyptic Britain a beachcomber makes his living collecting artefacts washed up on the Channel shore. But when he comes across a strange, shape-shifting creature he realises he must take it inland, before it destroys everything he knows. The author was in conversation with Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites, Our Wives Under the Sea and Salt Slow. You can buy a copy of The End of Everything from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book. You can buy a copy of Ambivalence ⁠from the London Review Bookshop⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Keenan’s Boyhood (White Rabbit) opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, blessed with the power to see into the past and future by a perhaps imaginary angel, leads us on a journey from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, as the novel builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption. ‘A complete triumph’ writes Irvine Welsh. ‘It slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove.’ David Keenan read from Boyhood, and talked about its themes, with LRB contributing editor Andrew O’Hagan. You can buy a copy of Boyhood from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary burning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it. You can buy a copy of The Wonderful World That Almost Was from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Tea’s queer autofictional classic Valencia, which Torrey Peters described as ‘one of the few truly life changing books I've encountered’, is a quarter of a century old; to celebrate, her UK publisher Serpent’s Tail have released a 25-year anniversary special edition, with a new introduction by Maggie Nelson. Tea was in conversation with Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear and Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever. You can buy a copy of Valencia from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While recuperating in hospital in Mexico, Flora meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. Then things take an unexpected turn… Ardijis was reading from The Shadow of the Object and in conversation with Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine, whose most recent book was The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. You can buy a copy of The Shadow of the Object from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To celebrate the publication of their respective new books, So Mayer (Bad Language) and Sarah Schulman (The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity) discussed the radical affinities between their work in exposing the power structures underpinning both the ways in which we communicate, and the language we use to do so. You can buy Bad Language and The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Drabble’s new collection, The Great Good Places, is an omnium gatherum of essays, stories and memoir, drawing on a lifetime’s worth of insight and wisdom. ‘Generous, perceptive, and good-humoured, Margaret Drabble is always a delight to read’, wrote Joan Bakewell; The Great Good Places has all these qualities in evidence. Drabble was in conversation with Tessa Hadley, whose most recent novel is The Party (Vintage). You can buy a copy of The Great Good Places from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Am I, A Deer?, Polly Barton’s debut novel, takes on the vagaries of translation – linguistic translation, self-translation, and reinvention – which she’s previously explored in the much-loved Fifty Sounds, also published by Fitzcarraldo. ‘The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schrödinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the ‘black box’ of the karaoke booth; inside and outside simultaneously, trying to figure out whether she exists and in a state of tingling oscillation’, writes Jen Calleja. ‘Polly Barton is the maestra of controlled dissolution.’ You can buy a copy of What Am I, A Deer? from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an audacious new take on the campus novel Luke Kennard’s protagonist, a penniless out-of-work actor, takes on a job unlike any other. He is hired to sit silently at the back of a lecture hall, concealed within a black bag. Black Bag (John Murray) examines, hilariously, modern masculinity, romance, identity and much else besides. ‘Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining’ writes Anna Metcalfe. ‘Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged. A deeply cathartic read for anyone seeking the funny side of the total decimation of the arts.’ Luke Kennard was in conversation with fellow poet and novelist Will Eaves. You can buy a copy of Black Bag from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Magic and Mechanics, the latest in Scratch Books’ ‘Reverse Engineering’ series, six writers – George Saunders, Claire-Louise Bennett, Mark Haddon, Camilla Grudova, Amber Medland and Colin Barrett – present and disassemble one of their recent short stories. To celebrate its launch, join Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with novelist Ben Pester as they discuss their work, exploring the ways that their backgrounds in theatre have led them to create exhilarating and innovative prose writing. You can buy a copy of Magic & Mechanics from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Analogue Africa, (Verso) essayist and LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding explores the anti-colonial imagination through the works of African artists and film-makers, including Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. ‘In Analogue Africa, [Harding] is writing at the peak of his powers’, writes Adam Shatz, ‘eloquent, perceptive, attentive at once to questions of form and to the moral and political stakes involved in the creation of postcolonial culture.’ Harding was in conversation with Kevin Okoth, author of Red Africa and regular contributor to the LRB. You can buy a copy of Analogue Africa from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a steamy Netflix show called ‘Cheating’ becomes the much-talked-about megahit of the moment, baby-boomer Kate is alarmed to find it contains secrets from her marriage to architect husband Jack that only she should know. John Lanchester, LRB contributing editor and author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital, explores popular culture, the dynamics of marriage and intergenerational conflict in his latest novel Look What You Made Me Do (Faber). Lanchester was in conversation with Hattie Crisell, author of In Writing (Granta). You can buy a copy of Look What You Made Me Do from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbitbox is Wayne Holloway-Smith’s first foray into long-form narrative, but retains the originality, compression and power which characterize his poetry collections (most recently Love Minus Love, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize). Exploring a mother and her young son’s reactions to an all-consuming domestic threat, Joelle Taylor has described how, in Rabbitbox, Holloway-Smith ‘bunches language like a fist, one that unravels into shadow butterflies’. Holloway-Smith was in conversation with the actor Adeel Akhtar. You can buy a copy of Rabbitbox from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artist and film-maker Lauren J. Joseph’s first novel At Certain Points We Touch, described by Olivia Laing as ‘A stone-cold masterpiece’ was hailed as a Debut Novel of the Year by the Observer in 2022. Her second novel takes us from the night-spots of Soho to the febrile Berlin music scene. A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to feel loved, Lean Cat, Savage Cat (Bloomsbury) is an unforgettable novel from one of the most exciting writers at work today. The author was in conversation about her book with Olivia Laing, who describes it as ‘An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration.’ You can buy a copy of Lean Cat, Savage Cat from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isabel Waidner’s latest novel As If (Hamish Hamilton) is an existential farce exploring fading hopes and lost dreams through the medium of two very different, but very similar men. ‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ wrote Jude Cook in the Guardian. Waidner was in conversation with artist and film-maker Sarah Wood. You can buy a copy of As If from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has been a shop favourite ever since we discovered Long Live the Post Horn, a powerful tale about loneliness and the struggle between capitalism and humanity told through the microcosm of the Norwegian postal service. Hjorth is in conversation with Catherine Taylor to discuss Repetition (Verso), her sixth novel to be published in English, translated by her indefatigable champion Charlotte Barslund. As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to re-examine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic and the former deputy director of English PEN. Her first book, The Stirrings, won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir and life-writing. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest novel Your Life Without Me (Canongate) journalist and novelist James Meek investigates the unpredictable links between personal trauma, family dysfunction and political violence. A retired schoolmaster is invited by the police to meet a former pupil accused of plotting to destroy St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘This is his best novel yet, writes Alex Preston, ‘a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth.’ James read from his book, and was in conversation about it with the writer Lara Pawson. You can by a copy of Your Life Without Me from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder. One in four adults are prescribed psychiatric medication. These numbers represent a huge and recent expansion in mental health labelling, but reveal nothing of the experience of those seeking help. In The Unfragile Mind, Gavin draws on conversations with patients, colleagues, and his thirty years of practice to explore the chequered history of psychiatry, the nature of mental health and ill-health, and the problems - including mood disorders, trauma, anxiety and addiction - that he addresses daily. The mind, he argues, is dynamic and adaptive - better addressed not with rigid labels and protocols, but with curiosity, kindness, humility and hope. Francis was in conversation with Philippe Sands. You can buy a copy of The Unfragile Mind from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anouchka Grose, a psychotherapist specialising in climate anxiety, became disillusioned with the apparent futility of activism as it is normally conceived, resolved to look inwards, seeking a way to revolutionise the self in response to polycrisis. The Revolution Will Be Internalised (Indigo) documents that inward journey, encompassing ego-dismantling retreats, animal communication, and tantra. Grose will be in conversation about her work with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Daddy Issues and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. You can buy a copy of The Revolution Will Be Internalised from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Tell Me How You Eat (Hutchinson Heinemann), Amber Husain draws on her own experience of the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders as well as on an omnivorous diet of reading that ranges from Eleanor Marx to the Black Panthers and beyond to ask profound questions about our relationship with food, and what a truly healthy diet might be, both for ourselves and for society as a whole. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days. You can buy a copy of Tell Me How You Eat from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the release of the second print edition of contemporary food and culture magazine Vittles, writers Sheena Patel and Lauren J Joseph will discuss the short stories they contributed to the issue. One of the through lines of Issue 2 – which is themed around the notion of ‘Bad Food’ and celebrates the gross, vulgar and unaesthetic aspects of how we feed ourselves that don’t align with the aspirational bent of typical food media – is an exploration of the inter-relations between food, sex, bodies and desire. Patel and Joseph were in conversation with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue about the relationship between food and the erotic in their writing. You can buy a copy of Vittles, issue 2 from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King (Granta) the narrative switches between two increasingly intermingling timelines, medieval and contemporary, as a modern curator becomes absorbed in the story of a half-forgotten monarch struggling to maintain his rule. Perry is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections Beauty/Beauty and Stone Fruit and was in conversation about her debut novel with fellow poet K Patrick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016 the painter Chantal Joffe approached the writer Olivia Laing to ask if they would sit for a portrait. Out of that meeting emerged a close friendship and collaboration, and out of that collaboration has emerged Painting, Writing, Texting (Mack), an account in words and images of what can happen when two ways of looking at the world converge. Painter and writer were at the shop to talk about art, writing and collaboration, chaired by Emily Labarge (Dog Days). You can buy a copy of Painting, Writing, Texting from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an episode of the LRB podcast Aftershock recorded live at the London Review Bookshop, Daniel Soar and contributors discussed the long aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror, from Iraq and Afghanistan to drone strikes, mass surveillance and the weaponisation of the financial system. What is the legacy of Bush and Cheney’s ‘forever war’ in today’s White House? Joining Daniel Soar were Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published in 1974 Freudianism was seen by most feminists as ineradicably patriarchal and inimical to the women’s movement. Mitchell’s brilliant exegesis, drawing on Lacan and Laing as well as Freud himself, instead sees Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and seeks to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself. To mark a new edition of her seminal work from Verso Mitchell revisits its arguments in conversation with curator, art historian and writer Frances Morris who was, from January 2016 to February 2023, director of the Tate Modern. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the publication of Knife Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois (Yale) its author, curator and art historian Marie-Laure Bernadac was in conversation about the life and work of Louise Bourgeois with the book’s translator, Lauren Elkin. ‘Bernadac's remarkable biography has made the telling of Louis Bourgeois's life into a new art’ (Juliet Mitchell). You can buy a copy of Knife Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author of thirteen novels, several collections of short fiction, memoirs, books for children and screenplays, Jeanette Winterson is one of our greatest and most accomplished storytellers. In her latest book One Aladdin , Two Lamps (Cape) Winterson turns to the art of storytelling itself, using the legend of Shahrazad in The Thousand and One Nights as a springboard to ask, and suggest answers to, some of the great questions: Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? And what makes us happy? You can buy a copy of One Aladdin, Two Lamps from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michèle Roberts discusses the follow-up to Bookshop bestseller French Cooking for One with Alice Blackhurst. You can buy a copy of French Cooking for Two from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Once and Future Riot (Cape) cartoonist Joe Sacco turns to the communal riots that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 2013. With works such as Palestine, Safe Area Goradze, The Fixer, War Junkie and Footnotes in Gaza Sacco single-handedly invented the genre of graphic reportage, and remains its leading exponent. He was at the shop to talk about his work on the frontline of global conflict, and the role that imagery can play in raising awareness. Sacco was in conversation with writer and editor Skye Arundhati Thomas whose book Palestine is Everywhere has just been co-published by Silver Press and TBA21. Their earlier books include Pleasure Gardens, co-written with Izabella Scott, and Remember the Details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ghassan Kanafani, born in Acre in 1936, displaced by the Nakba in 1948 and assassinated in Beirut in 1972, was one of the leading Palestinian writers of his generation. In an event to mark a new edition of his masterpiece Men in the Sun (Verso) British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad (Enter Ghost) was in conversation about his work, both literary and political, with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at Exeter University and author, most recently, of Extractive Capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Up in the Air (Verso) architectural historian Holly Smith tells the story of Britain's multi-storey council housing from its beginnings to the present day, charting how at different times it became the symbol of the welfare state’s idealistic principles, and of its failures. Building on extensive research, Smith tells the story of high-rise housing from the perspective of those who lived there, from Sheffield to Liverpool to London. Smith was in conversation with historian Owen Hatherley, whose most recent book is The Alienation Effect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Attention (Jonathan Cape) collects for the first time Booker prize-winning novelist Anne Enright’s non-fiction. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, taking us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, delving into Enright’s own family history and offering new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. Enright was in conversation with Clair Wills, author of Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Remedies (Hazel Press) playwright, poet, novelist, biographer, historian and much else besides Julia Blackburn meditates on the images, amulets and incantations that have been used to cure illnesses from ancient times to the present day, offering a set of poetic keys to unlock the mysterious, subtle space between mind and body. Blackburn was in conversation with the folklorist Sarah Clegg, author of The Dead of Winter and Woman’s Lore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork, carries water from the Owens Valley, across the desert to a barren corner of California. Without it, the city of Los Angeles and the film industry as we know it would not exist. In Aqua (Canongate) writer and film-maker Chiara Barzini explores this contested land and waterscape, blending travel writing, philosophy, cultural history and memoir in a hugely entertaining meditation on water, film, dreams versus reality, and an empire on the brink of catastrophe. Barzini was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, who has described Aqua as ‘outrageously good’ and ‘unforgettable’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ena Khalaf Tuffaha was born in Seattle but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and her poetry reflects on her Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage and on her experience as a first-generation American immigrant. In Something About Living (the87press), winner of the National Book Award in 2024, her poems interweave the history of Palestinian suffering and resistance with the challenges of living in a world full of violence and the gentle pleasures we embrace in order to survive that violence. Tuffaha will be reading from her work, and discussing it with writer, bookseller and film curator So Mayer, whose most recent book is Bad Language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America's most audacious writers with works such as Haunted Houses (1986) and Weird Fucks (2021). In Thrilled to Death (Peninsula) Tillman has curated a definitive selection from her short fictions, by turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt. Tillman read from her work, and was in conversation with Brian Dillon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest novel Death and the Gardener Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s leading writer of fiction and winner of the International Booker Prize (forTime Shelter), reflects on the subject of loss in a tale about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia. Gospodinov will be presenting his work in conversation with writer and critic Chris Power. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Perry discussed her extraordinary new memoir with Amy Key. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her second novel Will There Ever Be Another You (Bloomsbury), LRB contributing editor Patricia Lockwood, one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, conducts a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times, centring on the life of a young woman whose internal disarray echoes that of the world at large. Lockwood was in conversation with writer and poet Joe Dunthorne, whose books include O Positive, Submarine and Children of Radium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

T.S. Eliot prizewinning poet Sarah Howe discusses her new collection with Sandeep Parmar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our preeminent historian of Germany turns, in A Scandal in Königsberg (Allen Lane), to an intriguing sequence of events that has fascinated for many years. In 1830 Königsberg, now the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was a somewhat sleepy backwater, famous mainly for having once been the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But its tranquility was shattered by a religious scandal, implying that beneath the town's somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. Clark’s deft treatment of the material, combining erudition and humour, makes this forgotten piece of history very much a tale for our times. Clark was in conversation with acclaimed mythographer, historian and iconologist Marina Warner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Books: A Manifesto (Weidenfeld) subtitled How to Build a Library, poet and critic Ian Patterson reflects on a life spent with and formed by books. Now, as he constructs the last of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of reading in our lives - from Proust to Jilly Cooper, from golden-age detective novels to avant-garde poetry. He talked about books and libraries with the novelist Ali Smith who, in Public Library and Other Stories, explored our many-faceted fascination with the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his bestselling debut The Examined Life psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explored how we learn to live. Now in Love’s Labour (Chatto) he turns to the equally perplexing topic of how we love. Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there? Grosz was in conversation with Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In All Consuming (Serpent’s Tail) Ruby Tandoh wittily explores the way we eat now, from social media to restaurant critics to the perfect dinner party to the meteoric rise of bubble tea. Felicity Cloake, author of Completely Perfect, writes ‘Fascinating, funny and devastatingly honest, a must-read on modern food culture in all its technicolour cheese-drenched glory.’ Tandoh was in conversation with the essayist and novelist Olivia Sudjic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leading Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison will be in London to present her latest work, Dante’s Inferno (Carcanet). As much a transformation as a translation, Goodison’s reworking casts the great Jamaican folklorist and poet Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett-Coverley as Virgil, and moves the action to the Caribbean, where we encounter other poets, including Goodison’s friend Derek Walcott, local politicians, reggae pioneers and other figures from the island’s past, at the same time endowing Jamaican patois with a startling beauty and power. Goodison was in conversation with poet and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Empire of Forgetting (Cape) is the final collection of the Scottish poet, novelist and essayist John Burnside, who died in May last year. Fellow poet Kathleen Jamie describes him as ‘a titan of literature…. His passing leaves a gap not only in our literature, but in our ability to exist in the world. He increased the possible ways of our being.’ To coincide with this publication, Cape are reissuing Burnside’s three volumes of memoir, A Lie About My Father, Waking Up in Toytown and I Put a Spell on You with new introductions. Poet and essayist Michael Symmons Roberts and editor Hannah Westland paid tribute to Burnside and celebrated his life and work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her first work of non-fiction A Truce That Is Not Peace (4th Estate), acclaimed novelist Miriam Toews spirals out from a question asked of her at a literary festival in Mexico City – ‘Why do you write?’ – in a dazzling exploration of grief, guilt, futility and creativity. Toews read from her work, and discussed it with Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forced to leave her native Hungary by the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, Ágota Kristóf took up residence in Switzerland and began writing in French. Most famous for her Notebook Trilogy – ‘A book through which I discovered what kind of person I really want to be’ (Slavoj Žižek) – her short stories, now available for the first time in English as the Penguin Classic volume I Don’t Care (tr. Chris Andrews), have been described by Max Porter as ‘pure genius’. In this episode, Canadian writer Camilla Grudova discusses Kristóf’s work and place in the late modernist literary firmament with Jennifer Hodgson. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by the new editions of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1966 novel The Image of Her and travel diary America Day by Day (Vintage), translator and novelist Lauren Elkin and writer and curator Lou Stoppard talked about the life, works and legacy of one of feminism’s most enduring icons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sylvia Plath’s second collection Ariel (Faber) was published in 1965, two years after the poet’s death, in a version somewhat reconfigured from her draft copy by Ted Hughes. Plath’s original arrangement was restored in 2004 in an edition edited by her daughter Frieda Hughes. To mark Ariel’s 60th birthday and the new Faber edition, poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Richard Scott read from Plath’s work and from their own, and examined the abiding legacy of one of the 20th century’s most influential literary documents. Fellow poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw was in the chair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola and COVID-19 – in Edna Bonhomme’s groundbreaking analysis of six pivotal moments in medical history, the pandemic is revealed to be inevitably political. Urgent and illuminating, A History of the World in Six Plagues is far more than a history of disease – it is a call to reimagine a more equitable future in the face of ongoing global health challenges. Edna Bonhomme was in conversation with journalist and novelist Rachel Connolly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout its history the Labour left has been a key source of energy and ideas for the party – but left-right tensions have long been the cause of damaging divisions. What lessons does this story hold for today’s left and the struggling Starmer government? Are they irreconcilable enemies - or can they ever work together? Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out, Pinochet in Piccadily and The Searchers, a joint portrait of Labour mavericks Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, was in conversation with journalist and novelist Melissa Benn, whose selection of her father Tony Benn’s political writings The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? was recently published by Verso. In the chair was historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, whose most recent book Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1985 is published by Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reviewing Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy in the Guardian, Oluwaseun Olayiwola described how, ‘in its beautiful, fiery insistence, this collection redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living’. The judges of the 2024 T.S. Eliot prize agreed. Gizzi read from his work and was in conversation with Anthony Joseph, chair of the judges, who was awarded the Eliot prize in 2023 for his Sonnets for Albert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Baron’s cult classic The Lowlife, first published by Black Spring in 1963, has recently been reissued by Faber. Set in Hackney in the aftermath of WW2, Baron’s novel follows the descent of Zola-reading gambler Harryboy Boas into the murky world of East End gangsters, hoodlums and loan sharks. Iain Sinclair, who has written an introduction about Baron for the new edition, was discussing the book and its author with Susie Thomas and Ken Worpole, co-editors of So We Live: The Novels of Alexander Baron (Five Leaves). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on a lifetime’s engagement with myth, literature and history as well as on her work with young refugees in Sicily in the ‘Stories in Transit’ project, Marina Warner’s latest book Sanctuary (William Collins) explores the concept of hospitality, the cult of relics, shrines and festivals, the imagination of place, and travelling tales and asks profound questions about political ideas of a right to safety, home, freedom of movement, and peace. Warner was joined by James Butler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

’Samuel Fisher’s prose moves with swift and sure tread across the glinting particulars of locality, until that condition, that curse, with its pains and pleasures, becomes universal. Our fate. Our challenge. Our discarded future' – Iain Sinclair In a London ravaged by climate change, where the few survivors suffer from an epidemic of chronic pain, accompanied by haptic and visual hallucinations known as ‘migraine aura’, Ellis wakes from his first bout of the illness in a ruined bookshop. Accompanied by the bookshop’s former owner Sam, he embarks on a psychogeographic quest through the city in search of his ex-girlfriend Luna. Fisher’s third novel Migraine (Corsair) confronts vital issues of environmental collapse, and asks what kind of society might survive in the face of it. He was in conversation with the poet and essayist Helen Charman, author of Mother State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim Hyesoon is one South Korea’s foremost poets. Her groundbreaking and radically feminist poetry – ‘a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism’ (Griffin Prize Judges) – has been translated into English by poet Don Mee Choi for over a decade. We celebrate the latest of these translations – the Griffin Prize-winning masterpiece on mourning and survival, Autobiography of Death, now published for the first time in the UK by And Other Stories – with an evening of readings from Kim and discussion of her work with Will Harris, whose latest collection is Brother Poem (Granta). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Original (Scribner), Nell Stevens’s second novel, Grace Inderwick grows up as the ward of a cold Victorian family in which the only warmth and affection is provided by her cousin Charles. After many years missing at sea, Charles returns to the household. But is this the real Charles or an impostor? Nell Stevens brilliantly reconfigures the familiar trope of the returning stranger as a gripping meditation on forgery and authenticity, in life, in art, and in love. Nell Stevens was joined in conversation by essayist and novelist Olivia Laing, whose most recent book is The Garden Against Time. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1958 the 18-year-old Liliane Lijn left New York for Paris, determined to become an artist. Her captivating memoir Liquid Reflections (Hamish Hamilton) tells the story of her meetings with poets, painters, philosophers and revolutionaries and of the development of her groundbreaking artistic practice, pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and feminine mythology. Now resident in London, Lijn was in conversation about her life and work with Jennifer Higgie, former editor of the art magazine frieze and author of The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan (Kick the Latch, The Dominant Animal) acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged and rearranged the diarist’s words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog. Scanlan was joined by Emily LaBarge, whose book Dog Days was published in autumn 2025. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Deep House (Allen Lane) is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams – just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. Via forests and deserts, London fashion shows and East Village hotel rooms, they eventually shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco. Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is a journey through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle. Atherton Lin is in conversation with Diarmuid Hester, author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears (Allen Lane). More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book In Defence of Leisure (Cape), Akshi Singh presents Marion Milner as a writer for our times. In asking the simple question: how do I want to spend my free time? Milner developed a method for discovering her true likes and dislikes. As Singh follows Milner’s approach – from keeping a diary to painting, building a home to travelling to the sea – she discovers the importance of rest, creativity and play in all of our lives, and how it can open the door to achieving what we truly desire. Singh was in conversation with Anouchka Grose, psychoanalyst, writer and climate campaigner whose books include Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard (Mack, 2022) and Fashion: a Manifesto (Notting Hill Editions, 2023). More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geoff Dyer has written books on every subject under the sun; now, at last, he turns his hand to memoir. Homework is his account of his childhood and adolescence in provincial England, as the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, and the opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement in the 1960s and 1970s. Merve Emre describes it as being like ‘going for a long walk with a close friend, whose singular voice — inventive, absorbing, a little rakish, and wonderfully dry — will hold your interest for hours on end.’ Dyer was in conversation with curator, editor and writer Gareth Evans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Francesca Wade’s biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, follows on from her acclaimed Square Haunting (Faber, 2020) to present a portrait of one of 20th century modernism’s most rowdy and confounding geniuses, in what Lisa Appignanesi has described as both a ‘discerning literary biography and a page-turning whodunit’. Wade was joined by Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light (CB Editions, 2024). More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since its founding, the online food and culture publication Vittles has sought to disrupt mainstream ideas of what food writing looks like. To mark its fifth anniversary, Vittles produced its first print issue – an engaging mix of newly commissioned articles and a selection of some of the best essays it published in the previous five years. At the Bookshop, three contributors to Vittles Issue 1 – Robin Craig, Amy Key and Waithera Sebatindira – discussed what it means to write about food as a non-food writer with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To celebrate the Penguin Classics reissue of bell hooks’s Art on My Mind, Zarina Muhammad & Lola Olufemi discuss her work. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If the first quarter of the 21st Century has been rich in one thing, it is anxiety. Pandemics, asteroids, climate change, global instability, the cost of living, tsunamis, migration – the list of things to be worried about seems to grow longer every day. We should thank our lucky stars then for Oxford Professor of Geography Danny Dorling. In ⁠The Next Crisis⁠ (Verso), he delves into the data with characteristic diligence and level-headedness to discover what we’re worried about, what we shouldn’t be worried about, what we should be worried about and what we should do about it. Dorling was joined by writer and philosopher Arianne Shahvisi. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury) Lamorna Ash, author of the coming-of-age memoir cum anthropological study of the Cornish fishing industry Dark, Salt, Clear, visits Evangelical youth festivals, Quaker meetings, a silent Jesuit retreat along the Welsh coastline and a monastic community in the Inner Hebrides to investigate, through interviews and personal reflections, what drives young people in the twenty-first century to embrace Christianity. Poet Seán Hewitt writes ‘Humane, curious and unexpectedly moving, Lamorna Ash’s book is as much an account of the human condition as it is an investigation of faith. Quietly radical in its empathy, this is a book I have waited years and years to read, without even knowing it.’ Lamorna Ash was in conversation with James Butler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In On Breathing (Peninsula Press) Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York and part-time faculty member at The New School for Social Research, draws on psychoanalytic theory to reflect on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during covid and a new mother to explore how the experience of air and breathing serves to undermine the pervasive myth of the individual, and to underline how dependent we are on invisible systems, and on each other. In this recording, Webster is breathing the same air as Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Daddy Issues and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter, looks behind the glossy surface promises of frictionless trade and limitless growth to uncover the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits. Piercing, wry and constantly revealing, Extractive Capitalism (Profile) brings vividly to light the dark truths behind the world's most voracious industries. Professor Khalili was joined in conversation about her work by lecturer, commentator and broadcaster David Wearing, whose AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain (Polity) was published in 2018. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the first of a new series from Old Street in which historian focus on a single moment of history, pre-eminent English-language expert on the Soviet Union Sheila Fitzpatrick gives a detailed and darkly humorous account of the day in 1953 on which Stalin died, an event for which, despite its inevitability, both Russia and the wider world were almost completely unprepared. Fitzpatrick discussed The Death of Stalin with Owen Hatherley (Trans-Europe Express, The Alienation Effect). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pear Trees (Hazel Press) is a short story by Laura Beatty, the Ondaatje Prize-shortlisted novelist and biographer. Set in an Albanian mountain village, Pear Trees blends folklore and ecology to pose the largest of questions about our relationship with the living world. Beatty was joined in conversation by potter and author Edmund de Waal, whose most recent books include Letters to Camondo (Chatto) and Perdendosi (Hazel Press). More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 23 April 1925, T.S. Eliot was invited by Geoffrey Faber to join the newly founded publishing house of Faber & Gwyer. It was to prove the most momentous appointment in 20th-century poetry in English. As a pioneering talent scout for Faber & Gwyer (which would become Faber & Faber in 1928) Eliot launched the careers of W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, David Jones and Stephen Spender, and oversaw the publication of the work of the poet who had discovered him, Ezra Pound. Exactly a hundred years on, poet and critic Mark Ford, emeritus professor of English at Sheffield John Haffenden, former Faber managing director Toby Faber and senior lecturer at the University of Brighton Aakanksha Virkar visited the Bookshop to discuss the events leading up to Eliot’s appointment, and his early years with the firm. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love (4th Estate) – ‘an impassioned magnum opus celebrating Blake’s star-shaken genius by discovering his lineage everywhere in the author’s own crystal cabinet of artists and outlaws,’ in the words of Iain Sinclair – Philip Hoare pays brilliant and digressive tribute to the maverick poet and artist and his abiding influence. Hoare, author of the classic Leviathan and Albert and the Whale, was joined in conversation by novelist and essayist Olivia Laing. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo) packs a lot in – humour, heartbreak, politics, sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism, pop culture and much else besides. ‘Where else can you read about e-girls twerking to LBJ in hell?’ asks Maggie Millner, author of Couplets. ‘Who else can pack microplastics, adultery, and overalls into the same poem, and make you (literally) cry along the way? No one, that’s who. Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the real freaking deal.’ She read from her work and spoke about it with Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life and Not Even This. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Year with Gilbert White (Faber) biographer and historian Jenny Uglow continues her exploration of the 18th-century scientific revolution with a journey in the company of the father of British natural history, whose The Natural History of Selborne has been constantly in print since 1789 in over 300 editions to date. Jenny Uglow talked about how the nature notes of an obscure Hampshire clergyman became one of the best-loved books of all time with Fiona Stafford, Professor of English at Somerville, Oxford and author of The Long, Long Life of Trees, The Brief Life of Flowers and Time and Tide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days (Peninsula Press) begins with a personal trauma – the account of how she and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009 – building on that experience a dazzling exploration of writing, art and the imagination. Drawing on writers and artists such as Vivian Gornick, Robert Burton, David Lynch and Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the ‘Good Story,’ and its aftermath, on its own terms. LaBarge was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wendy Erskine’s two short story collections Sweet Home and Dance Move marked her out as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish fiction. Now her first novel The Benefactors (Sceptre) looks set to cement that reputation. ‘In all of its glorious polyphony, The Benefactors brims with humanity’, writes Lucy Caldwell. ‘It’s got snap, it’s got sparkle, it’s got soul. All of Belfast is here, all of life. I adored it.’ Wendy Erskine was in conversation with Sheena Patel, part of the collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE and author of the novel I’m a Fan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Playful, mind-expanding, dark, funny and endlessly rewarding, Ali Smith’s dystopian parable of an authoritarian future was one of the most talked-about new books when published in hardback last year. To mark the appearance of Gliff in paperback, Smith returned to the shop to talk about it with film-maker Sarah Wood. They also spoke about So in the Spruce Forest, an essay originally written for ‘Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth’, an exhibition in 2023 in Oslo which has now appeared in book form, beautifully printed by the Munch Museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Flower (Fitzcarraldo), his first work of non-fiction, Copenhagen-based artist Ed Atkins propels us into a world of junk food, invented memories and confessional anti-confessionalism. ‘Sometimes it brought me to tears and I’m not even sure why,’ writes Luke Kennard, ‘It’s the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn’t even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It’s heroic. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from it.’ Atkins read from his work and was joined in conversation by poet and novelist Holly Pester. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. In The Alienation Effect (Allen Lane) acclaimed architectural historian Owen Hatherley draws on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, to argue that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. Owen Hatherley was joined in conversation about his book by poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Find more events at the Bookshop: ⁠https://lrb.me/eventspod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Worpole, ‘a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition’ (New Statesman), has written on many subjects during his long career, from cemeteries to hospices to the novels of Alexander Baron, but has often returned to the subject of his beloved Essex. His latest essay collection Brightening from the East (Little Toller) focuses on the natural and built landscapes of the ‘region of the mind’ that is the estuarine marshlands of the Thames and the East Anglian coast, bringing us stories of radical communities and arcadian dreams of new ways of living. Worpole is in conversation with writer and journalist Melissa Benn; the evening will be hosted by writer and producer Gareth Evans. From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Testo Junkie, Pornotopia, An Apartment in Uranus and Can the Monster Speak, Paul B. Preciado became established as one of the most exciting and challenging social thinkers of our time. His latest book Dysphoria Mundi (Fitzcarraldo), a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry and autofiction, draws on the experience of the Covid pandemic and the social convulsions that accompanied and followed from it to argue that dysphoria, far from being a form of mental illness, is the defining condition of our age. In what is his most accessible and significant work to date he seeks to make sense of a world in ruins around us, at the same time mapping a joyous, radical way forward. Preciado was joined by Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste and Steal as Much as You Can. From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gender, race and identity collide on the open seas in Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto), a powerful, feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. She was in conversation with Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan: Or the Whale, who has described Guo’s latest novel as being ‘as animal and visceral and shape-shifting and subversive as the broad back of the mythic whale themselves.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices