Twice a week or so, the London Review Bookshop becomes a miniature auditorium in which authors talk about and read from their work, meet their readers and engage in lively debate about the burning topics of the day. Fortunately, for those of you who weren't able to make it to one of our talks, were…
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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
On 23 April 1925, T.S. Eliot was officially invited by Geoffrey Faber to join the newly founded publishing house of Faber & Gwyer. It was to prove the most momentous appointment in the history of 20th-century poetry in English. Among Faber & Gwyer's first books was Eliot's Poems 1909-1925, which included ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', The Waste Land, and ‘The Hollow Men'. As pioneering talent scout for Faber & Gwyer (which would become Faber & Faber in 1928) Eliot launched the careers of such as 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 that would become virtually synonymous with his name. 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
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
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
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.
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 writer 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.
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.
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.
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
Owen Hatherley & Michael Hofmann on the European émigrés that made Britain 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. 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
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.
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
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.'
In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Allen Lane), sociologist Didier Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with his classic memoir Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother's rapid physical and cognitive decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault among others, Eribon transmutes his rage, sadness and the shame over her death into a nuanced portrait of the woman who raised him. How does our society treat the elderly, Eribon asks? Can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them? Eribon was in conversation about his work with the essayist and novelist Mendez. 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
Seventy years after the publication of Samuel Beckett's first novel in English, Faber have reissued Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable with ritzy new covers and fresh introductions. To celebrate, Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light, and Jennifer Hodgson, whose biography of Ann Quin is forthcoming, deliver their own tribute to Beckett's fiction, and discuss his life and work. ‘Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy,' as Beckett wrote, ‘What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds.'
In Enemy Feminisms (Haymarket Books), described by Judith Butler as ‘honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant', Sophie Lewis provides a field guide to the reactionary stereotypes that have affected and distorted feminisms past and present, and propounds a paradigm for a feminism that is inclusive, anticolonial and truly liberational. Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, was joined in conversation about her work by Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. 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
Women in Dark Times (Fitzcarraldo) begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to ‘honour' killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. Jacqueline Rose was in conversation about her work with Yasmin El-Rifae, co-producer of The Palestine Festival of Literature and author of Radius.
Art historian T.J. Clark began his academic career with two groundbreaking works on the art of mid-nineteenth century France, expounding materialist theory of art that has remained his watchword for five decades, with books on Poussin, Cézanne, Picasso and modernism. Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames and Hudson) distils a lifetime's work through a series of case studies, from Hieronymus Bosch to Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution, from Walter Benjamin to Pier Paolo Pasolini, exploring how art has always responded to the often chaotic and dangerous circumstances of its creation. Clark was joined in conversation about his life and work by Caroline Arscott, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. 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
‘With his electric Soho, Richard Scott has arrived like a lightning bolt in our midst' said T.S. Eliot Prize judge Sinéad Morrissey on the publication of his first collection in 2018. To celebrate publication of his second, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber), Richard will be reading alongside fellow poets Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Stranger Baby and Unexhausted Time) and Jane Yeh (Discipline, Marabou and Ninjas). 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
Poet and playwright Ariana Reines will be making a rare UK appearance to read from her new collection with Divided Books, Wave of Blood, a lyric essay she has described as an ‘experiment in ethics' reckoning with the US wars on terror and their repercussions. Reines was joined in conversation by critic and academic Alice Blackhurst, whose most recent book is Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image. 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
In Wages for Housework (Allen Lane) Emily Callaci, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of a movement that shot to prominence in the 1970s, distilling a century of feminist struggle and critique into a single bold slogan. Focusing on five women who helped forge and fight for it – Selma James, Mariarosa Della Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod – Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Callaci was in conversation with Helen Charman, author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood. 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/pod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
In his debut collection Strange Beach – the very first title in Fitzcarraldo's new poetry series – poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola finds the body to be a porous landscape across which existential dilemmas of gender, sexuality and race are enacted and explored. Poet and novelist Andrew McMillan writes of Olayiwola's work ‘the tideline of the poetic phrase is constantly shifting, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language, every grain of a word held up to the light to consider its myriad refractions.' Olayiwola read from Strange Beach, and was joined in conversation about his work by the poet and critic Camille Ralphs. Find more events at the London Review Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
From his arrival in London in 1981 – clutching a suitcase and sewing machine – to his death from AIDS on New Year's Eve 1994, Leigh Bowery – the man described by Boy George as ‘modern art on legs' – led an extraordinary life; a life chronicled in the equally extraordinary biography by his closest friend and confidante Sue Tilley, reissued by Thames and Hudson this February. Tilley was at the shop to discuss Bowery's life and legacy with Charlie Porter, author of What Artists Wear, and whose debut novel Nova Scotia House was published by Particular Books in March. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
In The Position of Spoons novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy invites the reader to share in her interior world, mapping her own life through the lives and works of the artists and writers who have shaped her own practice, from Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego. Levy, described by Lauren Elkin as ‘one of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction', talks about it here with Adam Thirlwell.
Matthew Hollis has reworked the classic Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer into a poem desperately relevant for our times: in a society threatened by climate change and the coming-loose of social bonds, Hollis invites us to hear, as the Anglo-Saxons did, the spirit music of land, wind and sea. Hollis's text is one half of a collaborative project with the photographer Norman McBeath, who was at the shop with Hollis to present and talk about their work. The discussion was chaired by Sara Hudston of Hazel Press. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
In Serendipity (Reaktion) Carol Mavor uses Anne Frank's journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War, Emily Dickinson's poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes hidden in a drawer, Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov's wife Véra and her own memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate in New York's Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol, to muse upon the serendipitous afterlives of objects. Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester and prolific author of books and articles about art and culture, was in conversation about fragments, remnants and what remains with novelist, essayist and translator Lauren Elkin.
In his 2014 Dante's Inferno poet and provocateur Philip Terry moved the action to Essex University. His Purgatorio (Carcanet) transports us to nearby Mersea Island, where Ted Berrigan leads our author up an artificial mountain to meet with artists Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, as well as Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka Shankar. Philip Terry was joined in conversation with Marina Warner at the Bookshop. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
It's hard to believe that Fitzcarraldo Editions has only existed for ten years; during that short time, they have published a remarkable selection of books (gathering four Nobel Prizes between them), and their iconic blue and white covers have become a mainstay of the bookshop. To celebrate their first decade, Fitzcarraldo are publishing some of their best-loved titles in hardback, limited edition form. Brian Dillon and Kate Briggs will be at the shop to discuss their books in this series: Dillon's Essayism (a gathering together of his loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking), and Briggs' This Little Art, a fresh, fierce and timely meditation on literary translation. The conversation will be chaired by Helen Charman, whose political history of motherhood, Mother State, came out earlier this year from Penguin.
In You Can't Please All (Verso), a sort of sequel to his seminal 1987 memoir Street-fighting Years, Tariq Ali continues the story of a life lived flamboyantly and magnificently on the Left. Pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn are combined with reflections on his work as a novelist, playwright and film-maker, and as an activist in the War on the War on Terror. Ali was in conversation about his life and work with Oliver Eagleton, associate editor of New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project.
From Jesus Christ to Krautrock via Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot, Simon Critchley's On Mysticism (Profile) brilliantly displays the author's playful, eclectic erudition in an evocation of the phenomenon he defines, after Evelyn Underhill, as ‘experience in its most intense form.' Critchley was in conversation about mysticism East and West with the LRB's James Butler. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
Campaigning journalist Claud Cockburn – defiantly anti-establishment and proudly Communist – had as his watchword ‘believe nothing until it is officially denied', a saying borrowed by his son Patrick, himself a legendary foreign correspondent, for his biography of his maverick father. Described by schoolfriend Graham Greene as the greatest journalist of the twentieth century, Cockburn was born at the heart of the establishment it became his life's work to satirise, lampoon and undermine, with reports from Berlin during the rise of Fascism and Spain during the Civil War, as well as New York, Washington and Chicago, where he once conducted an interview with Al Capone. Patrick Cockburn spoke at the shop about Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied (Verso), and its lessons for journalism then, now and in the future, with journalist Duncan Campbell. Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Listen to Neal Ascherson discuss Claud Cockburn: https://lrb.me/aschersonpod Get the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/believe-nothing-until-it-is-officially-denied-claud-cockburn-and-the-invention-of-guerrilla-journalism-patrick-cockburn
Building on his seminal lecture ‘The Shoah After Gaza' (LRB 21 March 2024) and his earlier books From the Ruins of Empire and The Age of Anger, novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra's latest work The World After Gaza (Fern Press) seeks to place the current crisis in Gaza and Palestine within the broader context of the troubled and tragic history of colonialism and anticolonialism. ‘A brilliant book,' writes William Dalrymple, ‘as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, colour and religion.'Mishra is in conversation with curator and producer Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Marion Milner, across her long career as psychoanalyst, essayist and artist, thought deeply about creativity in all its forms, exploring fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. In Marion Milner: On Creativity, David Russell, Professor of English at the University of California, uses these ideas as a starting-point for an exploration of Milner's thought and its continuing relevance today. Russell was in conversation with psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips, whose most recent book is On Giving Up (Hamish Hamilton, 2024). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Rebecca Solnit's latest essay collection explores subjects as diverse as the climate crisis, toxic masculinity and the rise of the far right with her usual flair and capacity for radical hope: Merlin Sheldrake has described No Straight Road Takes You There as ‘a book of fierce and poetic thinking - and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world'.Solnit was joined in conversation by investigative journalist and campaigner Carole Cadwalladr.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Before she became a well-known novelist, Margaret Atwood was an award-winning poet. She has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years, from the self-published, hand-set Double Persephone in 1961 to its follow up The Circle Game which won the Governor General's Award, to her latest, critically-acclaimed collection Dearly in 2020. Paper Boat (Chatto & Windus) draws on that impressive body of work, and expands on it with poems previously uncollected, revealing an artist who has somehow always managed to be at the height of her powers, and to have her finger on every pulse.Atwood appeared at Conway Hall to discuss her work with poet, editor and critic Sarah Howe. They were joined by poets Amy Key and Rachel Long who read poems from Paper Boat throughout the evening. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
‘Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.'Solvej Balle's septology On the Calculation of Volume (Faber), thirty years in the making, was published in Danish by the author's own press to huge and universal acclaim: ‘Absolutely, absolutely incredible' (Karl Ove Knausgaard); ‘Unforgettable' (Hernan Díaz); ‘A total explosion' (Nicole Krauss). Now Faber has brought the first two volumes of her masterpiece to an anglophone readership in a vibrant translation by Barbara J. Haveland, the first of which has been nominated for this year's International Booker Prize.Balle was joined in conversation by novelist and critic Chris Power.Get the books: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/on-the-calculation-of-volume-i-absolutely-absolutely-incredible.-knausgard-solvej-balleFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Gliff, the latest novel from Ali Smith, forms the first part of a duology; its title, the Scots word for a glimpse or shock, will be echoed but not replicated in next year's Glyph. In a dystopian, Kafkaesque fictional lanscape, Smith explores how we make meaning and are made by it, and what it would actually mean for the next generation to sort out our increasingly toxic world.Smith read from the novel and was in conversation with artist and filmmaker Sarah Wood.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/gliff-ali-smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Josh Cohen's new book, All the Rage (Granta), explores anger, in all its permutations - social media arguments, political divides, road rage, passive aggression – in the words of Deborah Levy, ‘brilliantly investigating what it is when we are enraged'. What should we make of our anger; to what use can we put it? Cohen's previous books include Not Working and The Private Life. He was in conversation with the sociologist and political economist William Davies, whose most recent book is Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg – author of the HWA Crown Award-shortlisted Woman's Lore - looks behind the tinsel and the turkey to explore the darker traditions of the Christmas season. At wassails, hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by ghastly, grinning horses, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors, we discover how these customs and rituals originated and how they changed through the centuries, and ask ourselves: if we can't keep the darkness entirely at bay, might it be fun to let a little in?She was joined in conversation about all this and more with Ronald Hutton, historian, folklorist and professor of history at Bristol University.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/the-dead-of-winter-the-demons-witches-and-ghosts-of-christmas-sarah-clegg Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Eileen Myles reads from their first collection of poetry since 2018's Evolution. The poems in a “Working Life” evoke the joy and unease in the quotidian, moving ‘with call and response between perception and thought', as Camille Roy writes in Brooklyn Rail magazine.Myles is in conversation with journalist and activist Amelia Abraham, whose Queer Intentions was published by Picador in 2020. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Isabelle Baafi, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for her pamphlet Ripe, constructs her debut collection Chaotic Good (Faber) around the story of an escape from a toxic marriage. ‘Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance,' writes poet Will Harris. ‘Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that – with each turn of the chamber – brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.'Isabelle Baafi read from her work in the company of Lavinia Greenlaw, whose most recent book is the essay collection The Vast Extent.Find more events a the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Poor Artists (Particular Books) Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente (AKA The White Pube), explore the bizarre world of contemporary art through their protagonist Quest Talukdar. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Blending storytelling with dialogue from anonymised interviews with artists and art workers – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a few ghosts, a Venice Biennale fraudster and a communist messiah – Poor Artists is a unique portrayal of the emotional, existential and financial experience of artists today. Joining them in conversation was Olivia Sudjic (Asylum Road, Sympathy). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Third Realm is the next instalment of the series Karl Ove Knausgaard began with The Morning Star and continued in The Wolves of Eternity; like its two precursors, it is a breathtaking exploration of ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, ‘re-enchanting the cosmos with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it' (in the words of The Guardian).Knausgaard read from The Third Realm and was joined in conversation about its mysteries and complexities by Helen Charman, author of Mother State.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is', writes Andrew O'Hagan of Helen Castor's The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today's headlines.' Castor, whose 2010 book She-Wolves was adapted for television by the BBC, discussed Richard and Henry with Mary Wellesley, author of Hidden Hands: Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers and co-presenter of the medieval strand of the LRB's Close Readings podcast series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Black Meme (Verso) Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.Russell was joined in conversation with artist and writer Rene Matić.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In his memoir Sonic Life (Faber), Thurston Moore recounts a life that has been defined by music. Following a childhood rock 'n' roll epiphany in the early 1960s, his infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave led him to move to New York City, where he immersed himself in the underground music and art scenes. In 1981 he co-founded the band Sonic Youth, who changed the sound of modern rock music in a thirty-year career of constant experimentation. Throughout the book we encounter a constellation of musicians and artists who inspired him, including The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.Moore talks with poet Jack Underwood (A Year in the New Life, Happiness). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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