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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
'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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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
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 post-war settlement in the sixties and seventies. 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.
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
To mark its fifth anniversary, the online food and culture publication Vittles has produced its first print issue – an engaging mix of newly commissioned articles and a selection of some of the best essays it has published in the past five years. Ever since its founding, Vittles has sought to disrupt mainstream ideas of what food writing looks like. In keeping with this ethos, this event will feature readings and discussions with three contributors to Vittles Issue 1 – Robin Craig, Amy Key and Waithera Sebatindira – themed around what it means to write about food as a non-food writer. Craig, Key and Sebatindira were in conversation with Vittles editor Odhran O'Donoghue.
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
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
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