London Review Bookshop Podcast

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 kara...

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...

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...

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, perc...

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 h...

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 langu...

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 fee...

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 L...

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 indefatiga...

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...

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 e...

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. Gr...

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...

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 aspi...

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 fel...

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...

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 Co...

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...

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...

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, s...

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...

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...

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,...

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 c...