London Review Bookshop Podcast

Hazel Press’s four 2020 titles were all LRB Bookshop bestsellers; we’re proud to be launching the first tranche of their four 2021 titles, one an electrifying collaborative poem, one a unique anthology. Katrina Naomi and Helen Mort were reading from Same But Different, a lockdown collaboration which began as simply an exchange of poems; but like Wang Wei and Pei Di’s Wang River Collaboration, thei...

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story o...

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of autobiographical novels published in English as My Struggle propelled him to international fame, near universal acclaim and not a little controversy. His latest book The Morning Star (Penguin Press) is both a radical departure from that series, and a return to fiction as we traditionally know it. A group of holidaymakers in southern Norway witness the sudden and mys...

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, in Dialogue with a Somnambulist (House Sparrow Press) her stories, essays and personal portraits, collected here for the first time, reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form...

What could be simpler than a dish of pasta with tomato sauce? According to food historian Massimo Montanari’s latest book A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce (Europa), quite a lot. Montanari was in discussion with food writer Rachel Roddy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Gardner Smith’s roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living against the backdrop of violence of Algerian War-era France, has been out of print for decades, but as one reviewer put it, ‘the issues Smith raises … resonate at least as much now as they did six decades ago.’ The story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn’t find in...

The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival. But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB’s new selection of Fitzgerald’s writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late...

Leo Boix and Andrew McMillan read and talk to celebrate the publication of Boix's long-awaited debut collection in English, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto), a book described by Ilya Kaminsky as of ‘a wide tilt and scope; it sings the doors open.’ Andrew McMillan’s third collection pandemonium is just out from Jonathan Cape, following hot on the heels of the prizewinning physical and playtime....

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson's On Freedom (Jonathan Cape) explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our in...

In Flâneuse Lauren Elkin celebrated the woman walker in the city, revealing how aimlessly wandering through New York, Tokyo, Venice – but most of all Paris – invigorates the soul and focuses the mind. In her latest book No. 91/92 (Les Fugitives) she joins the commuter crowds on the bus with a love letter to Paris written in iPhone notes. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her fir...

W.G. Sebald was one of the most important literary figures of the bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries. Twenty years after his death, we were joined by acclaimed biographer Carole Angier, the author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury), described by Alberto Manguel as ‘an extraordinary achievement, able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile defini...

In Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker bobs and weaves between humour and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television, and collapses distinctions between the personal and the political, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Parker read from the collection and talked to Rachel Long, whose Forward nominated debut collection My Darling...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond (Fitzcarraldo), has been a firm bookshop favourite since its release, for its unique, irreverent voice and attention to the parts of experience which go overlooked or unspoken. Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up, is one of our most eagerly-anticipated books of 2021; Bennett was in conversation with Sheila Heti. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Owen Hatherley’s Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso) argues for the city as a socialist project. Hatherley was in conversation with Juliet Jacques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

Building on her essay ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2018, Professor of Social and Political Theory Amia Srinivasan explores the political and cultural dimensions of sexual desire, and its frustration. Srinivasan is in discussion with co-editor of the LRB, Alice Spawls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more a...

As a writer and as a woman Lavinia Greenlaw has spent her life being forced to answer questions that don’t really matter and not being allowed to ask or answer the ones that really do. In her powerful new book Some Answers without Questions (Faber) she sets out to redress the balance. Greenlaw is in conversation with Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Hosted on Acast. See...

In twelve witty and insightful essays novelist, memoirist and all-round thinker Jeanette Winterson explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity. Drawing on mythology, religion, art, history and gender theory as well as on science, Winterson’s take on the future of our species is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Winterson was in convers...

With their first two novels Isabel Waidner has established themself as one of the most disruptive, vital and boundary-pushing fiction writers at work in the UK today. Their latest novel Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula Press), a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies, takes this work to the next level. In celebration of its pub...

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years turned everything we think we know about money, debt and society on its head, and has, in the ten years since it was first published, become a modern classic. A new hardback edition, with introduction by distinguished economist Thomas Piketty, is published this year by Melville House. To mark the tenth anniversary of this groundbreaking international bes...

There’s more to being bald than having no hair. Philosopher Simon Critchley and musician Brian Eno discuss the various dimensions of hairlessness in connection with Simon’s new book Bald. In typical Critchley mode though, this collection of essays spills far beyond the question of hair, or the lack of it, to take in Aristophanes, Hamlet, the mysteries of Eleusis and the joys and pains of being a L...

One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world - from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry - are hysterically rehearsed. A Primer for Cadavers, his startlingly...

Poet and critic Jack Underwood’s latest book Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly (Little, Brown) combines meditations on literature with astrophysics, quantum mechanics and the art of parenting. Most of all though it is a lyrical essay in praise of uncertainty and the pleasures (and pains) of uncertain living. He was in conversation with fellow poet Raymond Antrobus whose firs...

Deborah Levy completes her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy – the first two volumes, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, won the Prix Femina Etranger in 2020 – with Real Estate, (Hamish Hamilton), a profound meditation on the things, both physical and psychological, that a woman might own. Levy herself writes ‘It was as if the search for Home was the point, but if I acquired it and t...

Scholar, musician, activist, raconteur and polemicist, Edward Said was one of the most celebrated and controversial intellectuals of the last century. Drawing extensively on interviews and archival research, professor Timothy Brennan provides the first full account of the many faceted life and mind of a uniquely inspiring and talented individual. Timothy Brennan discusses Places of Mind (Bloomsbur...

John Burnside’s new novel, Havergey (Little Toller), is set on a remote island in the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe. From our event in 2017, Burnside reads from the novel and is in conversation with Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso). The event is chaired by Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...