London Review Bookshop Podcast

Rich with arguments that speak directly to our moment - a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before - Building and Dwelling (Allen Lane) draws on Richard Sennett's deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities. Sennett was in conversation with Anna Minton, author of Big Capital (Penguin).  Hosted on Acast. See aca...

In this event from 2018, Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine and author of several books of essays, fiction, history and art criticism, talked about his first book, In the Dark Room, published by Penguin in 2005 and now available again in a handsome new edition from Fitzcarraldo, with Sophie Ratcliffe, Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and author of On Sympathy (Oxford,...

Lynsey Hanley's Estates, first published by Granta in 2008, has become over the past decade one of the key texts to analyse Britain's urban landscape in the post-War period. To mark a new edition of her seminal work, Hanley, a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman, was in conversation with fellow journalist Dawn Foster, who has written widely on housing and social issues. Hoste...

In this event from June 2017, Brian Dillon talks to Max Porter about his latest book, Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Dillon has been fascinated by the essay form throughout his reading and writing life, and Essayism is at once a paean to this venerable and still vibrant genre, and a dazzling contemporary example of it. Porter is the author of the prize-winning Grief is the Thing with Feathers (...

Russian twentieth-century poetry is one of the pinnacles of European literature and we still know little about it. This event includes readings from Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Maria Petrovykh, Varlam Shalamov (still better known for his prose) and the emigre poet Georgy Ivanov, one of the very greatest of all Russian lyric poets. Stephen Capus, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and James Womack read some o...

As the nights close in, what could be better than to gather around the (virtual) hearth and consider multi-award winning poet Robin Robertson's shadow-wracked new collection, Grimoire (Picador). A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits, and in Robertson's intense Celtic take, it tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retributio...

Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air (Granta), following on the tails of her pamphlets understudies for air and capriccio, is one of the mostly hotly-awaited debut collections of 2020. She read from the collection, and was in conversation about it with Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland (Faber) and Lafarge’s editor at Granta. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more ab...

London, the Capital of world capitalism, a centre of global finance and a place of immense wealth and privilege, has an often unacknowledged red underbelly, stretching from Herbert Morrison in the 1930s to Sadiq Khan in the 2020s. In Red Metropolis (Repeater), Tribune culture editor and historian Owen Hatherley looks back at that tradition, and argues that a socialist, democratic, pluralist city c...

Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga presented her latest novel, the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber). The third in a trilogy which began with Nervous Conditions and continued with The Book of Not, This Mournable Body tells the ongoing story of Tambudzai and her struggles with patriarchy and the legacy of colonialism as she tries to make her way, on her ow...

In our event from 16 July 2019, Geoff Dyer talks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, m...

On publication of Andrew Motion's new book of poetry, Essex Clay, he joined Alan Hollinghurst in conversation at St George's Bloomsbury. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo) is a series of essays, each of them taking as its pretext a single sentence drawn from literature. What emerges is a dazzling experiment in criticism, a personal and at times polemical investigation of style, meaning and sense. Dillon was in conversation about his work with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather and Crud...

Novelist, memoirist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB John Lanchester sets out to chill you to the virtual bone with his first ever collection of short fiction Reality and Other Stories (Faber). As if modern life weren’t unsettling enough, Lanchester makes it even more so with tales of haunted mobile phones, selfie sticks with demonic powers and other stories of technology gone horribly...

The European Union Prize for Literature aims to put the spotlight on the creativity and diverse wealth of Europe’s contemporary literature and to promote the circulation of literature beyond national and linguistic borders. To discuss the prize, the state of European literature and Britain's place in the post-Brexit international literary community, we welcomed two past winners: Sunjeev Sahota, wh...

In celebration of the life, work and legacy of William Trevor, one of the giants of modern Irish fiction, authors Salley Vickers, Kevin Barry, Hermione Lee and BBC Radio 4 Books Editor Di Speirs read from and talked about their favourites of his novels and short fiction, to mark the publication of Last Stories (Viking). Trevor, who died in 2016, won the Whitbread prize three times, was five times...

We were joined by Toby Litt, Helen Charman, Lisa Kelly and Mary Jean Chan, four of the poets featured in Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. From the first anthology, published in 1994, through to this seventh volume, the series showcases the work of some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world. The New Poetries anthologies have never sought to identify a sch...

Three-times Booker-nominated author and LRB editor-at-large Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel centres on the powerful friendship between James and Tully, fuelled by teenage rebellion and the unforgettable soundtrack of late 80s British music. Stretching over three decades, Mayflies is a captivating study of adolescence becoming adulthood, with all the shades of light and darkness that has made O’Hagan...

Igbo and Tamil writer and artist Akwaeke Emezi's mesmerising first novel Freshwater was published to universal acclaim in 2018, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Their second book was Pet, a novel for young adults that raised difficult and pertinent questions about cultures of denial, and was described as ‘beautiful and genre-expanding’ in the New York Times. To mark the public...

Novelist and essayist Kirsty Gunn’s latest novel Caroline’s Bikini is a powerful retelling of one of the oldest stories in western literature – that of unrequited love. In a series of conversations in West London bars, Gunn unravels the passion of financier Evan Gordonstone for the glamorous Caroline Beresford, an unravelling that brings Gordonstone to the brink of destruction. Kirsty Gunn is the...

Leading political thinker Chantal Mouffe proposes a new way to define left populism today: it is more than an ideology or a political regime. It is a way of doing politics that can take various forms but emerges when one aims at building a new subject of collective action — the people. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm...

Across five collections, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has won admirers for its distinctive mix of the humourous and the cerebral, a voice the London Review of Books described as ‘Somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor.’ The best of those five collections is now gathered in her first selected, What I'm Looking For (Penguin). McLane was at the shop to read from and discuss her work...

‘This past is a dimension of the present, without which the present is mutilated.’ In Lord of all the Dead, Javier Cercas plunges back into his family history, revisiting Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to discover the truth about his ancestor Manuel Mena, who died fighting on the Francoist side at the Battle of the Ebro. Who are we to judge the dead? How can we reconcile nati...

Five Dials 57, ‘To Leave and to Be Left Behind’, explores the imaginative space of the journey – where it can take us and how it can change us. Guest-edited by Sophie Mackintosh, it brings together a range of playful, intimate and risk-taking voices from across contemporary fiction and poetry. To celebrate the launch of this special issue, Sophie was joined in conversation by three of the magazine...

In conversation with Dave McKean, Richard McGuire talks about his graphic novel, Here, a book-length expansion of his groundbreaking 1989 sequence of the same name, Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To celebrate the publication of Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?, a new selection of Jenny Diski's LRB essays, chosen and introduced by Mary-Kay Wilmers, Deborah Friedell talked to Chloe Diski about Jenny's life and work. You can order Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? from us here: https://lrb.me/order Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more abou...