London Review Bookshop Podcast

Two of Ann Quin’s admirers, novelist and essayist Deborah Levy and writer and critic Juliet Jacques, will be joined in conversation about her life and work by Jennifer Hodgson, editor of The Unmapped Country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Corsair) won Morgan Parker a wide UK readership; Magical Negro takes and expands on the achievement of that first collection, dealing as it does with objectification, loneliness, stereotyping and the stubbornness of ancestral trauma. Danez Smith has called Parker ‘one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes a...

Writing on Lorna Goodison’s poetry, Derek Walcott asks ‘What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.’ Goodison has served as the Poet Laureate of Jamaica and published twelve volumes of poetry; her Collected Poems came out from Carcanet in 2017. In 2019, she won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Linton Kwesi Johnson is one of the only three poets...

There is a sort of chase for coherence in the current commercial market for fiction ... a sort of terror of there being any kind of mystery in a book, or even a character being confused. Deborah Levy, described by Lauren Elkin in the TLS as ' one of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction' was at the Bookshop to talk about her latest novel Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton), which explore...

Are we English, British, European, citizens of the planet Earth or none of the above? The ‘Citizens of Everywhere’ project invites writers, artists and journalists to respond to the seismic shifts in European and American politics, and their implications for the future, in ways that are creative, surprising, and, most importantly of all, useful. Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, Labour peer and former d...

The fleeting appearance of black faces in Tudor paintings marks the silent presence of a community's untold story. Who were the black men and women who lived, loved, and died in Renaissance Britain? How did they arrive? And how can we recover their voices when all we have is a glimpse in a portrait here, or church and court record there? At this event the writer Fred D'Aguiar and historians David...

In Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Polity) Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi engage in a critical dialogue that seeks to expand our understanding of capitalism, revealing it to be not merely a system of economic relations, but rather a form of institutionalised social order, and one that continually reinvents itself through crisis. Nancy Fraser, Professor of Political & Social Science a...

Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and, according to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 'the geographer royal by appointment to the left', returned to the Bookshop to talk about his new book A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier (London Publishing Partnership). Dorling's book looks at the evidence for a successful politics that would promote happiness and...

Laleh Khalili and Rafeef Ziadah on shipping and capitalism in the Arabian peninsula. You can order the book discussed in this episode here: lrb.me/order Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Radio producer and naturalist Tim Dee has curated in Ground Work (Cape) an essential collection of autobiographical essays from distinguished writers, all of which explore, in diverse ways, the complex and increasingly vexed relationship between the human and natural. Tim Dee was in conversation with two of the book's contributors, Marina Warner and Ken Worpole. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priv...

Nikita Lalwani’s latest novel You People (Viking) centres on a London pizzeria where the chefs are Sri Lankan and many of the kitchen staff are illegal immigrants. Through a diverse set of characters Lalwani draws a vivid portrait of contemporary British life as it really is lived. Lalwani was in conversation with her editor Mary Mount. ‘Enthralling as a thriller, yet also a beautiful human drama,...

Adam Mars-Jones talks about his newly-published novel, ‘Box Hill’ with Richard Scott. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although our events programme is on hold at the moment, we’re delighted that Danny Dorling and Zoe Williams could get together virtually to record this podcast in lieu of the planned event. In his intriguing and counterintuitive new book Slowdown (Yale), Danny Dorling argues that, contrary to what most of us believe, human life is actually slowing down, in diverse areas from birth rate to GDP to t...

Mick Herron’s hero/anti-hero Jackson Lamb is everything Le Carré’s Smiley isn’t, as well as quite a lot of what he is. Drunk, obese, bone-idle and ridiculously talented in the dark arts of spycraft, he is also ridiculously loyal to the inhabitants of Slough House, a group of misfits, addicts and screw-ups who have been exiled from the security services for a range of misdemeanours both real and co...

‘We architects must be idealists’, wrote Minnette de Silva, Sri Lanka’s first female architect. Shiromi Pinto’s second novel, Plastic Emotions (Influx Press) is based on de Silva’s life, charting her affair with Le Corbusier and her attempt to rebuild Sri Lanka in the aftermath of independence.   Pinto was in conversation with Owen Hatherley, whose most recent book is The Adventures of Owen Hather...

Sam Contis discusses ‘Dorothea Lange’s Day Sleeper’, the way women photographers are remembered and forgotten and how one artist encounters another in the world and in the archive, with Joanna Biggs, assistant editor at the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lars Iyer, author of the Spurious trilogy and Wittgenstein Jr. revisits philosophy in his latest novel Nietzsche and the Burbs (Melville House). Set in a modern secondary school, Iyer’s novel follows a group of students through their last few weeks of school, centring on an enigmatic and charismatic recent transferee from private education, nicknamed by his fellow pupils ‘Nietzsche’ both for his b...

In her previous book Strands poet and essayist Jean Sprackland brought lyrically to life the hidden histories of objects found on her local beaches. Now in These Silent Mansions (Jonathan Cape) she brings together a magpie-like collector’s instinct, a historian’s restless curiosity and a poet’s keen sensibility to investigate what graveyards can tell us about both the dead and the living. Revisiti...

Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress (Cape) tells the story of the relationship between Irish theatre legend Katherine O'Dell and her daughter Norah, as told by Norah herself. Early stardom in Hollywood, triumphs and tragedies on the stages of Dublin and London, and a career unravelling into infamy and eventual insanity are vividly evoked in a brilliant novel about mothers, daughters, secrets and t...

Leïla Slimani was the first Moroccan woman to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for her novel Lullaby. Her latest book Sex and Lies (Faber) departs from fiction to explore the lives of and give a voice to the young women of Morocco, struggling to survive and thrive in a deeply conservative, patriarchal culture. Slimani was in conversation about her work with Professor Amia Srinivasan, tutoria...

By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside, but two years ago, she began to feel that she was only seeing half the picture. She needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. So she decided to go undercover in her spare time - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist g...

Like Beethoven, the poet Ruth Padel first came to love and understand music through playing the viola. Her great grandfather, a concert pianist, studied music in Leipzig with Beethoven’s friend and contemporary. Her latest collection Beethoven Variations (Chatto) is simultaneously a biography in verse of the great composer and a passionate and highly personal account of how one creative genius can...

Will Harris reads from his debut collection RENDANG, alongside poet and editor Rachael Allen. Find out about upcoming events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/bookshopeventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The writer Samantha Harvey has won wide acclaim and a devoted following for her novels, most recently The Western Wind, set in mediavel Somerset. In her latest book The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Cape) she turns to philosophical memoir, with an account of a bout of insomnia that afflicted her from out of the blue, and led her to re-examine many of her assumptions about life, about w...

In the period between the wars nearby Mecklenburgh Square was home to many artists, writers and radicals. In a stunning work of rediscovery Francesca Wade focuses on five remarkable women who lived there: the modernist poet and visionary H.D; crime writer and translator of Dante Dorothy L. Sayers; classicist Jane Harrison; economic historian Eileen Power; and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. C...