London Review Bookshop Podcast

John Berger was one of the most various of writers and men: art critic, essayist, novelist, poet and much-missed friend of the shop. In *[A Writer of Our Time][1]* (Verso), Berger’s first full biographical study, Joshua Sperling traces Berger’s... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Issue 146 of Granta is themed around the politics of feeling. Guest co-editor Devorah Baum interviews Peter Pomerantsev about his piece ‘Normalnost’, which explores how what once appeared the exclusive culture of post-Soviet Russia – the denial and... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine Angel’s Daddy Issues engages with what Lauren Elkin has called ‘that forgotten figure in feminism’s critique of patriarchy: the father’, examining the place of fathers in contemporary culture and asking how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy,...

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, An American Marriage (Oneworld) is a thrilling depiction of the American Dream in freefall. Barack Obama (no less) has called it ‘a moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s but smuggled out of Russia with the help of Andrey Sakharov in the early 1980s, established Grossman’s reputation as a 20th-century Tolstoy, in particular following Robert Chandler’s magnificent 1985 translation into English. Most readers, however, do not realize that it is only the second half of a two-part work, t...

New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Rachel Cusk on Katherine Anne Porter, the Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to d...

New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Rachel Cusk on Katherine Anne Porter, the Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to d...

Sheila Rowbotham’s many books, in history, politics, feminist theory and biography, have established her firmly at the forefront of both the women’s movement and of libertarian socialism. Perhaps the most personal of them though is Promise of a Dream, first published by Penguin in 2000 and now available again in a new edition from Verso. Frank, beautifully written, funny and moving, it is a coming...

In her latest work Guestbook: Ghost Stories (Particular Books) Leanne Shapton, through a series of stories and vignettes, encounters the uncanny. Are our experiences of ghosts and the unworldly mere fantasies of the mind, or are they solid evidence of the supernatural? In a book designed, curated and illustrated by Shapton herself, she provides some, but by no means all of the answers. Toronto-bor...

David Keenan’s For the Good Times (Faber), set in Belfast during The Troubles, pursues four friends battling for an identity in a neighbourhood harangued by violence and religious intensity. The book highlights the complexity of believing in a cause whilst indulging in the spoils of amoral days. Keenan’s second novel is an urgent and experimental follow up to This is Memorial Device (Faber). Keena...

In her first book Dressed (Jonathan Cape), Shahidha Bari explores the hidden memories, meanings and ideas which are wrapped up in our clothes; themes of privacy, freedom, love and objectification are treated garment by garment. Bari was in conversation with Marina Warner, whose most recent book is Forms of Enchantment (Thames & Hudson). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....

Listen back to an evening of readings and discussion from three outstanding poets, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris and Sarah Howe. ------ Mary Jean Chan's first full length collection Flèche is published by Faber this July. Her debut pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was selected as the 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, editor of Oxford Poetry and is a Lectur...

To mark the publication of Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House (Dialogue Books), we hosted a round table discussion about LGBTQI+ literature and culture, and the contributions it might make to the current, somewhat torrid, political climate. Our participants were Niven Govinden, Amelia Abraham author of Queer Intentions (Picador) and Isabel Waidner, editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of I...

An evening of discussion and poetry readings with poets Kayo Chingonyi, Bhanu Kapil, Ilya Kaminsky and New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal. This lively event brings together eminent poets, critics and editors for a public panel discussion on diversity and the current state of poetry reviewing culture in the UK and the US, followed by poetry readings from Kayo Chingonyi and Bhanu Kapil. The pan...

Nicola Barker discusses T.S. Eliot, with reference to his appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The ‘Writer...

In Full Surrogacy Now (Verso), Sophie Lewis takes on the surrogacy industry – worth over one billion dollars a year in the USA alone, and famously exploitative – with a unique and explosive argument: we need more surrogacy, not less! Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and centre, that we should ‘overthrow, in short, the notion of the “family”’. Donna Haraw...

A.L. Kennedy discusses a personal mixtape of early influences (Cummings, Burgess, Pinter, Feiffer), with reference to their appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterit...

Mark Ford discusses John Ashbery, with reference to his appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The Writers o...

Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd Poet Laureate of the USA. Her last collection, Wade in the Water, was nominated for a Forward Prize; her last-but-one, Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Eternity, her Selected Poems, gathers together the best of her four books. Hilton Als has called her ‘a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, to history.’ Jay Ber...

‘Every new baby is its own crisis.’ The ‘mother ship’ of Francesca Segal’s memoir is the neonatal intensive care unit where she was confined for fifty-six days after the premature birth of her twin girls. Mother Ship (Chatto and Windus) is at once a celebration of female friendship, a medical thriller and a love poem to Segal’s daughters, from the acclaimed author of The Innocents and The Awkward...

Novelist, journalist and translator Keith Gessen will be at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel A Terrible Country, published by Fitzcarraldo, which investigates Russia’s past and present through the eyes of a Russian-American who moves from New York to Moscow to care for his elderly grandmother. Man Booker Prize winner George Saunders describes A Terrible Country as ‘A cause for...

Sally Rooney breathes new life into fiction. Her novels deal with ordinary life in all its unexpected ways. The Guardian said of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends: ‘It’s rare that a novel elicits such ferocious and unmitigated awe from just about everyone you know, whether male, female, or millennial’. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (published by Faber & Faber last September),...

After Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962 Algiers became the de facto capital of anti-imperialism, anti-racism and world revolution, and a haven for visionaries and rebels such as Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Jomo Kenyatta and Eldridge Cleaver. Elaine Mokhtefi moved to Algiers during this extraordinary moment of hope, turmoil, dreams and disillusion, and her memoir of that ti...

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch’s painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Os...

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of several highly acclaimed novels, described in her memoir In Other Words her passionate romance with the Italian language. She now continues that passionate engagement with the country and its literature as the editor of a new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She was in conversation about Italy, things Italian, and the art of the short story with Chris Power, whose de...