London Review Bookshop Podcast

Short stories don't have to be like short stories. They can be experiences, visitations, slices of events or part revelations of a truth or a lie. Kirsty Gunn and Deborah Levy joined us at the Bookshop to discuss how they go about making up their own short fiction and the influence of modernism in their recent collections, Infidelities and Black Vodka. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mo...

Katharine Norbury's affecting memoir The Fish Ladder (Bloomsbury) deals with grief, recovery and the redemptive power of stories and journeys. Abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent, Norbury was brought up by loving adoptive parents. As an adult, and having recently suffered a miscarriage, she embarked with her nine-year-old daughter on a journey to trace a river from sea to source. The noveli...

Patrick Cockburn, regular contributor to the LRB and Middle East correspondent for the Independent, is, according to Seymour Hersh, 'Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today'. His latest book The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Verso) describes the origins of the new rebel state in Iraq and Syria, setting it in the context of the region's turbulent...

Islamic scholar Robert Irwin joined us at the Bookshop in discussion with mythographer Marina Warner about a groundbreaking new translation of Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, and its implications for our understanding of the classical Arabic storytelling tradition. The 18 medieval tales collected here (by Penguin Classics), probably originating in the 9th and 10th centuries, are t...

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, most recently Summer of Hate, and two books of art and cultural criticism. The New York Observer describes her as 'the art world's favorite novelist,' and her recent monograph, Lost Properties, about conceptual art and economic activism, was published for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is a co-editor of the independent Semiotexte, with Hedi El Kholti and S...

James Ellroy’s hardboiled, idiosyncratic explorations of Los Angeles police corruption and midcentury Washington power politics have earned him a worldwide following; his new novel, Perfidia (Cornerstone), is the first in a new trilogy featuring some familiar characters, including the gleefully amoral Dudley Smith. Ellroy joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with the American novelist David V...

Writing about place – a sub-genre of travel writing that subverts it by being about staying put, rather than moving – has been enjoying an extraordinary vogue of late. Three of the genre’s finest practitioners joined us at the shop to discuss its significance and future. Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground (Granta) explores the small part of Cornwall to which he has recently transplanted himself; Julia...

When I was in eighth grade my history teacher wrote on my report card: “She only does what she wants to do.” She thought that was a bad thing, and it’s not. Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear transplanted to 20th-century Iowa. She joined us at the shop to read from her latest novel, Some Luck (Mantle), the first book in a projected t...

Our top 1% take 15% of all income. That’s the highest share of anywhere in Europe. Our bottom fifth are the poorest in Europe. In Inequality and the 1% (Verso) Danny Dorling (Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford, or, as Simon Jenkins more pithily put it, 'geographer royal by appointment to the left'), goes in pursuit of...

In 'The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It' (Allen Lane) Owen Jones analyses the people and institutions that govern our lives – government, the media, the banks and the accountancy firms – and exposes usually invisible networks that bind them together. Far from working on our behalf, as they often claim, these institutions are, Owen Jones argues, the biggest threat to our democracy toda...

Leading sociologist of art [Sarah Thornton][1] goes behind the scenes with 33 living artists including Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman and Isaac Julien to ask the apparently simple but vexing question, ‘What is an artist?' Thornton joined us at the Bookshop to talk about her new book, *[33 Artists in 3 Acts][2]* (Granta), with the celebrated artist Isaac Julien. Hosted on Acast. See ac...

In what may well be the largest work of public art in history, Turner prize-winner Mark Wallinger placed a uniquely designed labyrinth in each of London's 270 Underground stations. The project was commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of London Underground. His extraordinary art-work is documented in Labyrinth: A Journey Through London’s Underground, published by Art / Books in association wi...

Vasily Grossman, now widely regarded as the greatest Russian novelist of the 20th century, died 50 years ago this month. The author of the remarkable Everything Flows and Life and Fate (the only manuscript ever to be itself arrested by the Soviet authorities), Grossman was a crucial witness to the multiple horrors of the period. He did not live to see his greatest books published. This was a uniqu...

James Meek came to the bookshop to talk about his new book, Private Island (Verso), a scathing assessment of the last two decades’ privatisation of public assets, ranging from electricity to postal services to municipal housing. What has been lost? Who has benefited? And what’s been the impact on Britain’s wider polity? In the words of John Lanchester, ‘some of it will make you sad, some of it wil...

Will Self’s latest novel Shark explores the hidden history of the late 20th century, taking in the American invasion of Cambodia, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and reckless experimentation with psychotropic drugs. Self joined us at the Bookshop to read from Shark and take on questions from the audience. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad cho...

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six autobiographical novels, published in Norway between 2009 and 2011 under the series title *Min Kamp* (‘My Struggle’) have excited controversy and critical acclaim in equal measure. Knausgaard’s unflinching and almost uncritical laying on of detail has led some critics to call him ‘the Norwegian Proust’. ‘There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book’,...

Ali Smith has been described by Kate Atkinson as ‘one of the few contemporary writers ploughing a genuinely modernist furrow.’ Her latest novel *how to be both* continues her almost reckless experimentation with form and content, adapting the artistic techniques of fresco painting to literature in telling a dual-time tale of art, love, injustice and redemption. Ali came to the Bookshop to give a r...

'Who has the temerity to call themselves a philosopher? The word “philosopher" is an honorific. It should be bestowed upon you by others.' Lars Iyer’s latest novel Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House) concerns the academic career of a group of Cambridge philosophy students, deeply under the influence of their teacher, whom they have nicknamed ‘Wittgenstein’. ‘Wittgenstein’s’ austere, exacting philosop...

‘It's a bit mysterious, but somehow the emotion I feel at the heart of whatever I'm writing comes through, usually by my not insisting on it.’ Lydia Davis made a rare London appearance at the Bookshop to read from and discuss her unique body of work. She spoke with Adam Thirlwell about titles, translation and small thoughts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more a...

Helen Macdonald and Tim Dee came to the Bookshop to talk about birds, and about writing about birds. Radio producer Tim Dee propelled himself into the front rank of British nature writing in 2009 with his remarkable birdwatching memoir The Running Sky, followed in 2013 by Four Fields. Helen Macdonald, writer, poet, naturalist, conservationist, historian and some-time falconer, has recently publish...

As the world commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War historian Douglas Newton recounts the hidden history of Britain’s decision to enter the conflict. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, including the private papers and correspondence of leading politicians of the time, Newton pays particular attention to the widespread and vehement opposition to the war, both inside parl...

Nigel Smith, currently Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton, was in conversation about the thought, literature and legacy of the Ranters with Sir Stephen Sedley, formerly a judge in the Court of Appeal, frequent contributor to the LRB and an acknowledged authority on the history of English radicalism. Folk singer Leon Rosselson performed two of his songs at the event: 'Abiezer C...

Best known in Britain for her award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels is also an acclaimed poet. Her latest collection, Correspondences, shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Prize, is an extraordinary and utterly sui generis collaboration with painter Bernice Eisenstein. In a unique, accordion-style format, Michaels’s resonant book-length poem, a historical and personal elegy, unfolds on on...

Geoff Dyer’s latest book Another Great Day at Sea (Visual Editions), illustrated with the photographs of Chris Steele-Perkins, recounts daily life aboard an American aircraft carrier the USS George H. W. Bush, on which Dyer spent time as a kind of writer in residence. Philip Hoare wrote of it in the Guardian: ‘This is beautiful writing. It is urgent, funny, utterly in-the-moment and achingly hones...

Leslie Jamison’s essays deal with illness, art, running, loss, the female body and everything else besides. She joined us at the shop to discuss her work with the author Olivia Laing. The conversation touched on artificial sweeteners, the essay as a form and the difficulties of writing about pain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...