London Review Bookshop Podcast

'The first thing you find out in any textbook about maps is that they don't work. There's no such thing as a good map.'What is a map? And what is a map’s relation to the real world? In Mapping it Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies (Thames and Hudson) a stellar cast of modern artists, architects, scientists and theorists, including Yoko Ono, Mona Hatoum, Tim Berners-Lee, Anish...

Film-maker, graphic designer, animator, cartoonist, photographer, internet and new media pioneer, installationist, novelist, critic, publisher – the French artist Chris Marker, who died in 2012 on the day of his 91st birthday, was as versatile as he was prolific. He is best known for his film masterpieces Sans Soleil and La Jetée (the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys) but his influen...

Almost a century after Einstein first proposed it, the full ramifications of the General Theory of Relativity are still being debated. Pedro Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and his new book The Perfect Theory brings to life both the science and the scientific controversies which have surrounded the General Theory since its conception. Pedro was at the Bookshop in...

In Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel The Blazing World (Sceptre) artist Harriet Burden, consumed by fury at the lack of recognition she has received from the New York art establishment, embarks on an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts who exhibit her work as their own, to universal acclaim. ‘All intellectual endeavours’ Burden herself remarks pugnaciously at the novel’s opening...

John Berger came to the Bookshop to celebrate the life and work of Aimé Césaire on the occasion of Archipelago's reissue of Césaire's long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1936). Born in Martinique in 1913, Césaire was one of the founding voices of the négritude movement in Francophone literature. He considered this work his “break into the forbidden,” at once a cry of rebellion and a celebr...

Javier Cercas rose to fame in the English-speaking world with The Soldiers of Salamis which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and was one of our early bestsellers. He continued his exploration of modern Spanish history with The Anatomy of a Moment, a work of non-fiction that investigated the failed coup of 1981. Now he returns to fiction with Outlaws, a fast-paced and morally compl...

Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt’s The Novel – A Biography (Harvard) invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English. Michael Schmidt spoke with Michael Wood, author and regular contributor to the London Review o...

'The tutored and passionate eye of the director holds the space, which otherwise would be without boundary, indiscriminate and endless.' Since making her first film at the age of 14, Sally Potter has established herself as one of Britain's leading directors – of dance and theatre as well as of cinema. In her new book, Naked Cinema (Faber),she strips bare the art of directing actors for the camera....

Following the hugely enjoyable launch event last year for [*The Flamethrowers*][1], Rachel Kushner returned to the shop to mark the UK publication (by Vintage) of her first novel [*Telex From Cuba*][2], set among the American expatriate community on the eve of Castro's revolution. Rachel was in conversation with Robert Collins, Deputy Editor of the *Sunday Times* and an early champion of *The Flam...

In his new book, 'Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism' (Profile), David Harvey unravels the paradoxes at the heart of capitalism – its drive, for example, to accumulate capital beyond the means of investing it; its imperative to use labour-saving technologies that leave consumers bereft of adequate means of consumption; and its compulsion to exploit nature to the point of extinction...

To celebrate the publication of The Bloomsbury Cookbook (Thames & Hudson), we held an exclusive evening at the Bookshop, a stone’s throw away from the kitchens and dining rooms where the Bloomsbury group would converge. Author Jans Ondaatje Rolls was in conversation with artist Cressida Bell on the world of the Bloomsbury group. The talk was accompanied by a menu of recipes and cocktails inspired...

In 2010 Nick Hunt set out on an epic walk in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, across the whole European continent ‘from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn.’ Relying, like his hero, on the hospitality of strangers and using Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings as his only guide, Hunt crossed Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, partly to see how much had changed,...

May-Lan Tan and Will Eaves joined us at the Bookshop for the launch of their respective books, Things to Make and Break (since shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award) and The Absent Therapist (since shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize), both published by CB Editions. The authors treated us to a selection of passages from their work, featuring night-schools, spanking clubs and ex-girlfriend...

Since their last appearance at the LRB Bookshop, the poets of New Poetries V have been busy: five debut collections (and one forthcoming), prestigious awards, general excitement. Reunited at last, Tara Bergin, OIi Hazzard, Helen Tookey, Rory Waterman, Julith Jedamus and Lucy Tunstall read from their new volumes, in an evening that marked out the territory for the next generation of British poetry....

Adam Foulds’s latest novel, In The Wolf’s Mouth (Jonathan Cape), expands on the themes of violence, conflict and the distortions of history that have characterised his work since 2007’s The Broken Word. Set in Sicily as the Second World War moves into its endgame, the novel is a vivid study of the moral compromises and historical elisions forced on us by war and its aftermath. Adam was in conversa...

Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s memoir A Sense of Direction is an account of three pilgrimages – the Camino de Santiago, a tour of Buddhist temples on the island of Shikoku, and a journey to the tomb of a Hasidic Rabbi in the Ukraine – undertaken in the wake of a family crisis. Gideon was at the shop to talk about pilgrimage, writing and reconciliation with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and...

Film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author Derek Jarman died on 19 February 1994. To mark the 20th anniversary of his death, we hosted an evening of readings and discussion. Our focus was a very little-known but crucial part of Jarman’s work, his poetry, and in particular the volume 'A Finger in the Fishes Mouth', unavailable for over 40 years and now reprinted in facsimil...

To mark the paperback publication of Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Philip 'Leviathan' Hoare’s acclaimed new book The Sea Inside, we held an evening exploring the wondrous world of whales. One of our best non-fiction writers and a fine broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick and directed three films for BBC’s ‘Whale Night’. He was also co-curator, with...

'The past is a mosaic; we make it out of present materials.'Jonathan Lethem’s latest book Dissident Gardens (Cape) tells, in a ‘torrent of potent voices, searing ironies, popculture allusions, and tragicomic complexities’ the story of three generations of a radical New York family, at the same time painting a vivid portrait of the American Century. Jonathan Lethem was in conversation with Benjamin...

Will Self was at the shop to discuss the work of Guy Debord, and in particular The Society of the Spectacle, a 1967 work which offered an eerily accurate prediction of our mediated, image-saturated times. Self's introduction to the new Notting Hill edition beathes fresh life into the original 1970 translation. He writes: 'Never before has Debord’s work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in t...

In a year that might well see the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom, one of our foremost historians of national identity provides an analysis of the various Acts of Union that have until now more or less held the country together. In her latest book Acts of Union, Acts of Disunion (Profile), published to coincide with a 15-part Radio 4 series, she draws on art, architecture and literature...

In his second collaboration with landscape photographer Jason Orton, Ken Worpole – ‘for many years one of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the English social landscape’ ('The Independent') – examines the shifting perspective of England’s landscape aesthetic in the latter half of the 20th century, away from the rural interior towards the more disrupted landscapes of East Anglia and the Thame...

In American Smoke (Hamish Hamilton), the third part of a loose trilogy of topographical ruminations that began with Hackney: That Rose-red Empire and Ghost Milk, Iain Sinclair follows the traces of the writers of the American Beat generation – Kerouac, Burroughs, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Malcolm Lowry and more – in a journey that takes in the Old West, Mexico, volcanoes, murder, and a good deal...

Gillian Darley and David McKie’s study of Nairn - Ian Nairn: Words in Place – published by Five Leaves, reintroduces to a new generation an architectural critic whose work has influenced writers and critics such as J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades, who once described Nairn as ‘a great poet of the metropolis’. Gillian Darley and David McKie discussed Ian Nairn’s life and w...

Polish poet, novelist, painter and translator Jacek Dehnel appeared at the shop in conversation with his translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature and this evening was the occasion of her being presented with the Found in Translation Award for the second time (given by the Polish Book Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute London and the P...