London Review Bookshop Podcast

With Testo Junkie, Pornotopia, An Apartment in Uranus and Can the Monster Speak, Paul B. Preciado became established as one of the most exciting and challenging social thinkers of our time. His latest book Dysphoria Mundi (Fitzcarraldo), a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry and autofiction, draws on the experience of the Covid pandemic and the social convulsions that accompanied...

Gender, race and identity collide on the open seas in Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto), a powerful, feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. She was in conversation with Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan: Or the Whale, who has described Guo’s latest novel as being ‘as animal and visceral and shape-shifting and subversive as the broad back of the mythic whale themselves.’ Learn m...

In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Allen Lane), sociologist Didier Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with his classic memoir Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother’s rapid physical and cognitive decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Mic...

Seventy years after the publication of Samuel Beckett’s first novel in English, Faber have reissued Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable with ritzy new covers and fresh introductions. To celebrate, Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light, and Jennifer Hodgson, whose biography of Ann Quin is forthcoming, deliver their own tribute to Beckett's fiction, and discuss his life and work. ‘Oh the stories I co...

In Enemy Feminisms (Haymarket Books), described by Judith Butler as ‘honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant’, Sophie Lewis provides a field guide to the reactionary stereotypes that have affected and distorted feminisms past and present, and propounds a paradigm for a feminism that is inclusive, anticolonial and truly liberational. Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish...

Women in Dark Times (Fitzcarraldo) begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Extending her...

Art historian T.J. Clark began his academic career with two groundbreaking works on the art of mid-nineteenth century France, expounding materialist theory of art that has remained his watchword for five decades, with books on Poussin, Cézanne, Picasso and modernism.  Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames and Hudson) distils a lifetime’s work through a series of case studies, from Hieronymus...

‘With his electric Soho, Richard Scott has arrived like a lightning bolt in our midst’ said T.S. Eliot Prize judge Sinéad Morrissey on the publication of his first collection in 2018. To celebrate publication of his second, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber), Richard will be reading alongside fellow poets Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Stranger Baby and Unexhausted Time) and Jane Yeh (Discipline, Ma...

Poet and playwright Ariana Reines will be making a rare UK appearance to read from her new collection with Divided Books, Wave of Blood, a lyric essay she has described as an ‘experiment in ethics’ reckoning with the US wars on terror and their repercussions. Reines was joined in conversation by critic and academic Alice Blackhurst, whose most recent book is Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image....

In Wages for Housework (Allen Lane) Emily Callaci, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of a movement that shot to prominence in the 1970s, distilling a century of feminist struggle and critique into a single bold slogan. Focusing on five women who helped forge and fight for it – Selma James, Mariarosa Della Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown and Margare...

In his debut collection Strange Beach – the very first title in Fitzcarraldo’s new poetry series – poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola finds the body to be a porous landscape across which existential dilemmas of gender, sexuality and race are enacted and explored. Poet and novelist Andrew McMillan writes of Olayiwola’s work ‘the tideline of the poetic phrase is constantly shifting, is forev...

From his arrival in London in 1981 – clutching a suitcase and sewing machine – to his death from AIDS on New Year’s Eve 1994, Leigh Bowery – the man described by Boy George as ‘modern art on legs’ – led an extraordinary life; a life chronicled in the equally extraordinary biography by his closest friend and confidante Sue Tilley, reissued by Thames and Hudson this February. Tilley was at the shop...

In The Position of Spoons novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy invites the reader to share in her interior world, mapping her own life through the lives and works of the artists and writers who have shaped her own practice, from Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego. Levy, described by Lauren Elkin as ‘one of the most exciting vo...

Matthew Hollis has reworked the classic Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer into a poem desperately relevant for our times: in a society threatened by climate change and the coming-loose of social bonds, Hollis invites us to hear, as the Anglo-Saxons did, the spirit music of land, wind and sea. Hollis’s text is one half of a collaborative project with the photographer Norman McBeath, who was at the shop...

In Serendipity (Reaktion) Carol Mavor uses Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War, Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes hidden in a drawer, Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra and her own memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate in New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol, to muse upon the sere...

In his 2014 Dante’s Inferno poet and provocateur Philip Terry moved the action to Essex University. His Purgatorio (Carcanet) transports us to nearby Mersea Island, where Ted Berrigan leads our author up an artificial mountain to meet with artists Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, as well as Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Gins...

It’s hard to believe that Fitzcarraldo Editions has only existed for ten years; during that short time, they have published a remarkable selection of books (gathering four Nobel Prizes between them), and their iconic blue and white covers have become a mainstay of the bookshop. To celebrate their first decade, Fitzcarraldo are publishing some of their best-loved titles in hardback, limited edition...

In You Can’t Please All (Verso), a sort of sequel to his seminal 1987 memoir Street-fighting Years, Tariq Ali continues the story of a life lived flamboyantly and magnificently on the Left. Pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn are combined with reflections on his...

From Jesus Christ to Krautrock via Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot, Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism (Profile) brilliantly displays the author’s playful, eclectic erudition in an evocation of the phenomenon he defines, after Evelyn Underhill, as ‘experience in its most intense form.’ Critchley was in conversation about mysticism East and West with the LRB’s James Butler. Find more events at the Boo...

Campaigning journalist Claud Cockburn – defiantly anti-establishment and proudly Communist – had as his watchword ‘believe nothing until it is officially denied’, a saying borrowed by his son Patrick, himself a legendary foreign correspondent, for his biography of his maverick father. Described by schoolfriend Graham Greene as the greatest journalist of the twentieth century, Cockburn was born at...

Building on his seminal lecture ‘The Shoah After Gaza’ (LRB 21 March 2024) and his earlier books From the Ruins of Empire and The Age of Anger, novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra’s latest work The World After Gaza (Fern Press) seeks to place the current crisis in Gaza and Palestine within the broader context of the troubled and tragic history of colonialism and anticolonialism. ‘A brilliant book,...

Marion Milner, across her long career as psychoanalyst, essayist and artist, thought deeply about creativity in all its forms, exploring fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. In Marion Milner: On Creativity, David Russell, Professor of English at the University of California, uses these ideas as a starting-point for an explo...

Rebecca Solnit’s latest essay collection explores subjects as diverse as the climate crisis, toxic masculinity and the rise of the far right with her usual flair and capacity for radical hope: Merlin Sheldrake has described No Straight Road Takes You There as ‘a book of fierce and poetic thinking - and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world’. Solnit was joined in conve...

Before she became a well-known novelist, Margaret Atwood was an award-winning poet. She has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years, from the self-published, hand-set Double Persephone in 1961 to its follow up The Circle Game which won the Governor General’s Award, to her latest, critically-acclaimed collection Dearly in 2020. Paper Boat (Chatto & Windus) draws on that impressive body of wor...

‘Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.’ Solvej Balle’s septology On the Calculation of Volume (Faber), thirty years in the making, was published in Danish by the author’s own press to huge and universal acclaim: ‘Absolutely, absolutely incredible’ (Karl...