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 forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language, every grain of a word held up to the light to consider its myriad refractions.’

Olayiwola read from Strange Beach, and was joined in conversation about his work by the poet and critic Camille Ralphs.

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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 to discuss Bowery’s life and legacy with Charlie Porter, author of What Artists Wear, and whose debut novel Nova Scotia House was published by Particular Books in March.

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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 voices in contemporary British fiction’, talks about it here with Adam Thirlwell.

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 with Hollis to present and talk about their work. The discussion was chaired by Sara Hudston of Hazel Press.

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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 serendipitous afterlives of objects. Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester and prolific author of books and articles about art and culture, was in conversation about fragments, remnants and what remains with novelist, essayist and translator Lauren Elkin.

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 Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka Shankar.

Philip Terry was joined in conversation with Marina Warner at the Bookshop.

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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 form.

Brian Dillon and Kate Briggs will be at the shop to discuss their books in this series: Dillon’s Essayism (a gathering together of his loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking), and Briggs’ This Little Art, a fresh, fierce and timely meditation on literary translation. The conversation will be chaired by Helen Charman, whose political history of motherhood, Mother State, came out earlier this year from Penguin.

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 work as a novelist, playwright and film-maker, and as an activist in the War on the War on Terror. Ali was in conversation about his life and work with Oliver Eagleton, associate editor of New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project.

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.

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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 the heart of the establishment it became his life’s work to satirise, lampoon and undermine, with reports from Berlin during the rise of Fascism and Spain during the Civil War, as well as New York, Washington and Chicago, where he once conducted an interview with Al Capone.

Patrick Cockburn spoke at the shop about Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied (Verso), and its lessons for journalism then, now and in the future, with journalist Duncan Campbell.

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Listen to Neal Ascherson discuss Claud Cockburn: https://lrb.me/aschersonpod

Get the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/believe-nothing-until-it-is-officially-denied-claud-cockburn-and-the-invention-of-guerrilla-journalism-patrick-cockburn