London Review Bookshop Podcast

By London Review Bookshop

Arts

What's London Review Bookshop Podcast about?

Listen to the latest literary events recorded at the London Review Bookshop, covering fiction, poetry, politics, music and much more. Find out about our upcoming events here https://lrb.me/bookshopeventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Ha-Joon Chang & Daniel Chan...

03.22.2023

According to his excellent website, Ha-Joon Chang doesn’t do extreme sports, is not a hi-tech buff nor a secret expert on 18th-century maps, and he doesn’t even do gardening. He is however one of the world’s leading thinkers on development ...

London Review Bookshop Podcast episodes:

03.22.2023 Ha-Joon Chang & Daniel Chandler: Edible Economics According to his excellent website, Ha-Joon Chang doesn’t do extreme sports, is not a hi-tech buff nor a secret expert on 18th-century maps, and he doesn’t even do gardening. He is however one of the world’s leading thinkers on development ...
03.22.2023 Colin Grant & Michael Rosen: I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be In I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Cape) Colin Grant, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, director of WritersMosaic and author of Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, A Smell of Burning: A Memoir of Epilepsy and ...
03.15.2023 Perry Anderson and John Lanchester: Powell v. Proust In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures the achievement of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time against Proust’s more celebrated In Search of Lost Time – and finds Powell to be superior in certain key respects. Anderson ...
03.08.2023 Ha-Joon Chang & Daniel Chandler: Edible Economics Ha-Joon Chang is one of the world’s leading thinkers on development economics. In Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, Chang combines his passion for numbers with his passion for food (in particular, chocolate) to explain how the politics ...
03.01.2023 Juan Gabriel Vásquez & Shahidha Bari: Retrospective In Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s latest book a film director is attending a retrospective of his work in Barcelona. Plagued by personal tragedy, Sergio Cabrera begins to recall the events that have marked him and his family, from the ...
02.22.2023 Sheila Fitzpatrick & James Meek: The Shortest History of the Soviet Union Over a century after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. In The Shortest History Of The Soviet Union (Old Street Publishing), acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick charts the development ...
02.15.2023 Katherine Rundell and Alice Spawls: The Golden Mole Katherine Rundell has been writing about endangered animals in the LRB since 2018. Her new book, The Golden Mole, gathers those essays and new pieces into a bestiary of unusual and underappreciated creatures. Katherine was joined by LRB editor Alice ...
02.08.2023 Derek Owusu & Jason Okundaye: Losing the Plot Derek Owusu’s first novel That Reminds Me, a haunting, edgy Bildungsroman, won the Desmond Elliott prize in 2020. He was joined by Jason Okundaye to discuss and read from his second novel Losing the Plot, which continues his exploration of ...
02.01.2023 Wallace Shawn and Gareth Evans: Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky Wallace Shawn talks to Gareth Evans about his new collection of essays. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
01.25.2023 Sophie Lewis & Lola Olufemi: Abolish the Family In Abolish The Family, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis asks us to imagine a world without families. She traces the history of family abolitionism, before introducing us to the groundbreaking politics of radical feminists and gay liberationists that have called ...
01.18.2023 Vigdis Hjorth & Shahidha Bari: Is Mother Dead Vigdis Hjorth’s latest novel Is Mother Dead (translated by Charlotte Barslund; Verso) is a characteristic blend of thriller, metafiction, meditation on art, motherhood, belonging and surveillance. She cites as influences Brecht and Céline. Others have compared her to Kafka and ...
01.11.2023 Chantal Mouffe & James Schneider: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution Chantal Mouffe is one of the world’s leading left thinkers on power and populism. In her latest book, she proposes the creation of a broad coalition of movements under the banner of a Green Democratic Revolution to confront the impending ...
01.04.2023 Martin Shaw and Claire Armistead: s t a g c u l t A storyteller, mythologist and poet, Martin Shaw’s latest collection, s t a g c u l t (Hazel Press, 2022) lifts a lantern to a kind of haunting we can’t quite exorcise, or don’t wish to. Shaw was joined in ...
12.28.2022 Lara Feigel and Lauren Elkin: Look! We Have Come Through! In the spring of 2020 Lara Feigel found herself locked down with her partner, her two children and the works of D.H. Lawrence. In Look! We Have Come Through! (Bloomsbury) she blends biography, autobiography and literary criticism in a way ...
12.21.2022 Perdendosi: Edmund de Waal, Norman McBeath & Alexandra Harris Perdendosi: an instruction, typically at the end of a piece, for musicians to gradually diminish in volume, tempo and tone, to the point of disappearance. Photographer Norman McBeath uses the term to describe the way his images of fallen leaves ...
12.14.2022 On Claude McKay: Raymond Antrobus, Paul Mendez & Kevin Okoth Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows was published in 1922 and is only now beginning to receive its due. The collection stands alongside the better-known masterpieces of that year in its distillation of the spirit of the age and its outsize influence. ...
12.07.2022 Mohsin Hamid & Jo Hamya: The Last White Man In his fifth novel The Last White Man (Hamish Hamilton) Mohsin Hamid continues his exploration of cultural and racial displacement, commenced so brilliantly with Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West. ...
11.30.2022 Dawn Foster Forever: K Biswas, James Butler, Lynsey Hanley, Gary Younge Dawn Foster, chronicler of austerity Britain and leading voice from the housing crisis, passed away last year aged 34. Foster, author of Lean Out (Repeater, 2016) and LRB contributor, was a working class feminist who rose to prominence as a ...
11.23.2022 Jeremy Lee & Olivia Laing: Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many Chef proprietor at London’s Quo Vadis, Jeremy Lee’s commitment to locality, excellence and simplicity has made the restaurant a must-eat-at destination for every resident or visiting gourmet. He’s also, in stark contrast to the popular image of the celebrity chef, ...
11.16.2022 Michelle Tea and Isabel Waidner: Knocking Myself Up In Knocking Myself Up (Dey St.), Michelle Tea brings all her characteristic passion, wit and occasionally alarming candour to bear on the trials, tribulations and joys of trying to become, and becoming, a queer parent. Witch-enhanced honey, intrusive medical procedures, ...
11.09.2022 Derek Jarman: Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping Now published for the very first time, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping (House Sparrow Press) is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Somewhere between a fairytale, acid trip and road movie, the work lays the foundations ...
11.02.2022 Remember the Details: Skye Arundhati Thomas and Preti Taneja In Remember the Details, Skye Arundhati Thomas reflects on the Indian protest movement that began in mid-2019 against xenophobic and casteist citizenship laws. In the wake of the state erasure of these events, it asks what it means to remember, ...
10.26.2022 Caroline Bird and Helen Mort Helen Mort’s latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has just been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the latest accolade in what has been an incredibly productive year: 2022 has also seen the publication of her memoir of walking and motherhood, A ...
10.19.2022 Small Fires: Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In Small Fires (Pushkin), essayist and food writer Rebecca May Johnson takes a different path, rewriting the kitchen ...
10.12.2022 Signe Gjessing, Ray Monk and Max Richter on the ‘Tractatus’ Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in English for the first time a century ago thanks to the efforts of his tutor at Cambridge Bertrand Russell, set out to solve all of the problems of philosophy in less than 100 pages, through ...
10.05.2022 On Ukraine: with Andrey Kurkov, Oksana Zabuzhko, Robert Chandler, James Meek, Peter Pomerantsev, Ilya Kaminsky, and Lyuba Yakimchuk Andrey Kurkov is the celebrated Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin and 18 other novels. His letters from Ukraine about his family’s flight from Kyiv became essential daily listening on the Today programme in the aftermath of the 2022 ...
09.28.2022 Juliet Jacques with Owen Jones: Front Lines In her journalism Juliet Jacques writes about art, literature, culture and politics from a distinctive trans perspective. Front Lines (Cipher Press) collects seminal pieces written between 2007 and 2020. Juliet Jacques writes in her introduction ‘I never believed any journalism ...
09.21.2022 Victoria Adukwei Bulley & André Naffis-Sahely: Quiet/High Desert Two exciting young poets were at the shop to read from and talk about their work. Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut poetry collection Quiet (Faber) circles around ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood. ‘This book is a seismic event,’ writes ...
09.14.2022 Geoff Dyer & Mark Ford: The Last Days of Roger Federer As he enters late middle age, Geoff Dyer turns, in The Last Days of Roger Federer, to the question of late – or, indeed, last – style. Lisa Appignanesi writes, ‘Geoff Dyer's wry meditations on mortality and late style have ...
09.07.2022 Orwell Prize Shortlist Readings: Yara Rodrigues Fowler & Isabel Waidner Since 2019, the Orwell Prize has celebrated the best in contemporary political fiction. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Isabel Waidner, both on the prize’s 2022 shortlist, are in conversation with Sana Goyal, one of this year’s judges, talking about their novels ...
08.31.2022 Édouard Louis & Tash Aw: A Woman's Battles and Transformations ‘Everything started with a photo. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely towards the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father. Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything ...
08.24.2022 Seán Hewitt & Andrew McMillan: All Down Darkness Wide Seán Hewitt’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (Cape), won the Laurel Prize in 2020; Max Porter praised it for its reverence to the natural world and ‘gorgeous wisdom’, both of which are apparent in his new book, All ...
08.17.2022 Andrew Mellor and James Jolly: ‘The Northern Silence’ At one time something of a backwater in the musical world, over the past few decades Scandinavia has become a musical powerhouse, encompassing all genres from Esa-Pekka Salonen to Björk. Copenhagen-based music journalist Andrew Mellor has travelled from Reykjavik to ...
08.10.2022 Anna Aslanyan & Daniel Trilling on translation in reportage Two journalists with a multilingual background – Anna Aslanyan, the author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, and Daniel Trilling, the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe – ...
08.03.2022 Elif Batuman & Merve Emre: Either/Or Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed and The Idiot, joined us to read from and talk about her latest novel Either/Or. International travel, Harvard, Hungary and of course literature and philosophy collide in a heart-breaking and hilarious coming-of-age story by ...
07.27.2022 Margo Jefferson & Colin Grant: Constructing a Nervous System Margo Jefferson talks to Colin Grant about her latest book, Constructing a Nervous System. It’s a memoir unlike any other, taking as its focus each ‘influence, love and passion’ which have gone to shape Jefferson as a person: her family, ...
07.20.2022 Kate Folk and Sharon Horgan: ‘Out There’ Kate Folk's debut collection of short stories, Out There, combines science fiction, horror and psychological realism to explore the Kafkaesque precarities of social media and late capitalism: a house viscerally consumes its tenants, a curtain of void envelops the world, ...
07.13.2022 Lauren Elkin, Deborah Levy and Alice McCrum: The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir Written in 1954 but unpublished until after her death, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables is an intimate portrait, based on life, of female friendship on the cusp of womanhood. Its translator into English Lauren Elkin writes in her introductory note ...
07.06.2022 Kaveh Akbar and Seán Hewitt: Pilgrim Bell Back in March 2018 Iranian-born Kaveh Akbar launched his debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf with us at the bookshop. He joined us again in digital form, for his second, Pilgrim Bell (Chatto), a rich and moving collection which ...
06.29.2022 Julian Barnes and Chris Power: Elizabeth Finch Julian Barnes’s latest novel Elizabeth Finch, his first since The Only Story in 2018, is very much a novel of ideas. As a student sorts through the notebooks of his former teacher, the inspirational Elizabeth Finch, her ideas unlock for ...
06.22.2022 Nick Blackburn & Helen Macdonald: The Reactor From debut author Nick Blackburn, a therapist specialising in LGBTQ+ issues, comes The Reactor, a powerful new addition to the literature of grief and recovery. Following the death of his father Blackburn examines the nature of destruction, both natural and ...
06.15.2022 Niven Govinden & Gareth Evans: Diary of a Film Niven Govinden’s sixth novel Diary of a Film (Dialogue) follows an unnamed director through the streets of an Italian town as he muses on cinema, queer love and the creative process; on its hardback publication, during first lockdown, the Financial ...
06.08.2022 Preti Taneja & Lola Olufemi: Aftermath On 29 November 2019 Usman Khan murdered Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers’ Hall in London. Recently released from prison after serving a sentence for terrorism-related offences, Khan was attending an event to mark the anniversary of a writing ...
06.01.2022 Celia Paul & Olivia Laing: Letters to Gwen John Although born 20 years after Gwen John’s death, Celia Paul has always felt a strong affinity with the older artist. In Letters to Gwen John (Cape), described by Julia Blackburn as ‘A miraculous, door-opening book’, Paul has created in words ...
05.25.2022 Helen Thompson and Ann Pettifor: Disorder In her latest book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford) Helen Thompson argues that while the earthquake that was the Covid-19 pandemic profoundly shocked the world order, the fault lines along which it operated had been building for ...
05.18.2022 Pankaj Mishra and Lisa Appignanesi: Run and Hide After twenty years novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra makes a triumphant return to fiction. Described by Amit Chaudhuri as ‘his best work yet’ and by Neel Mukherjee as ‘unforgettable’, Run and Hide (Hutchinson Heinemann) explores, through the lives of three ...
05.11.2022 Ange Mlinko, Don Paterson and Edmund de Waal on Rilke Central to this modern myth is the ‘savage creative storm’ of 2-23 February 1922, when Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and completed the Duino Elegies in less than three weeks. 100 years on from its conclusion, the poet and ...
05.04.2022 Fernanda Melchor and Nicole Flattery: Paradais Fernanda Melchor first came to the attention of the English-speaking world with 'Hurricane Season', a tale of murder in a lawless Mexican village, described by Ben Lerner as ‘Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal’. In 'Paradais' she continues her exploration of violence, ...
04.27.2022 Tom McCarthy and Susan Philipsz on ‘Ulysses’ ‘How do you write after Ulysses?’ asked the twice Booker-nominated novelist Tom McCarthy, author of C, Satin Island and most recently The Making of Incarnation, in the LRB in 2014. He reflects on working in Ulysses’s wake – as we ...
04.20.2022 Revivalism: Christopher Hitchens Lisa Appignanesi, Benjamin Burgis, Janan Ganesh and James Wolcott on ‘A Hitch in Time’, chaired by David Runciman Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote; the London Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two ...

Older episodes