London Review Bookshop Podcast

Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Prize, the Costa, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus) is the eagerly-awaited follow-up: Saba Sams has described it as ‘gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny’. Long read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Howe, poetry editor at Chatto, whose own second collection Foretokens was published last year.

You can buy a copy of Sparrow on the Rooftop from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Michael Bracewell’s new novella The Smiths an anonymous narrator recounts the impact of the iconic pop group on his life. Accompanied by the French actress Carole Bouquet he embarks on a picaresque journey from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood, via a park bench in Cavendish Square. Deeply romantic and laced with comedy - not unlike the band themselves – The Smiths is an affectionate celebration of a pivotal episode in popular music history. The author read from his work, and discussed it with the novelist and journalist Leo Robson.

You can buy a copy of The Smiths from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot. Dark Night (Penguin Classics) gathers all of John’s poetry, together with a selection of his prose. The book’s translator, poet Martha Sprackland, joined LRB contributing editor James Butler for a discussion of the life and work of John of the Cross, and his abiding influence.

You can buy a copy of Dark Night from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Venice, September 1974. A chance meeting between a young English artist and Danilo Donati, production manager for Fellini and Pasolini, leads us into a tale of queer love, political intrigue and brutal murder. Emily Watlington wrote in Art in America ‘In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing's novel feels eerily timely.’ To mark the paperback publication of The Silver Book Olivia Laing was reading from their work, and in conversation with Jack Parlett, author of Flamboyance, Fire Island and The Poetics of Cruising.

You can buy a copy of The Silver Book from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power Lauren Elkin uses her own experience of training as a young soprano in the 1990s as a springboard for a powerful investigation of the female voice, from Maria Callas to Beyoncé and beyond. Part manifesto, part cultural history and all full-throated celebration, Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms and hymn of praise. Lauren Elkin was in conversation with writer, academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari.

You can buy a copy of Vocal Break from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s new book Said the Dead is part history, part ghost story and part unreliable memoir, exploring the lives, presences and forgotten voices of a derelict Victorian mental asylum in Cork. Ní Ghríofa, whose previous book A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was in conversation with Rachael Allen, author of the poetry collections Kingdomland and God Complex.

You can buy a copy of Said the Dead from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular LRB contributor Daniel Trilling has been researching and writing about the far right in Britain and beyond for more than a decade. His latest book If We Tolerate This (Picador), published ahead of the momentous English local, Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections on May 7, is a short and powerful polemic examining how far right ideas have come to dominate the political agenda, and outlining a strategy for how we might combat them. Pankaj Mishra writes ‘Combining forensic enquiry with moral passion, Daniel Trilling has emerged as one of our most intrepid and resourceful reporters.’ He was in conversation about his work with William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of This Is Not Normal and Nervous States.

You can buy a copy of If We Tolerate This from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The great M. John Harrison – ‘The closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ according to the New Statesman – returns to the shop to present his latest novel The End of Everything. In a post-apocalyptic Britain a beachcomber makes his living collecting artefacts washed up on the Channel shore. But when he comes across a strange, shape-shifting creature he realises he must take it inland, before it destroys everything he knows. The author was in conversation with Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites, Our Wives Under the Sea and Salt Slow.

You can buy a copy of The End of Everything from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book.

You can buy a copy of Ambivalence ⁠from the London Review Bookshop⁠.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book.

You can buy a copy of Ambivalence from the London Review Bookshop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices