London Review Bookshop Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Karl Ove Knausgaard & Helen Charman: The Third Realm Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

The Third Realm is the next instalment of the series Karl Ove Knausgaard began with The Morning Starand continued in The Wolves of Eternity; like its two precursors, it is a breathtaking exploration of ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, ‘re-enchanting the cosmos with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it’ (in the words of The Guardian).

Knausgaard read from The Third Realm and was joined in conversation about its mysteries and complexities by Helen Charman, author of Mother State.

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Helen Castor & Mary Wellesley: The Eagle & the Hart Mar 26, 2025

Show notes

‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is’, writes Andrew O’Hagan of Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today’s headlines.’ Castor, whose 2010 book She-Wolves was adapted for television by the BBC, discussed Richard and Henry with Mary Wellesley, author of Hidden Hands: Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers and co-presenter of the medieval strand of the LRB’s Close Readings podcast series.

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Legacy Russell & Rene Matić: Black Meme Mar 19, 2025

Show notes

In Black Meme (Verso) Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

Russell was joined in conversation with artist and writer Rene Matić.

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Thurston Moore & Jack Underwood: Sonic Life Mar 12, 2025

Show notes

In his memoir Sonic Life (Faber), Thurston Moore recounts a life that has been defined by music. Following a childhood rock ’n’ roll epiphany in the early 1960s, his infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave led him to move to New York City, where he immersed himself in the underground music and art scenes. In 1981 he co-founded the band Sonic Youth, who changed the sound of modern rock music in a thirty-year career of constant experimentation. Throughout the book we encounter a constellation of musicians and artists who inspired him, including The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

Moore talks with poet Jack Underwood (A Year in the New Life, Happiness).

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Rachel Kushner & Adam Thirlwell: Creation Lake Mar 05, 2025

Show notes

Described by Mick Herron as ‘seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall’, Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake (Cape) reaffirms her position as one of America’s most exciting and accomplished writers of fiction. In a reimagining of the spy novel for an age of ecological crisis, Kushner leads us to a remote Neanderthal cave in rural France where the enigmatic Bruno Lacombe leads his followers in a radical project to reject and undermine the modern world. ‘I've never read anything like it’, writes Brett Easton Ellis. Rachel Kushner was joined in conversation by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell.

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Iona Heath & Sally Potter: John Berger – Ways of Learning Feb 26, 2025

Show notes

In ‘a wonderful book about looking and learning’ (Gavin Francis) retired GP Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger’s work and friendship had on her working life as a doctor in a deprived London borough. Five decades of engagement with Berger’s work and twenty years of friendship with the man himself made her, she is convinced, a better doctor. Heath was in conversation about Berger’s legacy, for medicine and beyond, with film director and screenwriter Sally Potter, who wrote, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, ‘[John Berger] reminds us how to think about Charlie Chaplin, how to listen to songs, how to rage about prisons, how to remember that everything matters.’

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Michelle Tea & Jeremy Atherton Lin: SLUTS Feb 19, 2025

Show notes

Taking us from the awkwardness of middle school to the transcendence of a sex club, SLUTS: Anthology(Cipher Press) presents a diverse collection of writing – fiction and non-fiction, pro and con, philosophical and compulsive – exploring the eternally controversial word. Whether an insult or badge of honour, an identity or a state of mind, SLUTS engages some of the hottest minds of the moment to riff on the subject, exploring the nature of desire and its cultural consequences.

The anthology’s editor, Michelle Tea (Black Wave, Against Memoir), and contributor Jeremy Atherton Lin (Gay Bar) read from and discussed the project.

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Vigdis Hjorth & Lauren Oyler: If Only Feb 12, 2025

Show notes

If Only – first published in Norway in 2001, and now brought into English by Charlotte Barslund – is viewed in Norway as Vigdis Hjorth’s masterpiece, a story of the devastation wreaked on one woman’s life by an ill-advised affair. Hjorth (whose other novels in English include Is Mother Dead?, Will and Testament and Long Live the Post Horn!) is in conversation about the novel with Lauren Oyler, whose own debut novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021, and whose essay collection No Judgement came out earlier this year.

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Helen Charman & Lola Olufemi: Mother State Feb 05, 2025

Show notes

In Mother State(Allen Lane), Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mother’ ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Charman discusses her book with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

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Sarah Moss & Octavia Bright: My Good Bright Wolf Jan 29, 2025

Show notes

Best known for her novels – most recently, 2021’s The Fell – now Sarah Moss has turned her hand to life-writing. My Good Bright Wolf unflinchingly details her experience of girlhood and anorexia in prose described by Jan Carson as ‘part memoir, part confessional, part dark and feverish fairytale’. Moss was in conversation with Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace.

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