Stay ConnectedListen to the latest literary events recorded at the London Review Bookshop, covering fiction, poetry, politics, music and much more.
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In her first novel The Last Sane Woman (Verso) poet Hannah Regel investigates the pains and pleasures of artistic practice carried out against the odds. While researching in a small archive dedicated to women’s art young graduate Nicola Long happens upon one half of a correspondence, conducted half a century before, written by a recently graduated ceramicist to a friend. As Nicola reads on she becomes obsessed with the parallels between her own life and that of the woman she encounters in the letters.
Regel was joined in conversation by LRB contributor and art critic Emily LaBarge.
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Poets Ella Frears and Will Burns were at the shop to read from and talk about their new collections. Ella’s Goodlord, from Rough Trade Books, takes the form of a long, lyrical email to an estate agent, interrogating our obsession with ‘property’ with Frears’ characteristic humour and sharpness, while Will’s Natural Burial Ground (Corsair) is the second collection from a writer Max Porter has described as ‘a soulful English poet of the kind we don’t make enough of’.
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In her latest semi-autobiographical novel Playboy (Tuskar Rock, translated by Holly James), leading French writer Constance Debré describes how a woman, at the age of 43, abandons her apartment, her marriage and her successful legal career to lead a new life as an out lesbian and a writer. In a series of short, sharp vignettes the narrator describes a series of meetings with lovers, with her father and with her son and ex-husband, exploding heteronormative assumptions about what it means to be queer in a straight world. Debré was joined in conversation about her work by writer and critic Alice Blackhurst.
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Throughout its history feminism has had a troubled relationship with policing, torn between seeking its protection and attacking its ingrained sexist bias. In Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? (Verso) Leah Cowan cuts a trenchant path through the debate, reminding us of the vibrant and creative alternatives envisioned by those who have long known the truth: the police aren't feminist, and the law does not keep women safe. She discusses the issue with feminist writer and scholar Lola Olufemi.
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In her debut novel Scaffolding (Chatto) Lauren Elkin – ‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’, according to Deborah Levy – presents two couples occupying the same Paris apartment, five decades apart. Lauren Elkin’s previous works include Art Monsters, a landmark study of women artists, Flâneuse and a translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables. She was joined in conversation by writer and broadcaster Octavia Bright.
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The Federal Theatre Project, established as part of the New Deal in 1935 to provide employment opportunities for theatre professionals affected by the Great Depression, became the cornerstone of American radical drama, both on stage and on radio, throughout the late 1930s. Its staunchly political stance on labour and race relations and housing and health inequality proved popular with audiences, but less so with Congress which, in an atmosphere of growing anti-communist paranoia, withdrew the Project’s funding in 1939. In The Playbook (Faber) theatre historian and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro tells the absorbing and disturbing tale, at the same time uncovering the deep roots of today’s culture wars. He's in conversation with historian and author Sarah Churchwell.
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Anne Serre’s latest novel to appear in English, brilliantly translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson, was written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s younger sister, and recounts the tortured relationship between an unnamed narrator and his close childhood friend Fanny, a young woman suffering from profound psychological distress. Hailed in Le Point as a 'masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance’, A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions) is a bewildering rollercoaster of hope and despair, calling into question the form of the novel itself.
Serre, Bordeaux-born author of 14 previous novels, was joined in conversation about her work with novelist and LRB contributor Lucie Elven.
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In her debut novel Experienced (4th Estate) writer and cook Kate Young delves into the world of queer dating following, reluctant Bette on an odyssey of sexual encounters as she tries to catch up on the decade of fun she missed out on before coming out, always intending to return after the adventure to her true love Mei. ‘A fizzing rollercoaster of a romcom,’ writes Caroline O'Donoghue. ‘The sexiest book you'll read all year, and the most heartening’. Young read from her novel, and talked about it with Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies.
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Born in Belgium in 1954 to conservative, Catholic parents, Lucy Sante migrated to New York in the 1960s, where she became associated with the Bohemian artistic milieu of the city. After producing several highly acclaimed works of history such as Low Life and The Other Paris and translating Félix Fénéon’s feuilletons for NYRB as Novels in Three Lines, she announced in 2021 that she was transitioning: ‘Yes, I’ve known since at least age 11 but probably earlier and yes, I suppressed and denied it for decades’, she wrote at the time. In I Heard Her Call My Name(Hutchinson Heinemann), ‘a generous, fearlessly revealing book’ (Samantha Hunt), she describes with great grace, wit and humility her decision to begin living the life she knew was truly hers.
Sante is in conversation about her memoir with writer and filmmaker Juliet Jacques.
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Born in the pandemic lockdown of 2020, when Britain’s restaurants had closed their doors, Jonathan Nunn founded the online newsletter Vittles, which rapidly established itself as the premier platform for exploring food cultures in Britain and around the world. Out of Vittles was born London Feeds Itself, a fascinating collection of essays written at the intersections of food, architecture, history, and demography. First published by Open City in 2022, London Feeds Itself now appears in a new edition in association with Fitzcarraldo.
In this episode, Jonathan Nunn speaks about the project with architectural historian Owen Hatherley, whose essay ‘The Housing Estate’ from the book serves as a springboard for the discussion.
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During the Covid lockdown Iain Sinclair took delivery of two large yellow boxes containing fresh prints of photographs by the master-chronicler of Soho John Deakin who died, obscure and penniless, in a Brighton hotel room in 1972. Sinclair, another master-chronicler of London’s hidden past, uses those and other images and memories – (‘an invaluable catalogue of artists and divas, actors, film producers, criminals and derelicts’) – to bring back to life the unique artistic milieu of Bohemian London in the 50s and 60s. Iain Sinclair read from and talked about Pariah Genius (Cheerio), in conversation with memoirist, novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo.
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CAConrad is one of the most productive and inventive poets of their generation. Writing in the New York Times, Tracey K. Smith described how Conrad’s poetry ‘invites the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious’ – a susceptibility fully evidenced in Conrad’s latest Penguin collection, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return.
Conrad is joined by Luke Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London.
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Drawing on her own experience restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, and moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. She was joined in conversation with writer, critic and frequent LRB contributor Jon Day.
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At a Bethesda Baptist chapel two worshippers, separated in age by three decades, are drawn together by common interests, driven apart by divergent loves, before being reunited by the mysteries surrounding their small town. Francis Spufford describes Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape) as ‘a book in which everything is kindled into light by Sarah Perry’s rapt, luminous attention: friendship, betrayal, faith, astronomy, the drizzle on the streets of Essex and the heavens above them.’ Sarah Perry, author of Essex Girls, Melmoth and The Essex Serpent, read from the novel and talked about it with nature writer and novelist Helen Macdonald.
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Held is Anne Michaels’ long-awaited new novel – following on from the 1996 classic Fugitive Pieces and 2009’s The Winter Vault – exploring, in the words of Margaret Atwood, ‘war and its damages, passed through generations over a century’.
Michaels shared an extended reading from Held with actor Stephen Dillane, who played Jakob Beer in the 2007 film adaptation of Fugitive Pieces, and was joined in conversation by the evening's host, Gareth Evans.
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Choirboy, drag act, grandson, mentor, poet, lover, activist, performer: Dean Atta has played many roles in his life. In his explosive, candid and courageous memoir Person Unlimited (Canongate) he describes a life lived in defiance of categories. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote of Atta’s work as being ‘As honest as truth itself. He follows no trend; he seeks no favours . . . Beyond black, beyond white, beyond straight, beyond gay, so I say. Love your eyes over these words of truth. You will be uplifted’. Dean Atta reads from his work and talks about it with writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen.
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In The Future of Songwriting, lead singer with Throwing Muses, solo artist and songwriter Kristin Hersh reflects on the status and future of her chosen genre over a long, hot Christmas in Australia. In a series of conversations, encounters and philosophical dialogues Hersh delivers a fierce, funny and existential meditation on the art of the song - and its future. She was joined at the Bookshop by writer and critic Jennifer Hodgson.
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In her debut novel Amma (Weatherglass), a multi-generational saga set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and London, Saraid de Silva explores memory, trauma and displacement. She was in conversation with Nina Mingya Powles, author of Tiny Moons and Small Bodies of Water.
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Siblings (Monitor Books) is a unique round-table discussion / poetry collection, convened by Will Harris, between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya. The four poets explore real and imaginary siblings, writing communities, and the wayward directions of the lyric mode – writing as makers and friends about the possibilities that poetry enables now. All four poets convened at the Bookshop for discussion and readings.
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When Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work was published shortly before the author’s death in 1995, Marina Warner wrote in the LRB:‘This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on mysteries and passion.’
To mark the publication of a new edition (Penguin Modern Classics) with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, we host a discussion of Rose’s ‘masterpiece of the autobiographer’s art’ (Edward Said) and its legacy, featuring LRB contributing editor James Butler, Rebekah Howes of the University of Winchester and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
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1917: Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.
1930: Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.
1941: Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.
Harriet Baker describes in Rural Hours (Allen Lane) how three very different writers, more often associated with city living, found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. She was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse and translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables.
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Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection of non-fiction; a series of interlinked essays connecting internet gossip, the attention economy, and the role of criticism.
Oyler is in conversation with journalist and cultural commentator Leo Robson.
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Three of Wales' best contemporary writers in an early St David's Day celebration of Wales in words. Novelist Joe Dunthorne, National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa and Carnegie prize-winning novelist and playwright Manon Steffan Ros explore the country's literary history, share its less-known treasures, and discuss the meaning of 'Welshness' today, in a one-off conversation with readings. The event was curated by Hay Festival as part of Wales Week in London.
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Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua, Pasolini, Pussy Riot and the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. Eberstadt was joined at the Bookshop by critic and novelist Olivia Laing, whose latest book The Garden Against Time (Picador) is forthcoming in May 2024.
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When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes. ‘Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present’, writes Seán Hewitt, ‘this is a history shaken by intimacy – a brave and rigorously humane book.’ Wills was joined in conversation with Alice Spawls, editor of the LRB and co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press).
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Alexandra Harris has previously cast her probing critical eye over poetic and artistic responses to English weather (in Weatherland), and English art of the 1930s and 40s (in Romantic Moderns); now, in The Rising Down (Faber & Faber) she turns it on the West Sussex landscape of her childhood, revealing the layers of buried lives beneath a familiar landscape in a work which the Independent has described as ‘scholarship at its life-enhancing best’. Harris was in conversation with essayist and critic Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four Dimensional Human.
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Frantz Fanon was only 36 when he died in 1961, but his books and ideas – from White Skin, Black Masks to The Wretched of the Earth – have proved lastingly influential. Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is both a biography of Fanon and an in-depth study of his writing.
Shatz, the US editor of the London Review of Books and the author of Writers & Missionaries, was joined by Kevin Okoth, author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics.
Listen to Adam discuss Fanon with Judith Butler on Close Readings: https://lrb.me/fanonhc
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At the time of his death in 2017, the architectural critic and historian Gavin Stamp (Private Eye’s ‘Piloti’) had nearly completed his monumental survey of British architecture between the world wars. His wife, the writer and historian Rosemary Hill, has edited the text for publication. Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 (Profile) is a refreshing reassessment of the period which looks beyond modernism to give a broader picture of an age of turbulence and contradiction.
Hill was joined in conversation with Rowan Moore, whose most recent book is Property: The Myth that Built the World (Faber).
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In Revolutionary Acts (Faber), Jason Okundaye meets an elder generation of Black gay men and listens as they share intimate memories and reflect upon their lives. Through their conversations he traces these men's journeys and arrivals to South London through the seventies, eighties and nineties from the present day, seeking to reconcile the Black and gay narratives of Britain. Okundaye was in conversation with Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk and contributor to the London Review of Books.
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Within the British music scene, recent years have borne witness to underground genres emerging from the inner cities, going on to become some of the most popular music in the nation. In Where We Come From, journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom travels the country to explore the dawn, boom and subsequent blossoming of UK rap and grime. Taking us from the heart of south London to the West Midlands and South Wales, he explores how a history of migration and an enduring spirit of resistance have shaped the current realities of these linked communities and the music they produce. These sounds have become vessels for the marginalised, carrying Black and working-class stories into the light. Ekpoudom was joined in conversation with Gary Younge, journalist and author of Dispatches from the Diaspora.
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Laleh Khalili’s new book The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack) draws on her own experiences to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea, detailing (in the words of Steve Edwards) ‘the labouring bodies – hands, legs, and eyes; flesh and soul; suffering and solidarity – that make the world go round. In the process, the connections and divisions of the world economy come into view.’ Khalili was in conversation with LRB contributing editor James Butler, the co-founder of Novara Media.
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Fleur Adcock’s sly, laconic poems have been delighting audiences since her 1964 debut The Eye of the Hurricane. Her Collected Poems draws together the work of sixty years; as Fiona Sampson writes, ‘Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut.’ Adcock was joined in conversation at the Bookshop with her publisher, Neil Astley, and read from her Collected Poems.
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Holly Pester discusses her debut novel, The Lodgers, with Nathalie Olah.
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‘Here is a wasteland / of parched aesthetics / patched up with modern tubes’ – Rachael Allen’s long-awaited second collection, God Complex, is a long narrative poem describing the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of environmental degradation and toxicity. In this episode, she reads from the collection and was joined in conversation with the poet Lucy Mercer, whose first collection is Emblem (Prototype, 2022).
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Lara Pawson discusses her new book Spent Light with Jennifer Hodgson.
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Paul Muldoon reads from and talks about his collection Howdie-Skelp.
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‘Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves’, wrote Adam Phillips in a 2022 LRB piece, ‘On Giving Up’. Now developed and expanded into a book of the same title, Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive? Phillips was joined in conversation by Dame Hermione Lee.
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Lavinia Greenlaw’s new book The Vast Extent is a collection of ‘exploded essays’, about light and image, sight and the unseen, covering wide territories with the scientific precision and ease of access which characterises her poetry. She was joined by Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World.
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Seán Hewitt’s new poetry collection Rapture’s Road follows hard on the heels of Tongues of Fire – the winner of the 2021 Laurel Prize – and the bestselling memoir All Down Darkness Wide. Like its predecessors, the collection confronts dark and difficult subject matter in startlingly beautiful lyric language, ‘exquisitely calm’ in the words of Max Porter. Hewitt read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth, whose long-awaited new novel Enlightenment is coming out in May.
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Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, published in 2017, the first into English by a woman, was hailed as a ‘revelation’ by the New York Times and a ‘cultural landmark’ by the Guardian. With her translation ofthe Iliad, ten years in the making, she has given us a complete Homer for a new generation.
Emily Wilson, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is a regular contributor to the LRB and the host of one of our Close Readings series of podcasts, Among the Ancients. Wilson was joined in conversation by Edith Hall, professor at Durham University and the author of many acclaimed books on Ancient Greek culture and its influence on modernity. The event was chaired by Wilson’s Close Readings co-host, Thomas Jones, and passages from Wilson’s Iliad were read by acclaimed actors Juliet Stevenson and Tobias Menzies.
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Mary Jean Chan reads from their new collection, Bright Fear, and discuss it with Andrew McMillan.
Chan’s debut, Fleche, won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019. Bright Fear extends and develops that collection’s themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy, while remaining deeply attuned to moments of tenderness, beauty and grace.
Andrew McMillan’s most recent collection is pandemonium (Cape, 2021); a novel, Pity, is forthcoming in 2024. Together with Chan, he edited the landmark anthology 100 Queer Poems(Penguin).
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Who would you invite to a dinner party? In The Dinner Table, a delicious collection of great food writing from past and present, talented writer-chefs Kate Young and Ella Risbridger will introduce you to Samuel Pepys on the glories of parmesan, Shirley Jackson on washing up, Katherine Mansfield on party food, Nigella Lawson on mayonnaise, Michelle Zauner on kimchi and a great deal else besides.
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Part script, part novel, part manual, Sorcerer (Prototype) is the latest unclassifiable book written in collaboration between the artist and writer Ed Atkins and the poet and critic Steven Zultanski – a gentle, contemplative work about the pleasures of conversation, being with others, and being alone. ‘Unlike many narratives, Sorcerer does not put crisis and conflict at the centre of the story’, write Atkins and Zultanski, describing their theme as ‘the intractability of reality – both its resistance to clear meaning and its sweetness, weirdness.’ Atkins and Zultanski were in conversation with the art writer and journalist Emily LaBarge.
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In Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, continues the radical exploration of how the personal and the political interact. As Baroness Helena Kennedy KC writes, ‘Both memoir and manifesto, this wonderful book charts a personal history of feminist socialism - and, with her usual humane wisdom, our author points the way to a better politics.’ She was joined in conversation by Amelia Horgan, author of Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism.
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In Someone Else's Empire Tom Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, dispels the potent myth of Britain as a global player punching above its weight on the world stage, arguing instead that its foreign policy has for a long time been in thrall to the wishes and interests of the United States.
He talks about his book with writer, filmmaker, publisher and activist Tariq Ali.
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Mathias Enard’s latest novel, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild takes us to the marshlands of South West France in a Rabelaisian celebration of life, love and death. Juan Gabriel Vasquez writes of him ‘Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful stylist to boot. He is one of the great novelists of our time.' He reads from his book and talks about it with Chris Power.
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In her most personal book to date, Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso) McKenzie Wark writes with her characteristic acuity about gender transition, communism, history, art, memory and the journey of discovering who one really wants to be.Wark talks about that journey with Lauren John Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch.
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‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ wrote Jude Cook in the Guardian, praising Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold. Waidner reads from their latest novel Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, and talks about it with academic, performer and activist Diarmuid Hester, whose forthcoming book Nothing Ever Just Disappears Waidner has described as ‘insightful, delightful, and enlightening: an essential entrant into the queer canon.’
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Poet and editor of Bad Betty Press Amy Acre reads from and talks about her debut collection Mothersong (Bloomsbury). Poignant and powerful, her work explores motherhood, grief, trauma, recovery and what it means to be a female artist. She's in conversation with Joelle Taylor, author of the prize-winning poetry collection C+nto (Telegram), who has written of Mothersong: ‘Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this.’
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Historical fiction is having a moment, and at the forefront are two of 2023’s most hotly anticipated novels: Zadie Smith’s The Fraud and Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future. Smith and Thirlwell discussed their approaches to fiction and the ways in which prose can ‘sandblast the dust off history’, as Polly Stenham writes about The Future Future.
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In Shattered Nation, Oxford Professor of Geography Danny Dorling meticulously documents how Britain over the last 40 years has been transformed by incompetence, avarice and short-termism from one of the world’s leading economies, with widely admired public services, into Europe’s most unequal society, afflicted by staggering levels of deprivation and social division. Dorling was joined in conversation by Leo Hollis, author of The Stones of London and Inheritance.
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Kehinde Andrews continues the work he began in The New Age of Empire with The Psychosis of Whiteness (Allen Lane), a wry and piercing guide to retaining sanity in a racist world, which Ron Ramdin has described as ‘a remarkable and enriching work which shines a light on many dark places’. He discussed the book with journalist and writer Afua Hirsch, whose own Decolonising My Body is forthcoming from Square Peg in October.
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Terrance Hayes and Nick Laird read from and talk about their recent books So to Speak (Penguin) and Up Late (Faber). Hayes, describing Laird, praises his ‘truth-telling that’s political, existential and above all, emotional’; Laird writing about Hayes notes that his invention ‘allows his poetry to house almost anything, from the political to the sensual, from a magic goat to a talking cat’. Join us to celebrate two of the year’s most hotly anticipated collections.
The episode starts with Laird reading the title poem, Up Late, from his new collection.
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Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London was first published in 1964 and now appears, 40 years after his death, in a new edition from Notting Hill with an introduction by Travis Elborough, ‘one of Britain’s finest pop culture historians’ according to the Guardian.
Elborough was joined by architectural historian Gillian Darley and architect Charles Holland to discuss Nairn’s life, work and enduring legacy.
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Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk) has collaborated with musician and writer Sin Blaché to write a dazzling science fiction debut. Author Paraic O’Donnell describes Prophet (Jonathan Cape) as ‘a hyperkinetic headrush of a novel that proves its organic bona fides by getting you drunk with ideas before casually and cataclysmically breaking your heart.’ Macdonald and Blaché were at the shop to reading from and talking about their book with Isabel Waidner.
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Caret continues the adventures of the irrepressible John Cromer, begun in Pilcrow (2008) and continued in Cedilla (2011) – part of Adam Mars-Jones’ ‘semi-infinite’ novel series, praised by one reviewer as ‘a genuine, almost miraculous oddity’.
Mars-Jones was in conversation with the journalist and critic Leo Robson.
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For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it?
Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Lauren Elkin's Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.
Elkin talks about it with Vanessa Peterson, Associate Editor, frieze magazine.
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A holistic and revealing account of the inspirations, passions and practices of one of the country’s foremost contemporary artists, Art is Magic finds Jeremy Deller reflecting on the entirety of his career, his life and his art. Deller was joined in conversation with writer Michael Bracewell, author of Unfinished Business.
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In Tessa Hadley’s new collection, After the Funeral (Jonathan Cape), small events have huge consequences. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. Hadley was in conversation with Geoff Dyer.
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Four Faber poets will join us to read from their recent collections.
Describing Declan Ryan's long-awaited debut, Crisis Actor, Liz Berry called it ‘elegant and heartaching’. Maggie Millner‘s Couplets, also a debut, is a novel in verse, a unique repurposing of the 18th century rhyming couplet into a thrilling story of queer desire. Hannah Sullivan’s follow-up to her T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Three Poems, Was it For This, also consists of three long poems, on subjects ranging from London and the Grenfell fire to new motherhood. The title poem of Nick Laird’s new collection, Up Late, won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Terrance Hayes has characterised his work as containing 'a truth-telling that’s political, existential, and above all, emotional'.
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Olivia Laing, Ken Worpole and Jon Day discuss Colin Ward and David Crouch's 1988 classic of social and oral history The Allotment, long out of print but finally reissued by the indefatigable Little Toller Books.
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Two of Britain’s most exciting short story writers joined in conversation to celebrate the release of their highly-acclaimed debuts in paperback. Faber author Jem Calder and Edge Hill Prize winner Saba Sams read from and discussed their stories with Tom Conaghan, publisher of Scratch Books.
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Meat Love, the latest book-length essay by Amber Husain (following on from 2021’s Replace Me), explores how meat-eating has become irretrievably enmeshed with capitalist desire, in what Sophie Lewis has described as ‘an exquisitely-crafted little hand grenade lobbed at the gentrification of the carnivorous mind’.
She is in conversation with Rebecca May Johnson, whose Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen (Pushkin, 2022) touches on many of the same revolutionary themes. Johnson is an essayist and critic, and senior editor at the online magazine Vittles.
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Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Penman was joined in conversation by Adam Mars-Jones.
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K Patrick’s Mrs. S is one of the most eagerly awaited debuts of the year, having already secured for its author a spot on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. A queer romance set in the staffroom of an elite English boarding school, Lillian Fishman has described it as ‘a voluptuous performance in the art of withholding’. Patrick was in conversation with editor and writer Amelia Abraham, whose most recent book, Queer Intentions (Macmillan) was nominated for a Polari First Book award in 2020.
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M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Wish I Was Here is his first work of memoir – an ‘anti-memoir’ – written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020 for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Harrison was joined in conversation with writer and critic Jennifer Hodgson.
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In The Plague (Fitzcarraldo) Jacqueline Rose who has, in the words of Edward Said ‘no peer among critics of her generation’ uses the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the writings of Simone Weil to investigate how we might learn to live with death when it intrudes more closely than we might like on our lived experience. Rose was in conversation about life and death with James Butler, contributing editor at the LRB.
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This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia Bright’s journey through recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelings and experiences of the corresponding year of her recovery, tracing the shift in emotion and understanding that comes with the deepening connection to this new way of life. Bright was joined in conversation by Olivia Laing, author of Everybody.
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Maureen McLane’s poetry has been praised for its deftness, intelligence and grace under extreme pressure. Her new collection, the aptly named What You Want, draws on these strengths to produce something remarkable and new.
In a rare UK appearance, she reads from her work and talks to Will Harris, who also reads from his new collection Brother Poem (Granta). Harris has won the Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection (for his debut, 2019's RENDANG), and more importantly, the LRB Bookshop Poetry Pamphlet Pick of the Year for 2016.
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Novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy read from and spoke about her novel August Blue, a mesmerising story of how identities, coalesce, collide and collapse. She was joined in conversation about August Blue with the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, author of The Examined Life.
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Marriage has been an institution for centuries but why this highly contested and ancient practice has remained relevant to so many is by no means certain. What are we really talking about when we talk about marriage? And what are we really doing when we say, 'I do'? In On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton), Devorah Baum draws on philosophy, film, fiction, comedy, psychoanalysis, music and poetry, to consider the marriage plot. Baum was in conversation with Hisham Matar.
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When novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman’s mother became ill with the rare condition of normal pressure hydrocephalus she became entirely dependent on Lynne, her sisters and other caregivers, reversing the normal roles of parent and child. In Mothercare, Tillman describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. Tillman was joined by Michael Bracewell, author of Unfinished Business.
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Claudia Rankine’s Plot, an early work published for the first time in the UK this month, is a meditation on pregnancy and the changes it heralds: the potential bodily cost, the loss of self, the sense of impending stasis. It is a genre-defying text, a collection of fragments, dreams and conversations with all of the hallmarks of Rankine’s subsequent work, Citizen, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Just Us.
Rankine will be in discussion with Nicola Rollock, author of The Racial Code.
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Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Amy Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Joined by Megan Nolan, the author of Acts of Desperation, Key discussed the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.
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A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn: An Oral History (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo. ‘Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer,’ writes Joanna Kavenna, author of ZED. She was in conversation, brilliantly, learnedly and daringly, with Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions (Picador).
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In Revolutionary Spring (Allen Lane), a series of brilliant set-pieces, pre-eminent European historian Christopher Clark brings back to our attention the extraordinary events of the Spring of 1848. From Paris to Vienna to Budapest to Berlin to Rome to Palermo, a whole continent was embroiled in struggle, hope, revolutionary fervour and ultimately reaction.
Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, Sir Christopher will be in conversation with Katja Hoyer, a visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and author of Blood and Iron and Beyond the Wall.
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New York in the late 1960s: Mae escapes a run-down an apartment, an alcoholic mother and her mother’s occasional boyfriend to a new life as a typist for Andy Warhol, transcribing conversations with his friends and associates to provide the material for an unconventional novel. A mordantly funny investigation of celebrity, obsession, womanhood and sexuality, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury) is itself an unconventional debut novel, following on from Flattery’s acclaimed short story collection Show Them a Good Time.
Nicole Flattery discusses her novel with Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond and Checkout 19.
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Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh (Bloodaxe) gathers together poems from across her first five collections, as thrilling and unpredictable as any contemporary American poet. Writing about her work in the Boston Review, Richard Howard says that ‘when anything is as fresh as this diction, as free as these associations, as fraught as these passions, it is not descriptions or definitions which are wanted but the thing itself, the new words in new places, the necessary instigations’. Brenda Shaughnessy was in conversation with Amy Key, whose second collection, Isn’t Forever, came out with Bloodaxe in 2018, and whose new book inspired by Joni Mitchell's Blue, is forthcoming in spring 2023.
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In Ruth Padel’s latest pamphlet, Watershed, the poet reflects on the natural world, on water, and on the psychology of denialism, particularly where it concerns the climate crisis. Padel was joined in reading and conversation by Sean Borodale, whose latest pamphlet is Re-Dreaming Sylvia Plath as a Queen Bee.
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In Toy Fights poet Don Paterson recounts his childhood in working-class Dundee. This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. ‘A tremendously engaging memoir’ writes William Boyd, ‘seasoned with Don Paterson's customary wit, total recall and love of language. A classic of its kind.’
Paterson talks about the book with poet Declan Ryan, whose whose debut collection, Crisis Actor, will be published by Faber in July.
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Ian Patterson, in both poetry and prose, revels in language, its possibilities, absurdities and contradictions. He joined fellow poet Keston Sutherland for conversation at the Bookshop, and to read from and present his latest collection Shell Vestige Disputed.
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30 years after he reinvented the family memoir with And When Did You Last See Your Father? poet, critic and novelist Blake Morrison returns to the subject of his family in Two Sisters (The Borough Press) which reflects on the recent deaths of his two sisters as well as on the often fraught relationships of siblings in history and literature. Morrison was in conversation with Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Everyone is Still Alive (Phoenix).
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Based on the true story of an unsolved mystery, Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Cursed Bread (Hamish Hamilton), centres on a small village community upturned by the arrival of a glamourous couple. Jo Hamya calls the book‘sensuous and haunted, like Madame Bovary reworked as a ghost story’. Mackintosh was in conversation with Rebecca Watson, author of Little Scratch (Faber).
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In Affinities, a series of linked essays, Brian Dillon investigates what it might mean for a thing to be like something else, and what it might mean for things to be connected even when they are nothing like one another. Currently Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London, Dillon’s writing is always surprising, and revelatory. Expect both revelations and surprises.
Dillon was joined in conversation by the writer Jennifer Higgie, whose latest book is The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World.
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Fellow of All Souls, Oxford and regular LRB contributor Clare Bucknell argues in The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture (Head of Zeus) that the selective way in which poetry has been presented over the past three centuries tells a fascinating story about the democratisation of literature, class, gender, politics and nationalism. She talks about it with another regular LRB contributor, social and architectural historian Rosemary Hill.
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In one of the most eagerly anticipated debuts of 2023, LRB editor Tom Crewe presents a fictionalised account of the lives and loves of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis. The New Life charts their collaboration on a revolutionary work that set out to transform our understanding of sexual ethics. Tom Crewe was in conversation with Paul Mendez, author of another ground-breaking debut Rainbow Milk.
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Novelist and essayist Michael Bracewell reads from and talks about his latest novel Unfinished Business. An apparently ordinary, suburban office life, with its regular troubles of work, ambition, disappointment, marriage, age and bereavement becomes sharpened as pleasure is mistaken for happiness.
Bracewell is in conversation with Gwendoline Riley, author of First Love and My Phantoms.
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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 Bageye at the Wheel, evokes the experience of growing up in Britain as the child of Jamaican parents. In the words of Bernardine Evaristo ‘Colin Grant writes about the characters in his family with the mischievous, dramatic flair of a natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read.’ Grant was in conversation with author, poet, presenter, political columnist, broadcaster and activist Michael Rosen.
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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 discusses why a comparison between two writers at once so similar and dissimilar sheds new light on their greatest work, and literary construction more generally. He was joined by novelist and LRB contributing editor John Lanchester, for whom both writers have been lifelong touchstones.
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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 and economics of food production work with, for, and against us.
Chang was joined by economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler, whose first book, Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, will be published in April 2023.
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Attend our last Winter Lecture this Friday in person or online: lrb.me/winterlectures
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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 Spanish Civil War to the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the guerrilla wars in Latin America.
Vásquez is in conversation with writer and broadcaster Shahidha Bari.
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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 of the nation, from its accidental beginnings to its unexpected departure, and asks what lessons the global superpowers of today have learned from its story. Sheila Fitzpatrick was in conversation with writer, journalist and fellow LRB contributor James Meek.
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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 Spawls in a discussion touching on Elizabethan celebrity bears, Amelia Earhart’s bones, and the greatest lie we’ve ever told: that the world is ours for the taking.
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You can read Katherine’s work in the LRB archives: lrb.me/rundell
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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 Black lives in Britain.
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Wallace Shawn talks to Gareth Evans about his new collection of essays.
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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 for a society organised without the family at its core.
Lewis was joined by Lola Olufemi, author of Experiments In Imagining Otherwise.
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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 Thomas Bernhard, but in truth, she is quite unique. Hjorth was in conversation with writer and broadcaster, Shahidha Bari.
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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 ecological crisis.
Mouffe was joined in conversation with James Schneider, co-founder of Momentum and author of Our Bloc: How We Win.
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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 conversation by Claire Armitstead, associate culture editor at the Guardian and presenter of their weekly books podcast.
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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 familiar to readers of Free Woman, her book about Doris Lessing.
Feigel was joined in conversation about Lawrence and her own rediscovery of him with author Lauren Elkin.
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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 portray how they lose colour and volume, turning from living things into something like parchment. During lockdown, McBeath’s images were a constant companion to artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who responds to them here with a series of texts evoking change, decay and transformation, a unique collaboration beautifully documented in a new book from Hazel Press.
McBeath and de Waal are in conversation with Alexandra Harris, Professor of English at Birmingham University and author of Weatherland and Romantic Moderns.
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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.
Writer, researcher, and LRB contributor Kevin Okoth joined poet Raymond Antrobus and author Paul Mendez to discuss McKay's extraordinary life and work.
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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. In what has been described as a contemporary remoulding of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ a man awakes one morning to find that his skin has turned dark. Hamid was in conversation with Jo Hamya, author of Three Rooms (Vintage).
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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 newspaper columnist and broadcast commentator; she was a fearless champion for those at the sharp end.
In the week of the Queen's funeral, friends and colleagues discussed her life and legacy: K Biswas, critic and director of Resonance FM and On Road Media; James Butler, LRB contributing editor and co-founder of Novara Media; Lynsey Hanley, broadcaster and author; and Gary Younge, author and sociology professor at the University of Manchester.
Read Dawn Foster's work in the LRB: lrb.me/dawnfoster
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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, the jolliest and most affable host you might ever hope to be fed by. His new book Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many (4th Estate), ‘one of the most beautiful cookery books I have ever seen’ according to Rachel Roddy, encapsulates his approach to food and cooking: first and foremost, it is about giving and receiving pleasure.
Lee is in conversation about food and pleasure with the writer and critic Olivia Laing, who has written of him: 'I worship Jeremy Lee … He has a true gift for living, and for writing about it too.
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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, impertinent questions and generous drag queens collide in a memoir that is both hugely entertaining and, in the end, profoundly moving.
Tea was in conversation with Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff andSterling Karat Gold.
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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 for many of the themes and styles that characterise Jarman’s work in film, painting and design.
Joining host So Mayer, author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula), to explore the book were writer Philip Hoare, Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen and artist Michael Ginsborg.
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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, and how words and imagery inscribe reality into history. Thomas was joined by Preti Taneja, writer, activist, and contributing editor at The White Review.
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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 Line above the Sky, and a collaborative lyric essay (with Kate Fletcher), Outfitting, exploring fashion and wild ecology.
Caroline Bird’s latest book is Rookie, a long-awaited selection gathering material from her seven Carcanet collections – including The Air Year, which won the Forward Prize in 2020. She is also a playwright, and was an official poet for the London Olympics in 2012.
Mort and Bird discuss and read from their work.
Find upcoming events at the Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/upcomingevents
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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 as a vital source of knowledge, revelation and radical thought.
Johnson, author of the popular Substack ‘Dinner Document‘, was in conversation with Jonathan Nunn, who writes about the London food scene for eater.co.uk and edits the ‘Vittles’ newsletter.
Find more upcoming LRB Bookshop events via the website: https://lrb.me/eventspod
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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 a hierarchically numbered series of logical statements, or prepositions. He didn’t succeed, exactly – indeed, Wittgenstein himself was one of the book’s harshest critics – but that didn’t stop it becoming widely recognised as the most important work of philosophy of the 20th century. And its influence has extended into other artistic and intellectual fields too, from literature to cinema and music, and beyond.
Joining Ray Monk, biographer of Wittgenstein and Russell and professor of analytic philosophy, for a conversation about the power of the Tractatus and the unparalleled breadth of its influence, were Signe Gjessing, whose Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, a dazzling poetic reimagining, was published earlier this year, and the celebrated composer, musician and interdisciplinary pioneer Max Richter. The conversation will be chaired by Sam Kinchin-Smith, Head of Special Projects at the LRB.
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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 invasion.
Two weeks after the Russian invasion began, Kurkov was joined by Oksana Zabuzhko, Robert Chandler, James Meek, Ilya Kaminsky, and Lyuba Yakimchuk for a special event chaired by Peter Pomerantsev.
All the proceeds from ticket sales were donated to the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, an NGO coordinating the provision of medical care by civilian doctors on the Ukrainian front line.
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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 was objective, nor that there was any point in even trying to be. Above all, activism is needed to fight this, with journalism to support it: there is no point in pretending to be objective in our work, as the stakes remain just as high as they were back in 2010, perhaps even higher.’ Jacques is in in conversation with journalist Owen Jones.
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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 Kayo Chingonyi. ‘Its vibrations will be felt for a long time to come.’
Editor of Poetry London André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection High Desert (Bloodaxe) is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest, encompassing wildfires, Spanish colonial history, racial tensions and the recent pandemic.
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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 a dazzling way of dispelling gloom. Nietzsche and the Turin horse, vaporised Turner, dolorous Dylan, antics on courts and at Burning Man, Dyer's Last Days had me laughing aloud, a sure signal of deft seriousness. What is there to say except if this is late Dyer, it's great Dyer.’ Geoff is in conversation with the poet and critic Mark Ford.
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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 there are more things and Sterling Karat Gold – books which not only take political issues as subject-matter but enact radical politics through their form.
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‘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 natural but were the result of external forces - society, masculinity, my father - and that things could have been otherwise.’
Édouard Louis’s tender memoir of his mother is an exquisite portrait of womanhood, motherhood, the trials of both and the transcendent, fragile joy of eventual liberation. Louis, one of the leading French writers of his generation, discussed A Woman's Battles and Transformations (Harvill Secker) with its English translator the novelist Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Harmony Silk Factory and author most recently of We, The Survivors.
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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 Down Darkness Wide, a unique memoir of queer longing, trauma and depression.
Hewitt talks to Andrew McMillan, whose debut collection, physical (Cape), was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award. His most recent book, pandemonium, was published in 2021.
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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 Rovaniemi to investigate the glories and the dark side of Nordic music, encountering composers, performers and audiences and to explore our complex fascination with the unique culture of the north.
He was in conversation with James Jolly, radio presenter and former editor of Gramophone.
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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 – examine the role translation plays in reportage.
News is an international commodity, subject to constant translation and retranslation as journalists frame, adapt and contextualise their source material to match their target audience. There is a curious contradiction between the right to information and the disinformation that results from it, precipitated by time pressure. Most journalism is done in a hurry, but is being the first to bring your readers a story from a distant part of the world worth the risk of spreading fake news?
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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 one of our most consistently thought-provoking writers.
She was in conversation with Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, author of several works of non-fiction and most recently the annotator of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
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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, musicians, dancers, athletes and artists, and one which, in Maggie Nelson’s words, ‘takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs’. Vivian Gornick describes it as ‘one of the most imaginative – and therefore moving – memoirs I have ever read’.
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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, an army of AI chatbots is unleashed on the dating apps of San Francisco. Folk read from the book and was in conversation with Sharon Horgan, creator and star of the much-loved Channel 4 series Pulling and Catastrophe, who is working with Folk on adapting the collection's title story for television.
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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 ‘“So is it any good?” people have asked me when I’ve told them I’m translating a ‘lost’ novel by Simone de Beauvoir … And I am relieved to say: yes. It is more than good. It is poignant, chilling and eviscerating.’
Elkin, author of Flâneuse and No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute was in conversation with novelist and essayist Deborah Levy who has contributed an introduction to the UK edition. The event was chaired by Alice McCrum, programs manager at the American Library in Paris.
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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 explores issues of ambivalence around ethnicity, national identity and religious belief. He read a selection from his work, and discussed it with Seán Hewitt, fellow poet and author of Tongues of Fire and forthcoming memoir All Down Darkness Wide (Cape).
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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 him the philosophies of the past and illuminate the present, underpinned by the story and ideas of Julian the Apostate, the late Roman Emperor who abandoned Christianity in favour of a neo-Platonic Paganism. Barnes was in conversation with Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man (Faber).
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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 human-made, drawing on a repertoire of film, music and pop-culture. Olivia Laing has described The Reactor as ‘Beautiful, strange and completely compelling’ and Helen Macdonald praises it as ‘One of the finest accounts of the mysterious workings of grief I have ever read.’
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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 Times described it as ‘a wise and skilfully controlled novel, which can be read in an afternoon, but which radiates in the mind for much longer.’ To celebrate the novel’s release in paperback, Govinden talks to Gareth Evans, the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Moving Image curator.
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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 course he had attended while in prison. Novelist Preti Taneja had been one of his tutors.
In Aftermath (And Other Stories), described by Nikesh Shukla as ‘a masterclass work of literary brilliance’, Taneja has created from the horrific events of that day a searing lament, interrogating the language of terror, trauma and grief, a powerful indictment of the prison system and an equally powerful plea for its abolition. She was in conversation with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.
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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 and images an imaginary correspondence, and a spell-binding portrait of two women artists creating work against the grain, and entirely on their own terms. Paul talks about the book with the polymathic Olivia Laing, whose latest book is Everybody (Picador).
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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 decades. Her story begins with the energy crises of the 1970s, takes in the financial crash of 2008 before leading us to our current state of unease, disorder and instability. Thompson is in conversation with Ann Pettifor, economist and author of The Production of Money and The Case for the Green New Deal.
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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 friends riding the high tide of India’s boom years, the implications and human costs of the thirst for wealth and power. Mishra, a regular contributor to the LRB, was in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi.
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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 critic Ange Mlinko discusses Rilke, the cult of Orpheus and intense productivity with Don Paterson, whose versions of the Sonnets to Orpheus were published by Faber (and the LRB) in 2006, and the writer and artist Edmund de Waal, for whom the work of Rilke has been a constant touchstone.
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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, class and misogyny with a chilling story of two misfit teenagers living in a luxury housing complex, haunted by macabre fantasies of escape. Melchor discusses her work with Nicole Flattery.
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‘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 all must – with the Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz, whose past installations have drawn extensively on Joyce’s writing (and interest in music). She also sings live. Chaired by the LRB's Head of Special Projects, Sam Kinchin-Smith.
Presented in partnership with Shakespeare and Company. Photo credits: Nicole Strasser and Franziska Sinn.
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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 decades, was no exception. A Hitch in Time, published in December to mark the tenth anniversary of his death, collected 20 of the best in a selection James Wolcott describes, in his introduction, as ‘restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.’ Wolcott discussed what he means – the pre-9/11 ‘Hitch in time’ that the collection recaptures – with Benjamin Burgis, author of Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters, along with the writer and campaigner Lisa Appignanesi, the FT columnist Janan Ganesh, and the LRB’s David Runciman.
Part of our ongoing ‘Revivalism’ series of conversations focussing on literary revivals and heroes of the LRB archive.
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With How Should a Person Be? Sheila Heti merrily and unforgettably extended our notions of what a novel might or ought to contain. In Pure Colour (Harvill Secker), brilliantly described by Kirkus Reviews as ‘that rarest of novels—as alien as a moon rock and every bit as wondrous,’ she continues her extraordinary project of expanding our minds to where they ought to be. Heti was in conversation about that project with Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford.
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In his long essay Losers (Peninsula) psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen examines, with characteristic wit and acuity, what our culture loses by undervaluing what Elizabeth Bishop famously called ‘the art of losing.’ Drawing on a wide range of sources and inspirations from mythology, psychology and literature, including Freud, Winnicott, Beckett, Kafka, Thomas Bernard and Robert Walser, Cohen was in conversation with novelist and essayist Deborah Levy, who has written of Losers ‘With compassion, skill and verve, Josh Cohen eloquently dismantles societal and personal delusions about winning and losing.’
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Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Professor of Sociology at University College London, argues in Speculative Communities (Chicago) that speculation is no longer confined to the sphere of finance, but has, through virtual marketplaces, new social media and dating apps, become an integral part of the most intimate realms of our lives. Komporozos-Athanasiou will be in conversation with economist Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation, James Bridle, author of New Dark Age, and Will Davies, Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths and author of Nervous States.
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Vron Ware’s take on what it means to be English has, thankfully, little time for nostalgic visions of a post-Brexit rural paradise. In Return of a Native (Repeater Books) and with a sly nod to Thomas Hardy, she revisits her home turf in Hampshire to explore what it means to see the world from a small place. Her stories of violence and resistance, growth and destruction encompass deep time, colonial histories and global capitalism. Vron Ware, visiting professor in the Gender Studies department at London School of Economics, was in conversation about her work with Hazel Carby, author of Imperial Intimacies.
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It’s clear that the Covid pandemic has changed the way we need to think about public health, social justice, the economy and a good deal else besides. Michael Rosen, who became gravely ill with the disease, and whose bibliography is both too long and too impressive to list here, and Rachel Clarke, a journalist who became a doctor and has been heroically working on the frontline, were in conversation about the pandemic.
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2021’s Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah is in conversation about his work with author Kamila Shamsie.
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Diane Di Prima began writing her revolutionary ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago. To launch an expanded 50th anniversary edition of Revolutionary Letters from Silver Press our event featured readings by Helen Charman, CA Conrad and Mira Mattar and a conversation about Di Prima with Sophie Lewis, Francesca Wade and Sarah Shin.
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In The Woman Who Buried Herself (Hazel Press) Alys Fowler takes us deeper and deeper into, and under the soil, until there is no longer a separation. This story emerged like a fairy tale told to her during long hours daydreaming whilst weeding, in a sense it is her garden’s own tale which ventures into mythic realms, exploring the seen and unseen, mysteries of science, the animal and the organic in consciousness of life and love.Fowler was reading from the book and in discussion with Bee Wilson, LRB contributor and the author of the recent The Way We Eat Now (Harpercollins).
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Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery.
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Dante’s Purgatorio is as much an allegory of spiritual transformation as it is one of psychological rebirth, personal healing, and self-transcendence. Combining a graceful lyricism with decades of study, D.M. Black’s translation and commentary reveal new dimensions in Dante’s many portraits of people trying to find their way through life and what comes after. This fresh, bilingual edition of Purgatoriowas published on September 14th 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Black is in conversation with writer and translator Robert Chandler and psychoanalyst Giovanna di Ceglie.
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John Clegg and Jess McKinney launch their new Hazel Press poetry collections with reading and conversation.
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Tariq Ali has been observing and commenting on Afghanistan for more than four decades. He vehemently opposed the Soviet occupation in 1979, and the NATO invasion and subsequent invasion in 2001. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan (Verso) collects together for the first time his most important writings on this troubled country, and contains a new introduction written in the wake of NATO’s ignominious retreat.
Ali is in conversation with LRB contributing editor James Meek, who as foreign correspondent for the Guardian witnessed the war in Afghanistan at first hand.
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Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion (Granta) is a one-of-a-kind ‘lyric epic’, weaving memoir, essay and poetics into one of 2021’s most eagerly awaited debut poetry collections. Sy-Quia read from the book and was in discussion with Will Harris, whose own Granta debut RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The event was chaired by Rachael Allen, Granta’s poetry editor, whose most recent collection is Kingdomland (Faber).
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Hazel Press’s four 2020 titles were all LRB Bookshop bestsellers; we’re proud to be launching the first tranche of their four 2021 titles, one an electrifying collaborative poem, one a unique anthology.
Katrina Naomi and Helen Mort were reading from Same But Different, a lockdown collaboration which began as simply an exchange of poems; but like Wang Wei and Pei Di’s Wang River Collaboration, their poems soon started to speak to one another.
Belinda Zhawi, Ella Duffy, Maggi Hambling and Georgie Henley read their own and one other poem from O, an anthology about sensuality, masturbation, orgasms, and pleasure, with ourselves and with others; offering a safe space to celebrate our bodies, lust, passion, fun, joy, defiance, tenderness and intimacy.
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Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery.
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of autobiographical novels published in English as My Struggle propelled him to international fame, near universal acclaim and not a little controversy. His latest book The Morning Star (Penguin Press) is both a radical departure from that series, and a return to fiction as we traditionally know it. A group of holidaymakers in southern Norway witness the sudden and mysterious appearance of a new star, with consequences far beyond what they, or anybody else, could have predicted. Knausgaard is in conversation with journalist Jake Kerridge.
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Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, in Dialogue with a Somnambulist (House Sparrow Press) her stories, essays and personal portraits, collected here for the first time, reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in the long.
Chloe talks to the novelist, essayist and critic Lynne Tillman, and Gareth Evans.
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What could be simpler than a dish of pasta with tomato sauce? According to food historian Massimo Montanari’s latest book A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce (Europa), quite a lot. Montanari was in discussion with food writer Rachel Roddy.
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William Gardner Smith’s roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living against the backdrop of violence of Algerian War-era France, has been out of print for decades, but as one reviewer put it, ‘the issues Smith raises … resonate at least as much now as they did six decades ago.’ The story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn’t find in America, its account of his disillusionment and dawning consciousness of Algeria’s struggle for independence includes one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris Massacre of 1961.
Adam Shatz, who wrote the introduction for NYRB’s new edition, discussed The Stone Face’s achievement and contemporary resonances with Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities at UCL and the Holberg Prize-winning author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic and Darker Than Blue.
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The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival. But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB’s new selection of Fitzgerald’s writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late in life … she was an old hand as a literary journalist.’ It is this Fitzgerald, ‘a reviewer, a writer of introductions, a literary judge, and a speaker on panels and at literary festivals’, who is the subject of this special event to mark the publication of the LRB’s latest Selections volume.
Lee is in conversation with Susannah Clapp, who worked on many of her LRB pieces, and has described her as an ideal contributor who needed no ‘handling’: ‘She wrote to length, she wrote to time, she wrote without fuss, she wrote a lot’ – on subjects ranging from Alain-Fournier to Adrian Mole, Stevie Smith to Wild Swans – ‘always with a steady brilliance.’
Introduced by Sam Kinchin-Smith, the LRB's Head of Special Projects.
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Leo Boix and Andrew McMillan read and talk to celebrate the publication of Boix's long-awaited debut collection in English, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto), a book described by Ilya Kaminsky as of ‘a wide tilt and scope; it sings the doors open.’ Andrew McMillan’s third collection pandemonium is just out from Jonathan Cape, following hot on the heels of the prizewinning physicaland playtime.
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Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson's On Freedom (Jonathan Cape) explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
Nelson is in conversation here with Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions (Picador)
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In Flâneuse Lauren Elkin celebrated the woman walker in the city, revealing how aimlessly wandering through New York, Tokyo, Venice – but most of all Paris – invigorates the soul and focuses the mind. In her latest book No. 91/92 (Les Fugitives) she joins the commuter crowds on the bus with a love letter to Paris written in iPhone notes. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, her diary queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, as she registers the ordinary makings of a city and its people.
She talks about her travels through the city, literature, the mind and the human body with novelist, playwright and essayist Deborah Levy.
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W.G. Sebald was one of the most important literary figures of the bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries. Twenty years after his death, we were joined by acclaimed biographer Carole Angier, the author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury), described by Alberto Manguel as ‘an extraordinary achievement, able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions’. She was in conversation with Caroline Moorehead, the biographer of Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and others, whose most recent book is A House in the Mountains (Harper Collins).
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In Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker bobs and weaves between humour and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television, and collapses distinctions between the personal and the political, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Parker read from the collection and talked to Rachel Long, whose Forward nominated debut collection My Darling from the Lions was published by Picador last year.
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Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond (Fitzcarraldo), has been a firm bookshop favourite since its release, for its unique, irreverent voice and attention to the parts of experience which go overlooked or unspoken. Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up, is one of our most eagerly-anticipated books of 2021; Bennett was in conversation with Sheila Heti.
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From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Owen Hatherley’s Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso) argues for the city as a socialist project. Hatherley was in conversation with Juliet Jacques.
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Building on her essay ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2018, Professor of Social and Political Theory Amia Srinivasan explores the political and cultural dimensions of sexual desire, and its frustration.
Srinivasan is in discussion with co-editor of the LRB, Alice Spawls.
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As a writer and as a woman Lavinia Greenlaw has spent her life being forced to answer questions that don’t really matter and not being allowed to ask or answer the ones that really do. In her powerful new book Some Answers without Questions (Faber) she sets out to redress the balance.
Greenlaw is in conversation with Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
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In twelve witty and insightful essays novelist, memoirist and all-round thinker Jeanette Winterson explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity. Drawing on mythology, religion, art, history and gender theory as well as on science, Winterson’s take on the future of our species is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Winterson was in conversation with Victoria Turk, features Editor at Wired magazine.
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With their first two novels Isabel Waidner has established themself as one of the most disruptive, vital and boundary-pushing fiction writers at work in the UK today. Their latest novel Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula Press), a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies, takes this work to the next level.In celebration of its publication Isabel is in conversation with another of the UK's most innovative fiction writers, Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch(Dialogue Books).
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David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years turned everything we think we know about money, debt and society on its head, and has, in the ten years since it was first published, become a modern classic. A new hardback edition, with introduction by distinguished economist Thomas Piketty, is published this year by Melville House. To mark the tenth anniversary of this groundbreaking international bestseller, Grace Blakeley, Owen Jones, Gillian Tett and Yanis Varoufakis came together to discuss Debt and explore the lasting implications that Graeber's arguments have for society, past, present and future.
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There’s more to being bald than having no hair. Philosopher Simon Critchley and musician Brian Eno discuss the various dimensions of hairlessness in connection with Simon’s new book Bald. In typical Critchley mode though, this collection of essays spills far beyond the question of hair, or the lack of it, to take in Aristophanes, Hamlet, the mysteries of Eleusis and the joys and pains of being a Liverpool fan. As well as being one of the most influential living musicians, Eno has written several books, including the recently republished A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber).
Buy the book from us here: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/bald-35-philosophical-short-cuts-critchley-simon
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One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world - from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry - are hysterically rehearsed. A Primer for Cadavers, his startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. He was in conversation with Brian Dillon.
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Poet and critic Jack Underwood’s latest book Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly (Little, Brown) combines meditations on literature with astrophysics, quantum mechanics and the art of parenting. Most of all though it is a lyrical essay in praise of uncertainty and the pleasures (and pains) of uncertain living. He was in conversation with fellow poet Raymond Antrobus whose first collection The Perseverance was published by Penned in the Margins and whose second All the Names Given is forthcoming from Picador.
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Deborah Levy completes her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy – the first two volumes, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, won the Prix Femina Etranger in 2020 – with Real Estate, (Hamish Hamilton), a profound meditation on the things, both physical and psychological, that a woman might own. Levy herself writes ‘It was as if the search for Home was the point, but if I acquired it and the chase was over, there would be no more branches to put in the fire.’ She was in conversation about her work with Shahidha Bari, academic, critic, radio presenter and Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion.
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Scholar, musician, activist, raconteur and polemicist, Edward Said was one of the most celebrated and controversial intellectuals of the last century. Drawing extensively on interviews and archival research, professor Timothy Brennan provides the first full account of the many faceted life and mind of a uniquely inspiring and talented individual.
Timothy Brennan discusses Places of Mind (Bloomsbury) with LRB contributor Michael Wood.
Buy the books here.
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John Burnside’s new novel, Havergey (Little Toller), is set on a remote island in the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe. From our event in 2017, Burnside reads from the novel and is in conversation with Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso). The event is chaired by Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery.
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Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus blends fact and fiction to give ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family’. The year is 1959, and at Corbin College in New York academic Ruben Blum finds himself playing reluctant host to a visiting Israeli historian, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, who has unexpectedly arrived with his family in tow. The historian is the hawkish Benzion Netanyahu, and the family includes his 10-year-old son Benjamin, future Prime Minister of Israel. The resulting conflict of cultures and world views is comically played out in the format of a very unconventional campus novel. He was in conversation about his work with novelist, essayist and regular contributor to the LRB Colm Tóibín.
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Talking Politics: History of Ideas, David Runciman’s podcast introductions to the most important thinkers and theories behind modern politics, has been one of the few saving graces of a year of lockdowns, helping to make sense of our predicament through the revelatory ideas of Hobbes and Hayek, Fanon and Fukuyama, Bentham and De Beauvoir.
To mark the conclusion of the second series, David was joined by Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger and Bland Fanatics, among other books, for a conversation about those subjects of David’s that Pankaj has also written about extensively – including Gandhi, Rousseau and Nietzsche – alongside an alternative canon of non-Western theorists of politics and crisis.
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Everybody has a body, a source of both pleasure and pain. In her latest book Everybody (Picador) Olivia Laing uses the life and work of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich as an investigative tool to uncover the strange, subtle and sometimes perverted ways we think about the physical object we function within. Fundamentally, this exciting and challenging book is about how we might strive for freedom with, and not despite, our bodies. Olivia Laing was in conversation with Katherine Angel who has, most recently in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, and in several previous books, wrestled with issues of bodily integrity and bodily freedom.
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Described by Claire Louise Bennett as ‘lithe and ambitious’ and by Toby Litt as ‘a miracle in book form’, Isobel Wohl’s debut Cold New Climate (Weatherglass) is likely to be one of the most talked about novels of 2021. Encompassing the limits and expectations of love, life and family and the devastation and elation each of those can bring, and our fears for a future that is disappearing as we speed towards it, it’s a book that’s vibrantly conscious of the modern world, and slyly conscious of the tradition it’s coming from. Isobel Wohl was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, a fellow New Yorker, and author of Flaneuse.
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Throughout her career and across her many books Jacqueline Rose has been teasing out the political implications of violence, and in particular the way it concerns and interacts with the social constructions of gender. In her latest passionate, polemical work On Violence and On Violence Against Women (Faber) she confronts the issue head on, taking in trans rights, the sexual harassment of migrant women, the trial of Oscar Pistorius and the writings of Hisham Matar and Han Kang.
Rose is in conversation with Jude Kelly, Founder and Director of The WOW Foundation.
Buy the book here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/products/on-violence-and-on-violence-against-women-by-jacqueline-rose
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Helen Mort and Dan Richards were at the shop to talk about poetry and mountaineering. Mort read from her latest collection from Chatto and Windus, No Map Could Show Them (a Poetry Book Society recommendation), which recounts in Mort’s inimitable style the exploits of pathbreaking female mountaineers. Afterwards she was in conversation with Dan Richards, whose book Climbing Days (Faber) explores the writing and climbing exploits of his great-great aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley and I.A. Richards.
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Carrie Brownstein was at the shop to discuss her book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, with Lavinia Greenlaw.
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In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso)—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on #MeToo, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?
Angel is in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather (Picador).
Buy the books here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/katherine-angel-and-olivia-laing
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Chris Power’s first novel A Lonely Man (Faber) is a powerful, menacing exploration of the nature of truth, fabrication and identity. ‘If you're a fan of existential crises’ writes Jon McGregor, ‘family dramas, Putin-era paranoias, and Bolaño-style multiplicities, and want to see them woven into one taut novel, you're in the right place.’ Chris Power was in conversation about A Lonely Man with the critic Alex Clark.
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Beginning in San Francisco in 1981, the era of punk and nascent gay pride, Rebecca Solnit’s latest book Recollections of My Non-Existence (Granta) is a powerful memoir of growing both as a woman and an artist, drawing on the powers of literature, activism and solidarity in the face of an apparently unbreachable patriarchy. The struggle to find a voice and to find a way to make that voice heard are brilliantly captured and dissected by one of feminism’s, and indeed the world’s, foremost thinkers. Rebecca Solnit was in conversation about her life and work with historian Mary Beard, whose most recent book is Women & Power: A Manifesto. Both of our speakers are regular contributors to the pages of the LRB.
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Already well-known for her novels – Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner has over the past two decades been writing essays, reviews and reportage as insightful and surprising as her fiction. In The Hard Crowd (Jonathan Cape) she has selected 19 pieces, covering diverse topics: art, literature, music, politics with essays on Marguerite Duras, Jeff Koons, wildcat strikes, a visit to a Palestinian refugee Camp and the music scene of her hometown San Francisco.
She talks about her work with art critic and frequent contributor to the LRB Professor Hal Foster.
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Joshua Cohen, one of Granta magazines ‘Best Young American Writers’ for 2017, was at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel Moving Kings, published by Fitzcarraldo. Described by James Wood in the New Yorker as ‘A Jewish Sopranos… burly with particularities and vibrant with voice… utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy’, Moving Kings interweaves the housing crisis in contemporary New York with the history of conflict in the Middle East. Joshua Cohen was in conversation with Jon Day, lecturer in English at King's College, London and LRB contributor.
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From this 2018 event: In Municipal Dreams (Verso), John Boughton charts the often surprising story of council housing in Britain, from the slum clearances of the Victorian age through to the Grenfell Tower disaster. It’s a history packed with incident – with utopians, visionaries and charlatans, with visionary planners and corrupt officials – and Boughton combines it with an architectural tour of some of the best remaining examples, as well as some of the more ordinary places that millions of people have come to call home. He's in conversation about his book with Owen Hatherley, architectural historian and author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia.
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Holly Pester's debut collection, Comic Timing (Granta), is disorienting, radical and extremely funny; Pester has a background in sound art and performance, having worked with the Womens' Library, the BBC and the Wellcome Collection, and is an unmissable reader of her own work. She read from Comic Timing and was in conversation with Vahni Capildeo, whose most recent collection is Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, 2019), and Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta and author of Kingdomland (Faber, 2019).
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Having an engineer as a father and an art school education, Paul Spooner became, predictably, a school-teacher, then a lorry driver. A chance meeting with mechanical model-maker Peter Markey in Cornwall led him to discover his true métier – the almost extinct profession of automatist, or maker of automata. Since then he has been relentlessly making mechanical playthings, mostly of wood, some of them not, mostly small, some of them not, all of them intricately engineered, eccentrically beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
He is in conversation about his work with Rosemary Hill, architectural historian and contributing editor at the London Review of Books. She first encountered Paul Spooner's work at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden in the 1980s and has admired it ever since. Her books include God's Architect, a biography of A W N Pugin, and Stonehenge.
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Patricia Lockwood was in conversation about her new book, No One Is Talking About This (and a lot else besides) with fellow LRB contributing editor, John Lanchester.
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Brigid Brophy (1929-95) was a fearlessly original novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism and prison reform. Her many acclaimed novels include Hackenfeller’s Ape, The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball – which Faber reissued at the end of last year – as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. She also wrote about Mozart for the LRB, and contributed 19 other unforgettable pieces in the paper’s first years, on subjects ranging from Michelangelo to Germaine Greer, animal cruelty to structuralism.
Eley Williams, who wrote the foreword for the new edition of The Snow Ball, is in conversation with Terry Castle and Bidisha about Brophy the essayist and novelist, Brophy then and now.
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Lauren Oyler was talking abou her first novel, Fake Accounts, with the writer Olivia Sudjic, who has described it as 'Savage and shrewd, destined to go viral. If the world does end soon I'll be glad that I read it'.
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André Aciman talked to Brian Dillon about his latest book, Homo Irrealis (Faber and Faber), a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as Freud, W.G.Sebald, the films of Eric Rohmer and the cityscapes of Alexandria and St Petersburg.
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In The Lark Ascending (Faber) Richard King, author of Original Rockers and How Soon is Now?, explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature. From the far west of Wales to the Thames Estuary and the Suffolk shoreline, taking in Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Dylan Thomas, Gavin Bryars, Greenham Common and the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, The Lark Ascending listens to the land and the music that emerged from it, to chart a new and surprising course through a familiar landscape. King was in conversation with Luke Turner, editor of the influential online music publication The Quietus and author of the memoir Out of the Woods.
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Following on from his bestselling and hugely entertaining Germania and Danubia, Simon Winder continues his idiosyncratic journey through Europe’s past with Lotharingia (Picador). Now almost forgotten, Lotharingia arose from the ashes of the Carolingian Empire and stretched from the North Sea coasts of what is now the Netherlands all the way to the Alps, encompassing myriad languages and nationalities. Despite its disappearance and ensuing obscurity Lotharingia, Winder shows, has exercised a surprising and powerful influence on the history of the continent of Europe, from the Early Middle Ages to the present day. Winder was in conversation about Europe’s lost country with psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips.
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In his book Conversations About Sculpture (Yale) art historian Hal Foster recapitulates the discussions he has had, over a period of two decades, with the legendary minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. Professor Foster, a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, was in discussion about his book, and about Serra's extraordinary work, with Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey.
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From this 2017 event: Bertolt Brecht, poet, playwright, theatre director and refugee, was a passionate critic of fascism and war. During World War Two, already many years into his exile from Nazi Germany, Brecht started creating what he called ‘photo-epigrams’ to create a singular visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. As his family fled from the Nazis, 'changing countries more often than our shoes,' Brecht took photographs from newspapers and popular magazines and added short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. These photo-epigrams are collected in War Primer, a remarkable work first published in 1955 and made newly available in a new edition by Verso.
Chair Gareth Evans is joined by Deutsche Borse Prize-winning photographer Oliver Chanarin, Brecht scholar and translator Tom Kuhn and scholar and critic Esther Leslie in a panel discussion about this outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works that is strikingly relevant to the current confluence of war and neo-fascism today.
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Dana Spiotta was reading from her novel Innocents and Others, and talking about her work with with journalist and critic Alex Clark.
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From this 2017 event, Canadian poet and novelist Anne MIchaels, author of the multi-award winning fiction Fugitive Pieces, 'the most important book I have read for forty years' (John Berger), presents two new titles. Infinite Gradation (House Sparrow Press), her first volume of non-fiction, is an astonishing meditation on the moral, emotional and philosophical implications of language and the creative act. All We Saw (Bloomsbury), Anne's latest collection of poetry, continues her mesmerising and lyrical exploration of love, loss and the mystery at the heart of being. She was in conversation with writer and broadcaster Bidisha.
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Rich with arguments that speak directly to our moment - a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before - Building and Dwelling (Allen Lane) draws on Richard Sennett's deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities. Sennett was in conversation with Anna Minton, author of Big Capital (Penguin).
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In this event from 2018, Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine and author of several books of essays, fiction, history and art criticism, talked about his first book, In the Dark Room, published by Penguin in 2005 and now available again in a handsome new edition from Fitzcarraldo, with Sophie Ratcliffe, Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and author of On Sympathy (Oxford, 2008). Exploring the intersections of grief and memory, in his own personal history and beyond, Dillon evokes, in prose of great beauty and lucidity, the pain both of loss, and that of remembering the lost.
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Lynsey Hanley's Estates, first published by Granta in 2008, has become over the past decade one of the key texts to analyse Britain's urban landscape in the post-War period. To mark a new edition of her seminal work, Hanley, a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman, was in conversation with fellow journalist Dawn Foster, who has written widely on housing and social issues.
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In this event from June 2017, Brian Dillon talks to Max Porter about his latest book, Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Dillon has been fascinated by the essay form throughout his reading and writing life, and Essayism is at once a paean to this venerable and still vibrant genre, and a dazzling contemporary example of it. Porter is the author of the prize-winning Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber).
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Russian twentieth-century poetry is one of the pinnacles of European literature and we still know little about it. This event includes readings from Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Maria Petrovykh, Varlam Shalamov (still better known for his prose) and the emigre poet Georgy Ivanov, one of the very greatest of all Russian lyric poets. Stephen Capus, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and James Womack read some of their translations included in the new Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.
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As the nights close in, what could be better than to gather around the (virtual) hearth and consider multi-award winning poet Robin Robertson's shadow-wracked new collection, Grimoire (Picador).
A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits, and in Robertson's intense Celtic take, it tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology. This is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.
Joining Robertson in conjuring the spirit of place, people and purpose are Alasdair Roberts, the extraordinary singer-songwriter and keeper of the tradition, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield, whose most recent collection is Byssus. With host, Gareth Evans..
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Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air (Granta), following on the tails of her pamphlets understudies for air and capriccio, is one of the mostly hotly-awaited debut collections of 2020. She read from the collection, and was in conversation about it with Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland (Faber) and Lafarge’s editor at Granta.
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London, the Capital of world capitalism, a centre of global finance and a place of immense wealth and privilege, has an often unacknowledged red underbelly, stretching from Herbert Morrison in the 1930s to Sadiq Khan in the 2020s. In Red Metropolis (Repeater), Tribune culture editor and historian Owen Hatherley looks back at that tradition, and argues that a socialist, democratic, pluralist city could become a beacon of hope for the whole country and beyond. Hatherley is in conversation with Novara Media’s senior editor Ash Sarkar.
Buy the book from us here: londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/owen-hatherley
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Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga presented her latest novel, the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber). The third in a trilogy which began with Nervous Conditions and continued with The Book of Not, This Mournable Body tells the ongoing story of Tambudzai and her struggles with patriarchy and the legacy of colonialism as she tries to make her way, on her own terms, in 1990s Harare. Dangarembga has for many years been as involved in politics as in literature and film (for her all three are intimately connected), and has served as education secretary for the Movement for Democratic Change. She is currently awaiting trial in connection with her role in peaceful anti-corruption protests in Zimbabwe, charges which have led many prominent writers around the world to leap to her defence.
Dangarembga was in conversation with Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a gothic romance set in Georgian London which combines elements of Bildungsroman, crime fiction and slave narrative with a healthy dose of righteous anger.
This event was held in partnership with Faber Members.
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In our event from 16 July 2019, Geoff Dyer talks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and, presciently, the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Historian and biographer Frances Wilson's most recent book is Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey.
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On publication of Andrew Motion's new book of poetry, Essex Clay, he joined Alan Hollinghurst in conversation at St George's Bloomsbury.
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Writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo) is a series of essays, each of them taking as its pretext a single sentence drawn from literature. What emerges is a dazzling experiment in criticism, a personal and at times polemical investigation of style, meaning and sense. Dillon was in conversation about his work with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather and Crudo.
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Novelist, memoirist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB John Lanchester sets out to chill you to the virtual bone with his first ever collection of short fiction Reality and Other Stories (Faber). As if modern life weren’t unsettling enough, Lanchester makes it even more so with tales of haunted mobile phones, selfie sticks with demonic powers and other stories of technology gone horribly, horribly wrong in this retread of M.R. James for the Zoom generation.
As we prepare for what might be the strangest Hallowe’en in living memory, John Lanchester discussed the uncanny with the LRB’s head of special projects Sam Kinchin-Smith.
Buy the book from us here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/products/reality-and-other-stories-by-john-lanchester
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The European Union Prize for Literature aims to put the spotlight on the creativity and diverse wealth of Europe’s contemporary literature and to promote the circulation of literature beyond national and linguistic borders. To discuss the prize, the state of European literature and Britain's place in the post-Brexit international literary community, we welcomed two past winners: Sunjeev Sahota, who won in 2017 for his Man Booker shortlisted novel The Year of Runaways; and 2014 winner Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing. The discussion was chaired by critic and former EUPL jury member Catherine Taylor.
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In celebration of the life, work and legacy of William Trevor, one of the giants of modern Irish fiction, authors Salley Vickers, Kevin Barry, Hermione Lee and BBC Radio 4 Books Editor Di Speirs read from and talked about their favourites of his novels and short fiction, to mark the publication of Last Stories (Viking). Trevor, who died in 2016, won the Whitbread prize three times, was five times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2014 was made Saoi by Aosdána, Ireland’s most prestigious artistic award.
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We were joined by Toby Litt, Helen Charman, Lisa Kelly and Mary Jean Chan, four of the poets featured in Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. From the first anthology, published in 1994, through to this seventh volume, the series showcases the work of some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world. The New Poetries anthologies have never sought to identify a school, much less a generation: the poets included employ a wide range of styles, forms and approaches, and new need not be taken to imply young.
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Three-times Booker-nominated author and LRB editor-at-large Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel centres on the powerful friendship between James and Tully, fuelled by teenage rebellion and the unforgettable soundtrack of late 80s British music. Stretching over three decades, Mayflies is a captivating study of adolescence becoming adulthood, with all the shades of light and darkness that has made O’Hagan one of the most respected writers of his generation.
O’Hagan was in conversation with Edmund Gordon, biographer of Angela Carter.
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Igbo and Tamil writer and artist Akwaeke Emezi's mesmerising first novel Freshwater was published to universal acclaim in 2018, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Their second book was Pet, a novel for young adults that raised difficult and pertinent questions about cultures of denial, and was described as ‘beautiful and genre-expanding’ in the New York Times. To mark the publication of their second novel for adults The Death of Vivek Oji, a heart-wrenching tale of one family’s discords and misunderstandings, the London Review Bookshop hosted a live online conversation between Akwaeke Emezi and their editor at Faber, Louisa Joyner.
The interview between Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Dionne Brand referred to in their conversation can be found here: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/06/temporary-spaces-of-joy-and-freedom/
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Novelist and essayist Kirsty Gunn’s latest novel Caroline’s Bikini is a powerful retelling of one of the oldest stories in western literature – that of unrequited love. In a series of conversations in West London bars, Gunn unravels the passion of financier Evan Gordonstone for the glamorous Caroline Beresford, an unravelling that brings Gordonstone to the brink of destruction. Kirsty Gunn is the author of six works of fiction and several essay collections, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Dundee. She read from her latest book, and talked about it with Max Porter, author of Lanny.
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Leading political thinker Chantal Mouffe proposes a new way to define left populism today: it is more than an ideology or a political regime. It is a way of doing politics that can take various forms but emerges when one aims at building a new subject of collective action — the people.
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Across five collections, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has won admirers for its distinctive mix of the humourous and the cerebral, a voice the London Review of Books described as ‘Somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor.’ The best of those five collections is now gathered in her first selected, What I'm Looking For (Penguin).
McLane was at the shop to read from and discuss her work with poet and critic Sarah Howe, whose collection Loop of Jade won the 2015 T.S. Eliot prize.
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‘This past is a dimension of the present, without which the present is mutilated.’
In Lord of all the Dead, Javier Cercas plunges back into his family history, revisiting Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to discover the truth about his ancestor Manuel Mena, who died fighting on the Francoist side at the Battle of the Ebro. Who are we to judge the dead? How can we reconcile national and family history, the political and the domestic?
Cercas was in conversation with Gaby Wood, journalist and literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation.
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In conversation with Dave McKean, Richard McGuire talks about his graphic novel, Here, a book-length expansion of his groundbreaking 1989 sequence of the same name,
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To celebrate the publication of Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?, a new selection of Jenny Diski's LRB essays, chosen and introduced by Mary-Kay Wilmers, Deborah Friedell talked to Chloe Diski about Jenny's life and work.
You can order Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? from us here: https://lrb.me/order
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Two of Ann Quin’s admirers, novelist and essayist Deborah Levy and writer and critic Juliet Jacques, will be joined in conversation about her life and work by Jennifer Hodgson, editor of The Unmapped Country.
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Writing on Lorna Goodison’s poetry, Derek Walcott asks ‘What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.’ Goodison has served as the Poet Laureate of Jamaica and published twelve volumes of poetry; her Collected Poems came out from Carcanet in 2017. In 2019, she won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Linton Kwesi Johnson is one of the only three poets to be published as a Penguin Modern Classic while still alive; his collections include Inglan is a Bitch, Tings an’ Times, and Mi Revalueshanary Fren.
Johnson and Goodison were in conversation.
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There is a sort of chase for coherence in the current commercial market for fiction ... a sort of terror of there being any kind of mystery in a book, or even a character being confused.
Deborah Levy, described by Lauren Elkin in the TLS as ' one of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction' was at the Bookshop to talk about her latest novel Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton), which explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood.
“A bright broth of myth, psychology, Freudian symbolism and contemporary anxiety.” – Guardian
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Are we English, British, European, citizens of the planet Earth or none of the above? The ‘Citizens of Everywhere’ project invites writers, artists and journalists to respond to the seismic shifts in European and American politics, and their implications for the future, in ways that are creative, surprising, and, most importantly of all, useful. Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, Labour peer and former director of Liberty, novelist Tom McCarthy and campaigner Eloise Todd were at the shop to debate the future of citizenship in Britain, Europe and beyond. Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse and co -director of the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool, was in the chair.
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The fleeting appearance of black faces in Tudor paintings marks the silent presence of a community's untold story. Who were the black men and women who lived, loved, and died in Renaissance Britain? How did they arrive? And how can we recover their voices when all we have is a glimpse in a portrait here, or church and court record there? At this event the writer Fred D'Aguiar and historians David Olusoga and Catherine Fletcher joined Nandini Das, director of TIDE, to explore the challenge of using fiction to recover those lost voices in history.
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In Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Polity) Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi engage in a critical dialogue that seeks to expand our understanding of capitalism, revealing it to be not merely a system of economic relations, but rather a form of institutionalised social order, and one that continually reinvents itself through crisis. Nancy Fraser, Professor of Political & Social Science at the New School for Social Research, was in conversation about capitalism and its discontents with Ann Pettifor, Director of Prime (Policy Research in Macroeconomics), Fellow of the New Economics Foundation and author of The Production of Money (Verso).
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Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and, according to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 'the geographer royal by appointment to the left', returned to the Bookshop to talk about his new book A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier (London Publishing Partnership). Dorling's book looks at the evidence for a successful politics that would promote happiness and health and suggests policies that take account of this evidence. Dorling was in conversation with Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, and Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level.
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Laleh Khalili and Rafeef Ziadah on shipping and capitalism in the Arabian peninsula.
You can order the book discussed in this episode here: lrb.me/order
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Radio producer and naturalist Tim Dee has curated in Ground Work (Cape) an essential collection of autobiographical essays from distinguished writers, all of which explore, in diverse ways, the complex and increasingly vexed relationship between the human and natural. Tim Dee was in conversation with two of the book's contributors, Marina Warner and Ken Worpole.
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Nikita Lalwani’s latest novel You People (Viking) centres on a London pizzeria where the chefs are Sri Lankan and many of the kitchen staff are illegal immigrants. Through a diverse set of characters Lalwani draws a vivid portrait of contemporary British life as it really is lived. Lalwani was in conversation with her editor Mary Mount.
‘Enthralling as a thriller, yet also a beautiful human drama, and a serious enquiry into the possibility of goodness.’ - Tessa Hadley
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Adam Mars-Jones talks about his newly-published novel, ‘Box Hill’ with Richard Scott.
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Although our events programme is on hold at the moment, we’re delighted that Danny Dorling and Zoe Williams could get together virtually to record this podcast in lieu of the planned event.
In his intriguing and counterintuitive new book Slowdown (Yale), Danny Dorling argues that, contrary to what most of us believe, human life is actually slowing down, in diverse areas from birth rate to GDP to technological innovation. And, what’s more, in an arresting graphic style combining text and data with illustrations by Kirsten McClure, he shows how slowing down can be good for the planet, for the economy and for our lives in general.
For more information on the book and Danny's project, you can visit the Slowdown website here
You can order Slowdown from us here: lrb.me/order
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Mick Herron’s hero/anti-hero Jackson Lamb is everything Le Carré’s Smiley isn’t, as well as quite a lot of what he is. Drunk, obese, bone-idle and ridiculously talented in the dark arts of spycraft, he is also ridiculously loyal to the inhabitants of Slough House, a group of misfits, addicts and screw-ups who have been exiled from the security services for a range of misdemeanours both real and concocted. His five Slough House novels so far are brutal, ruthless, intricately plotted and, it’s important to mention, also extremely funny. Herron presented the sixth of them, Joe Country (John Murray) in the company of historian and novelist Miranda Carter who has, as M.J. Carter, herself created a series of brilliant thrillers, beginning with The Strangler Vine.
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‘We architects must be idealists’, wrote Minnette de Silva, Sri Lanka’s first female architect. Shiromi Pinto’s second novel, Plastic Emotions (Influx Press) is based on de Silva’s life, charting her affair with Le Corbusier and her attempt to rebuild Sri Lanka in the aftermath of independence.
Pinto was in conversation with Owen Hatherley, whose most recent book is The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space, and Olivia Sudjic, the author of Exposure.
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Sam Contis discusses ‘Dorothea Lange’s Day Sleeper’, the way women photographers are remembered and forgotten and how one artist encounters another in the world and in the archive, with Joanna Biggs, assistant editor at the LRB.
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Lars Iyer, author of the Spurious trilogy and Wittgenstein Jr. revisits philosophy in his latest novel Nietzsche and the Burbs (Melville House). Set in a modern secondary school, Iyer’s novel follows a group of students through their last few weeks of school, centring on an enigmatic and charismatic recent transferee from private education, nicknamed by his fellow pupils ‘Nietzsche’ both for his brilliance and intimations of oncoming madness. Iyer is currently Reader in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, where he was formerly a long-time lecturer in philosophy.
Iyer was in conversation with Jon Day, author of Homing.
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In her previous book Strands poet and essayist Jean Sprackland brought lyrically to life the hidden histories of objects found on her local beaches. Now in These Silent Mansions (Jonathan Cape) she brings together a magpie-like collector’s instinct, a historian’s restless curiosity and a poet’s keen sensibility to investigate what graveyards can tell us about both the dead and the living. Revisiting cemeteries in the towns and cities she has over the years called home, she unearths the fascinating, moss-hidden histories of those buried there, and investigates how memory and remembering ties us to the past, the present and the future.
Sprackland was in conversation with Chris McCabe, a writer who has travelled extensively through the graveyards of London in books such as Cenotaph South, In the Catacombs and most recently, The East Edge.
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Anne Enright’s latest novel Actress (Cape) tells the story of the relationship between Irish theatre legend Katherine O'Dell and her daughter Norah, as told by Norah herself. Early stardom in Hollywood, triumphs and tragedies on the stages of Dublin and London, and a career unravelling into infamy and eventual insanity are vividly evoked in a brilliant novel about mothers, daughters, secrets and the corrosiveness of fame.
Anne Enright, author of six previous novels including Booker-winning The Gathering was in conversation with Andrew O’Hagan, editor-at-large for the LRB and author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, most recently The Secret Life: Three True Stories (Faber).
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Leïla Slimani was the first Moroccan woman to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for her novel Lullaby. Her latest book Sex and Lies (Faber) departs from fiction to explore the lives of and give a voice to the young women of Morocco, struggling to survive and thrive in a deeply conservative, patriarchal culture.
Slimani was in conversation about her work with Professor Amia Srinivasan, tutorial fellow in Philosophy at Oxford and contributing editor at the LRB, where she has published articles on, inter alia, sexual politics, sharks and octopuses.
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By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside, but two years ago, she began to feel that she was only seeing half the picture. She needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. So she decided to go undercover in her spare time - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum including White Supremacists, ISIS, German Neo-Nazis, ‘Trad Wives’ and ‘Jihadi Brides’. The results of her research are presented in Going Dark (Bloomsbury), and give us a terrifying and essential insight into the mindset of extremism and the motives and strategies of its adherents.
She was in conversation with Daniel Trilling, author of Bloody Nasty People and Lights in the Distance.
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Like Beethoven, the poet Ruth Padel first came to love and understand music through playing the viola. Her great grandfather, a concert pianist, studied music in Leipzig with Beethoven’s friend and contemporary. Her latest collection Beethoven Variations (Chatto) is simultaneously a biography in verse of the great composer and a passionate and highly personal account of how one creative genius can feed, and feed on, another.
She was joined in an evening of readings and conversation about Beethoven, poetry and music by poets Raymond Antrobus and Anthony Anaxagorou, both of whom are currently engaged in creative projects working on and from the life and work of Beethoven.
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Will Harris reads from his debut collection RENDANG, alongside poet and editor Rachael Allen.
Find out about upcoming events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/bookshopeventspod
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The writer Samantha Harvey has won wide acclaim and a devoted following for her novels, most recently The Western Wind, set in mediavel Somerset. In her latest book The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Cape) she turns to philosophical memoir, with an account of a bout of insomnia that afflicted her from out of the blue, and led her to re-examine many of her assumptions about life, about writing, and about the human mind.
She was in conversation about her work with novelist Tessa Hadley, who has described The Shapeless Unease as ‘gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching … What a beautiful book.’
Find out about upcoming events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/bookshopeventspod
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In the period between the wars nearby Mecklenburgh Square was home to many artists, writers and radicals. In a stunning work of rediscovery Francesca Wade focuses on five remarkable women who lived there: the modernist poet and visionary H.D; crime writer and translator of Dante Dorothy L. Sayers; classicist Jane Harrison; economic historian Eileen Power; and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. Co-editor of the White Review, Francesca Wade’s articles have appeared in the LRB, TLS, Financial Times, Prospect and New Statesman. Square Haunting is her first full-length book and is published by Faber.
She was in conversation with Alexandra Harris, whose books include Romantic Moderns and Weatherland.
Find out about upcoming events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/bookshopeventspod
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Alexander Zevin's Liberalism at Large (Verso) is the first critical biography of the Economist newspaper, which, since 1843, has been the most tireless – and internationally influential – champion of the liberal cause anywhere in the world. But what exactly is liberalism, and how has its message evolved?
Zevin presents a history of liberalism on the move, confronting the challenges that classical doctrine left unresolved – the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, the ascendancy of finance – holding a mirror to the politics and personalities that helped shape a liberal world order now under increasing strain. Zevin was in conversation with Tariq Ali.
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The Observer called Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy ‘a landmark in twenty-first century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakeable efforts to forge her own path’. The essays in her latest book Coventry explore other writers who forged their own path – among them Natalia Ginzburg, Olivia Manning and D.H. Lawrence – and wider themes political, personal and ethical. The discussion focussed on the themes that she has explored in her impressive body of work to date: the thinking and philosophy that have driven her to these positions, how her thinking is evolving and the new challenges that she is exploring. Cusk was in conversation with Chris Power, author of Mothers (Faber and Faber). Rachel Cusk is the author of the trilogy Outline, Transit, Kudos; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes (winner of the Whitbread Award), The Temporary, The Country Life (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Lucky Ones, In the Fold, *Arlington Park* and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best Young British Novelists. She has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize three times, most recently for Kudos.
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One of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, Susan Sontag’s writing – on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism, Fascism, Freudianism, Communism and Americanism – forms an indispensable guide to our modern world. Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted archive, providing fascinating insights into both the public myth and private life of an endlessly complex individual. Moser was at the shop to discuss Sontag’s life and legacy with Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing.
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Long regarded as one of the world’s leading pianists, Stephen Hough is also a fine and perceptive writer, whose first novel was published last year. Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (Faber) brings together around 200 of his short essays, many of which began as notes made ‘during that dead time on the road’ that is the lot of the international performer – at airports, on planes and in hotel rooms. In these ‘jottings’, Hough ranges widely over all aspects of music and musical life, as well as people and places, art and literature, religion and ethics. Hough was in conversation with James Jolly, Editor-in-Chief of Gramophone magazine.
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In her latest book, Astra Taylor – ‘a rare public intellectual, utterly committed to asking humanity’s most profound questions yet entirely devoid of pretensions’ (Naomi Klein) – argues that democracy is not just in crisis, but that real democracy, inclusive and egalitarian, has never existed. Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Verso) aims to re-examine what we mean by democracy, what we want from it, and understand why it is so hard to realise. Taylor was in conversation with David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs and Professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.
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Diane Williams’s short (most of them very short) stories have been captivating literary audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for the last three decades. Ben Marcus, in his introduction to The Collected Stories, has described them as ‘fictions of perfect strangeness’, adding that they ‘prize enigma and the uncanny above all else.’ Williams read from her work, and was in conversation with Lara Pawson, formerly the BBC’s correspondent in Angola and author of This is the Place to Be (CB Editions).
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Celia Paul, born in India in 1959 and now resident in Bloomsbury is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working in Britain today. Following a passionate affair with painter Lucian Freud and figuring in several of his canvases she emerged as an immensely talented painter, initially focussing on intimate depictions of family life before more recently turning to the broader scale of landscape and sea-scape. Her memoir Self-Portrait (Jonathan Cape) is an invaluable first-hand account of the trials and rewards of making great art, and has been described by Esther Freud as ‘An insight into the white-knuckle determination needed to make great art, and why it is so few women painters reach the heights. An astoundingly honest book, moving and engrossing – full of truths.’ Paul was in conversation about her work with curator and art writer Catherine Lampert.
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Something strange has happened to truth in the past few years. Politicians, marketeers, Twitterists and others seem to have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if what they say is true as long as some people believe it (and even that doesn’t seem to matter all that much sometimes). In his latest book This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (Faber) intrepid investigative reporter Peter Pomerantsev travels the world, from China to Russia to Syria to the Balkans and to Brexit Britain in an often surprising investigation of why we can no longer believe what we say, or say what we believe. Peter Pomerantsev was in conversation with Guardian columnist Marina Hyde and Carl Miller, author of The Death of the Gods.
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At the beginning of the 20th Century, the first emancipated generation of black women in the USA were obliged, sometimes enabled and often hindered in creating new ways of living after the abolition of slavery. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Profile), Professor Saidiya Hartman tells the inspiring and surprising stories of these pioneers, whose discoveries about how to be in the world have been followed and emulated by people, black, white, gay, straight, cis, trans and other, ever since. Hartman was in conversation about her work with writer and activist Lola Olufemi.
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Jorge Galán’s extraordinary non-fiction novel Noviembre, now published in an English translation by Jason Wilson as November, recounts the horrifying murder of six Jesuit priests and two women during the Salvadorian civil war in 1989, dealing both with its aftermath and the complex political situation from which the atrocity arose. Its original publication in Spanish led to death threats against the author which forced Galán to flee his native country. Galán was in conversation with journalist Mark Dowd who has written widely and produced several documentaries on the relationship between religion and human rights. The interpreter was Cecilia Lipovseck from [Multilateral London][2]. This event is made possible by the generous support of Instituto Cervantes and Elisabeth Hayek.
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In her latest book ‘Surfacing’ (Sort of Books), poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie explores what emerges: from the earth, from memory and from the mind. Her travels take her from Arctic Alaska to the sand dunes and machair of Scotland in a quest to discover what archaeology might tell us about the past, the present and the future. Her writing throughout is marked, as always, by an acute attention to the natural world. She was in conversation about her work with Philip Hoare, author of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Risingtidefallingstar’.
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Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz discussed shared preoccupations including decolonisation and orientalism, Israel-Palestine, 20th-century music, and France, in conversation with the novelist Nikita Lalwani. This was the last in a series of events celebrating the LRB's 40th anniversary.
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Nell Dunn and Tessa Hadley discuss fictional representations of women’s everyday lives with the LRB’s Joanna Biggs, as part of a series of events celebration the LRB's 40th anniversary.
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On Wednesday 16 October, William Davies and Katrina Forrester discussed shared preoccupations including the subjects of their recent books, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World and In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. This was part of a series of events celebrating the LRB's 40th anniversary.
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Rosemary Hill and Iain Sinclair talk to the LRB's digital editor, Sam Kinchin-Smith, about their shared preoccupations with London, as written about in the London Review of Books. This was the first in a series of events celebrating the LRB's 40th anniversary.
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In Against Memoir (And Other Stories), Michelle Tea takes us through the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Via a series of essays, addresses and fragments she reclaims Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorcycle gang HAGS and introduces us to activists at a trans protest camp. Tea was in conversation with writer Juliet Jacques.
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Denise Riley’s devastating long poem ‘A Part Song’, written in response to the death of her son, was first published in the LRB in 2012 and later became the kernel of her acclaimed collection Say Something Back (Picador). The poem’s prose counterpart Time Lived, Without Its Flow was initially published in a small edition by Capsule Press but has now been made more readily available in a new edition, also from Picador. Riley was in conversation about her essay with the writer Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny and with the poet Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby.
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Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’. It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo) focuses on black artists, including James Brown, Charlie Parker and Prince, who were at the forefront of innovation and the white artists that followed, adapting their sounds for the mainstream. Described by Iain Sinclair as ‘a laureate for marginal places’ Penman began his career in 1970s at the NME and has since gone on to write for publications such as Sight & Sound, Uncut and the London Review of Books. Penman was in conversation with writer and editor Jennifer Hodgson.
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Nell Zink, born in Virginia in 1964 and now resident in Germany, is one of the most remarkable novelists of her, and indeed any generation. Her exuberant creations, always inflected with political, social and ecological concern, have won worldwide acclaim for their recklessness, their inventiveness and their sheer stylistic brilliance. She read from the latest of them, Doxology (4th Estate), a tale that begins with the iconic tragedy of 11 September 2001 and spins out from it into America’s past and potential futures, she discussed it with Alex Clark of the Guardian.
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In twelve inimitable, eccentric, hilarious, disturbing and powerful novels, Nicola Barker has established herself as one of the most inventive and powerful voices in contemporary British fiction. To mark the publication of the thirteenth, I Am Sovereign (William Heinemann), Barker was in conversation about experiment, fiction, contemporaneity and a great deal else besides with the novelist and short story writer Ali Smith.
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‘A writer is only as interesting as what she pays attention to.’ Deborah Levy is the author of many plays, novels, short stories and essay collections. Inventive, experimental and compulsively readable, her work has won many awards, accolades and prizes. Her latest novel The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton) plays with time and memory in a gripping exploration of the weight of history and the disastrous consequences of trying to ignore it. ‘There’s no one touching the brilliance of Deborah Levy’s prose today’ writes Lee Rourke. Levy was in conversation with Shahidha Bari, academic, critic and author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (Jonathan Cape).
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At the New School in New York, where Simon Critchley teaches, ‘Critchley on Tragedy’ is one of the most consistently oversubscribed courses. Now, in Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (Profile) he explains, in often surprising ways, why Greek Tragedies remain so compellingly relevant to modern times, in the way they confront us with things about ourselves we don’t want to believe, but are nevertheless true. Critchley was in conversation with Shahidha Bari, Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary, University of London.
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In 1990, Eileen Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer's life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s wellbeing, especial...
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Romy Hall, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel *[The Mars Room][1]* (Cape), is beginning two consecutive life sentences plus six months at a women’s correctional facility. Cut off from everything she knows and loves – The Mars Room, a San Francisco strip club where she once earned a living, her seven-year-old son Jackson now in the care of her estranged mother – Romy begins a terrifying new life, detailed with humour and precision by Kushner. George Saunders writes ‘Kushner is a young master. I honestly don't know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way.’ She read from her latest novel, and was in conversation about it with the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell. [1]: /on-our-shelves/book/9781910702673/mars-room
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In Life Lessons (Verso) Melissa Benn explores how we need to rethink education for life. As more and more of us live and work longer than ever before, a National Education Service should, like the NHS, be the framework that ensures a life-long...
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John Berger was one of the most various of writers and men: art critic, essayist, novelist, poet and much-missed friend of the shop. In *[A Writer of Our Time][1]* (Verso), Berger’s first full biographical study, Joshua Sperling traces Berger’s...
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Issue 146 of Granta is themed around the politics of feeling. Guest co-editor Devorah Baum interviews Peter Pomerantsev about his piece ‘Normalnost’, which explores how what once appeared the exclusive culture of post-Soviet Russia – the denial and...
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Katherine Angel’s Daddy Issues engages with what Lauren Elkin has called ‘that forgotten figure in feminism’s critique of patriarchy: the father’, examining the place of fathers in contemporary culture and asking how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, Angel argues, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook. Angel was in conversation with Sarah Moss, whose sixth novel Ghost Wall was longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2019.
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Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, An American Marriage (Oneworld) is a thrilling depiction of the American Dream in freefall. Barack Obama (no less) has called it ‘a moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young...
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Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s but smuggled out of Russia with the help of Andrey Sakharov in the early 1980s, established Grossman’s reputation as a 20th-century Tolstoy, in particular following Robert Chandler’s magnificent 1985 translation into English. Most readers, however, do not realize that it is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952 under the title For a Just Cause. Grossman’s original and preferred title was Stalingrad – a title now restored in Chandler’s new translation. The translator writes of it ‘To me, at least, Stalingrad now seems a greater novel than Life and Fate. It is more varied, more polyphonic, closer to Grossman’s immediate experience of the war … In our translation, we have restored much of the reality edited out from previous editions, reinstating several hundred passages – some of just three or four words, some of several pages – from the typescript. Our hope is that this may allow readers to recognize the full breadth, humour and emotional generosity of another of Grossman’s masterpieces.’ Robert Chandler was in conversation with writer and arts broadcaster David Herman.
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New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Rachel Cusk on Katherine Anne Porter, the Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. Now in its third year, the series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Rachel Cusk on Katherine Anne Porter, the Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. Now in its third year, the series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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Sheila Rowbotham’s many books, in history, politics, feminist theory and biography, have established her firmly at the forefront of both the women’s movement and of libertarian socialism. Perhaps the most personal of them though is Promise of a Dream, first published by Penguin in 2000 and now available again in a new edition from Verso. Frank, beautifully written, funny and moving, it is a coming of age story that takes us from Leeds to Oxford via the Sorbonne, and a stirring account of awakening political consciousness during the 1960s. Professor Rowbotham read from her work, and was in conversation with Lynne Segal, Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College and author, most recently, of Radical Happiness and Making Trouble.
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In her latest work Guestbook: Ghost Stories (Particular Books) Leanne Shapton, through a series of stories and vignettes, encounters the uncanny. Are our experiences of ghosts and the unworldly mere fantasies of the mind, or are they solid evidence of the supernatural? In a book designed, curated and illustrated by Shapton herself, she provides some, but by no means all of the answers. Toronto-born Shapton rose to literary prominence with her genre-defying Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, published by Bloomsbury in 2009. Her subsequent works, including Was She Pretty?, Swimming Studies and Toys Talking, have continued to baffle those readers and booksellers who like to know exactly which shelf to put a book on. She was in conversation with novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell.
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David Keenan’s For the Good Times (Faber), set in Belfast during The Troubles, pursues four friends battling for an identity in a neighbourhood harangued by violence and religious intensity. The book highlights the complexity of believing in a cause whilst indulging in the spoils of amoral days. Keenan’s second novel is an urgent and experimental follow up to This is Memorial Device (Faber). Keenan was in conversation with artist and musician, Bill Drummond.
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In her first book Dressed (Jonathan Cape), Shahidha Bari explores the hidden memories, meanings and ideas which are wrapped up in our clothes; themes of privacy, freedom, love and objectification are treated garment by garment. Bari was in conversation with Marina Warner, whose most recent book is Forms of Enchantment (Thames & Hudson).
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Listen back to an evening of readings and discussion from three outstanding poets, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris and Sarah Howe. ------ Mary Jean Chan's first full length collection Flèche is published by Faber this July. Her debut pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was selected as the 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, editor of Oxford Poetry and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. Will Harris is the author of the essay Mixed-Race Superman, published in the UK by Peninsula Press and in an expanded edition in the US by Melville House. His debut poetry collection, RENDANG, is forthcoming from Granta in 2020. Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. She is a Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London.
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To mark the publication of Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House (Dialogue Books), we hosted a round table discussion about LGBTQI+ literature and culture, and the contributions it might make to the current, somewhat torrid, political climate. Our participants were Niven Govinden, Amelia Abraham author of Queer Intentions (Picador) and Isabel Waidner, editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature and author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (both Dostoyevsky Wannabe).
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An evening of discussion and poetry readings with poets Kayo Chingonyi, Bhanu Kapil, Ilya Kaminsky and New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal. This lively event brings together eminent poets, critics and editors for a public panel discussion on diversity and the current state of poetry reviewing culture in the UK and the US, followed by poetry readings from Kayo Chingonyi and Bhanu Kapil. The panel event featured a transatlantic discussion of race and poetry reviewing with Ilya Kaminsky, Kayo Chingonyi and Parul Sehgal, chaired by Sandeep Parmar and introduced by Sarah Howe. This event also launched the 2019 report on ‘The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism’ compiled by Dave Coates and supported by Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics and the University of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing.
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Nicola Barker discusses T.S. Eliot, with reference to his appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The ‘Writers on Recordings’ event series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. The series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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In Full Surrogacy Now (Verso), Sophie Lewis takes on the surrogacy industry – worth over one billion dollars a year in the USA alone, and famously exploitative – with a unique and explosive argument: we need more surrogacy, not less! Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and centre, that we should ‘overthrow, in short, the notion of the “family”’. Donna Haraway has described the book as ‘the serious radical cry for full gestational justice I long for.’ Lewis was in conversation with Joanna Biggs, assistant editor at the LRB and author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work.
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A.L. Kennedy discusses a personal mixtape of early influences (Cummings, Burgess, Pinter, Feiffer), with reference to their appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. The series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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Mark Ford discusses John Ashbery, with reference to his appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. The series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd Poet Laureate of the USA. Her last collection, Wade in the Water, was nominated for a Forward Prize; her last-but-one, Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Eternity, her Selected Poems, gathers together the best of her four books. Hilton Als has called her ‘a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, to history.’ Jay Bernard’s eagerly-awaited first collection, Surge, draws a line between the New Cross Fire of 1981 and the fire at Grenfell Tower. Bernard’s pamphlet, The Red and Yellow Nothing, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The two poets read from and discussed their new collections.
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‘Every new baby is its own crisis.’ The ‘mother ship’ of Francesca Segal’s memoir is the neonatal intensive care unit where she was confined for fifty-six days after the premature birth of her twin girls. Mother Ship (Chatto and Windus) is at once a celebration of female friendship, a medical thriller and a love poem to Segal’s daughters, from the acclaimed author of The Innocents and The Awkward Age. Segal was in conversation with Olivia Laing, whose first novel, Crudo, was published last year.
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Novelist, journalist and translator Keith Gessen will be at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel A Terrible Country, published by Fitzcarraldo, which investigates Russia’s past and present through the eyes of a Russian-American who moves from New York to Moscow to care for his elderly grandmother. Man Booker Prize winner George Saunders describes A Terrible Country as ‘A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia’. Gessen was in conversation with Vadim Nikitin, Murmansk-born investigator of financial crime in what was once the USSR. Both Gessen and Nikitin are regular contributors to the LRB.
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Sally Rooney breathes new life into fiction. Her novels deal with ordinary life in all its unexpected ways. The Guardian said of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends: ‘It’s rare that a novel elicits such ferocious and unmitigated awe from just about everyone you know, whether male, female, or millennial’. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (published by Faber & Faber last September), was called ‘superb . . . a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness’ by Anne Enright. Olivia Laing has stated that ‘Rooney is the best young novelist – indeed one of the best novelists – I’ve read in years.’ On the occasion of the paperback publication of Normal People, Rooney was in conversation with Kishani Widyaratna, editor at Picador Books and contributing editor at The White Review.
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After Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962 Algiers became the de facto capital of anti-imperialism, anti-racism and world revolution, and a haven for visionaries and rebels such as Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Jomo Kenyatta and Eldridge Cleaver. Elaine Mokhtefi moved to Algiers during this extraordinary moment of hope, turmoil, dreams and disillusion, and her memoir of that time makes gripping reading. She was in conversation with Adam Shatz, a contributing editor at the LRB.
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In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch’s painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo in 2017, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a personal examination of the legacy of one of the world’s most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself. Knausgaard was in conversation with writer and journalist Charlotte Higgins.
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Jhumpa Lahiri, author of several highly acclaimed novels, described in her memoir In Other Words her passionate romance with the Italian language. She now continues that passionate engagement with the country and its literature as the editor of a new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She was in conversation about Italy, things Italian, and the art of the short story with Chris Power, whose debut collection of stories Mothers was published by Faber last year.
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One Lark, One Horse is Michael Hofmann’s first new collection of poetry for almost two decades, and more than justifies the wait; Stephen Romer writes that Hofmann has given us ‘a handle on our own helplessness, our fecklessness and unease’, and George Szirtes more succinctly has described his writing as ‘a poetry of nerves’. He read from the new collection, and talked about it with Declan Ryan, whose pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series was published in 2014.
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In Spring, the third instalment of her seasonal quartet, Ali Smith continues her unique investigation into our country’s past present and future, uniting Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times and a woman trapped in modern times by means of an extended riff on Shakespeare’s least read and most troubling play Pericles. The second book in the series Winter was described by Stephanie Merritt as ‘luminously beautiful.’ She read from its sequel, and discussed it with author and critic Erica Wagner.
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We hosted the shortlisted authors for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 in an evening of readings at the London Review Bookshop. Rewarding the most exciting and interesting literature published by small presses in the UK and Ireland, the Republic of Consciousness Prize has previously been awarded to John Keene (Counternarratives, Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Eley Williams (Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press). This year’s shortlist of six is: Daša Drndić for Doppelgänger, (Istros), Will Eaves for Murmur (CB Editions), Wendy Erskine for Sweet Home (Stinging Fly), Anthony Joseph for Kitch (Peepal Tree), Chris McCabe for Dedalus (Henningham Family Press) and Alex Pheby for Lucia (Galley Beggar). Sadly, Daša Drndić died last year, but was represented at the readings by her publisher and translator. See the full shortlist here. The readings were introduced by the prize’s founder, Neil Griffiths. The Republic of Consciousness Prize was set up in 2017, and is given yearly to a book published by a small press in the UK & Ireland. It is the only prize that awards money to both the publisher and the author of the winning title.
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Tessa Hadley's new novel Late in the Day (Jonathan Cape) addresses loss, friendship and lives unmoored. Hilary Mantel says, ‘The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest novel from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who ‘recruits admirers with every book’.' Hadley was in conversation with Alex Clark of the Guardian.
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In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining (Verso), novelist, journalist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB James Meek anatomises the fractured body of our nation as it approaches one of the most momentous junctures in its post-war history. In a series of frontline reports and interviews from every corner of the island, he talks to remainers, leavers, undecideds and don’t-cares. He was in conversation about his discoveries with Chris Bickerton, Reader in Modern European Politics at the University of Cambridge.
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Chloe Aridjis’s third novel Sea Monsters (Chatto), set in Mexico in the late 1980s, describes the elopement of Mexico City schoolgirl with a boy she barely knows, in search of freedom, independence and rather more oddly, a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped from a Soviet travelling circus. Aridjis was at the shop to read from and talk about her new book, described by Garth Greenwell as ‘mesmerizing, revelatory … a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world.’ Aridjis was in conversation with Juliet Jacques.
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Édouard Louis, one of France’s most acclaimed young writers, shot to international fame with his first novel, the semi-autobiographical End of Eddy. His latest book Who Killed My Father (Harvill Secker) revisits many of the same locations and subjects — poverty, homophobia and social exclusion — in non-fictional essay form, and is a powerful polemic exploring the bonds, often persistent even when apparently sundered, between parent and child. He discussed his work with Kerry Hudson, a novelist and journalist whose own work, notably in her first novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma and in her forthcoming non-fiction work Lowborn, also investigates with wit and candour the outer and inner lives of the often neglected working class.
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Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up to her award-winning 2014 debut Bright Travellers, is one of the most hotly-anticipated poetry collections of 2019. Its harrowing central sequence is a retelling of Greek myth, depicting Zeus as a serial rapist; other poems, including the Forward-shortlisted ‘Ruins’, engage with depression, female sexuality and early motherhood. Fiona was in conversation with Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under (Jonathan Cape), shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
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Things fall apart when empires crumble. Rediscovery of past glories is attempted again and again, until eventually those living in what was once the heart of the empire become reconciled with their fate. Many of the British are not yet reconciled. A major cause of Brexit was a stoked-up fear of immigrants, but Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (Biteback Publishing) argues that at its heart the rhetoric of Brexit was the playing out of older school curricula that had been dominated by empire. Brexit was led by people, almost all men, who mostly had fond memories of something that never was as great as they believed it to be. Co-authors Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson were in conversation. The conversation was chaired by writer and researcher Maya Goodfellow.
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First published by Irish independent Tramp Press, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self became a phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller. Now picked up on this side of the water by Hamish Hamilton, Pine’s debut collection of autobiographical essays is a poignant, radically honest and fiercely intelligent account of the pains and joys of living as a woman in the 21st Century. She was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell.
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John Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall, is a Kafkaesque nightmare whose richly-imagined world is very different from our own and yet all too familiar. Like 2012’s Capital (recently made into a TV series starring Toby Jones), Lanchester speaks to our contemporary preoccupations with an unnerving exactness. Keith Miller, reviewing Capital, noted that, ‘like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people; the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions’. Lanchester was in conversation with Daniel Soar, editor at the LRB.
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After the disintegration of the most significant relationship of his life, the demons Luke Turner has been battling since childhood are quick to return - depression and guilt surrounding his identity as a bisexual man, experiences of sexual abuse, and the religious upbringing that was the cause of so much confusion. It is among the trees of London's Epping Forest where he seeks refuge. But once a place of comfort, it now seems full of unexpected, elusive threats that trigger twisted reactions. Turner was in conversation with Olivia Laing (*Crudo*; *The Lonely City*).
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Simon Garfield – 'The schoolteacher who made the time fly, a one-man Blue Peter team for intelligent adults, a great British explainer’, according to the Observer – is never less, and usually much more, than entertaining. He was at the shop to talk about his latest book In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World, published by Canongate, and was in conversation with Andy Miller, presenter of Backlisted podcast and author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.
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Man Booker International-shortlisted novelist Mathias Enard, 'the most brazenly lapel-grabbing French author since Michel Houellebecq', returns with Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (tr. Charlotte Mandell), his fourth novel to appear in English after Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass. In 1506, Michelangelo – a young but already renowned sculptor – is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople. Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a thrilling novella about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another. Enard was in conversation with Elif Shafak.
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After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. In Everyday Madness (4th Estate) Appignanesi explores her own and society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives. Appignanesi was in conversation with Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman (Bloomsbury).
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In Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Time Bomb Danny Dorling presents the evidence that in 2018 the growth in UK income inequality may have finally peaked. Inequality began growing in the 1970s and the damaging repercussions may continue long after the peak is passed. There will be speculation and a little futurology. Danny was in conversation with Faiza Shaheen, director of the think tank CLASS and former Head of Inequality and Sustainable Development at Save the Children UK. Faiza recently explained that the rich, like viruses, also develop resistance, in their case to redistributive taxes. They use their wealth and power to carve out tax loopholes and lower tax rates. Their fortunes balloon. Inequality grows. In which case why should inequality peak now?
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Does the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin prevent it from genuinely understanding Russia? In Russia Without Putin (Verso), LRB contributor and Russophile Tony Wood argues that the core features of Putinism—a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society—are integral to the system set in place after the fall of Communism, a legacy of Yeltsinism rather than a resurgence of Soviet authoritarianism. Tony Wood was in conversation with James Meek, LRB Contributing Editor and author of Private Island (Verso).
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‘Like Björk and FKA Twigs, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together.’ The Guardian As a musician and artist, Jenny Hval is renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery, and in her debut novel, Paradise Rot (Verso) she presents a hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire, where the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. ‘As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician,’ says Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, ‘Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder.’ Hval was in conversation with Laura Snapes, deputy music editor at the Guardian.
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What is it about the particularities of painting that has allowed artists to explore, in a variety of ways and with a sometimes surprising degree of freedom, the vexed relations between the mundane and the celestial? In his latest book Heaven on Earth (Thames and Hudson) art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. Professor Clark will be in conversation with LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding.
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In Living With Buildings (Profile), Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions – through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way. Walking is Sinclair's defensive magic against illness and, as he moves, he observes his surroundings: stacked tower blocks and behemoth estates; halogen-lit glasshouse offices and humming hospitals; the blackened hull of a Spitalfields church and the floating mass of Le Corbusier's radiant city. Sinclair was in conversation with Patrick Wright, Professor of Literature and Visual & Material Culture, Kings College London.
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In Democracy Hacked, Martin Moore examines how our own fragile political systems are being gamed by authoritarian states, shadowy hackers and unaccountable social media firms. Is our democracy more vulnerable than we realise? Can these sinister think-fluencers be reined in, and what can we do to restabilise and secure our political sphere? Martin Moore was in conversation with David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge and author of, most recently, How Democracy Ends.
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Ben Marcus is one of contemporary American fiction’s most masterful writers. His new book of short stories, Notes from the Fog (Granta), is an emotional handbook to the baffling times we live in; a cabinet of brain-rearranging stories which are both horrifyingly strange and deeply touching. From parent/child relationships thrown off kilter to scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Marcus is the a chronicler of the present uncanny and the peculiar future. He was in discussion with Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press).
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Marina Warner’s new collection of essays, Forms of Enchantment (Thames and Hudson), collects her writing on art from 1988 to the present, including pieces on (among others) Louise Bourgeois, Joan Jonas and Paula Rego. She brings to artists and artworks the same anthropological and mythological approach which informs her previous books, including Stranger Magic, From Beast to Blonde and Monuments and Maidens, arguing that the social position filled by art and aesthetics is increasingly best understood in terms of magic. Warner was in conversation with Eleanor Birne, author and contributor to the London Review of Books.
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Richard Powers, one of America’s greatest novelists, often compared to Pynchon and Roth, read from and talked about his twelfth novel ‘The Overstory’ (Heinemann). Powers has always been remarkable for the seriousness with which he takes science and nature and their intersections with literature, and in ‘The Overstory’, which stretches in time and place from antebellum New York to the Pacific North West timber wars in the late 20th century, he provides us with an arboreal equivalent to Moby Dick, and a book that will permanently change – and for the better – the way you view the world around you. Powers was in conversation with the novelist Benjamin Markovits.
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In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In his new book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (Penguin) Slavoj Zizek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realisation of Marx's prediction that 'all that is solid melts into air.' With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? Zizek was in conversation with William Davies, author of Nervous States (Jonathan Cape).
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What is the meaning of time? Is there such a thing as the present? How can we reconcile our intuitions on the subject with the scientific overturnings of the 20th century? Who better to examine these questions than Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, Reality is Not What It Seems, and most recently, The Order of Time (Allen Lane). Dubbed ‘the poet of modern physics’ by John Banville, Rovelli's work combines expert knowledge with charm, wisdom and consolation. Carlo Rovelli was in conversation with Pedro Ferreira, author of The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity (Abacus).
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For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a narrow derision of religion in the name of an often very vaguely understood 'science'. In *Seven Types of Atheism* (Allen Lane) John Gray describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'. Gray was in conversation with author and essayist Adam Phillips.
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Out of My Head tells the highly personal and often surprisingly funny story of Tim Parks' quest to discover more about consciousness. It seems not a day goes by without a discussion on whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether the mind is unique to humans or spread out across the universe. Out of My Head aims to explore these ideas via metaphysical considerations and laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand and invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. Parks was in conversation with Laurence Scott, author of The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality (Heinemann).
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Hilton Als was at the shop to discuss his second book of essays White Girls (Penguin) with writer and journalist Bridget Minamore. In thirteen astonishing portraits New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als limns the vital subjects of race, sexuality and gender under the general heading of ‘White Girls’, a heading that is for him expansive enough to include Flannery O’Connor, Eminem, Truman Capote and Malcolm X. Reminiscent of James Baldwin at his best and most wicked, Hilton Als leaves no precious stone unturned nor any sacred cow unscathed in his mission to inform, enlighten and entertain. Read, listen, enjoy and learn.
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In ‘Trans-Europe Express’, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it. Hatherley was at the Bookshop in conversation with Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’ (Granta) and ‘Respectable: The Experience of Class’ (Penguin).
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The refugee crisis that hit the headlines in 2015 and 2016 has largely gone out of the news. Yet refugees continue to risk their lives on a daily basis in the attempt to reach Europe. Most of those who make it face extraordinary difficulties getting their claims for asylum accepted. This is one of the most serious humanitarian disasters to unfold in Europe in recent decades; yet the EU and its members have largely focused on deterring migrants. What can we learn from the refugees’ stories? And where do we stand, as Europeans whose governments seek to dissuade would-be refugees from leaving their homelands? Teresa Thornhill, author of Hara Hotel (Verso), and Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance (Picador), were joined in conversation by Marchu Girma of Women for Refugee Women and journalist Ziad Ghandour.
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Four of poetry's liveliest new voices – A.K. Blakemore, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Amy Key and Zaffar Kunial – joined us for an evening of readings hosted by Martha Sprackland of Offord Road Books.
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Novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy was at the shop to read from and talk about her latest book The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), the second part in her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy that began with Things I Don’t Want to Know. An exhilarating feminist manifesto for change, The Cost of Living is Levy’s conversation with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and reveals a writer at the height of her powers. She was in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, whose first novel Crudo was published by Picador in June.
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Over six winter days in upstate New York the Querry family, its members variously afflicted by painful divorce, bereavement and depression, wrestle with life’s fundamental questions. Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that can be learned, or a lucky accident of birth? Is reflection helpful to happiness or an obstacle to it? Profoundly moving and quietly humorous, Wood’s second novel is, as Rebecca Adams wrote in the Financial Times, ‘stubbornly true to life.’ Wood read from Upstate (Cape), and discussed it with the audience.
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Sophie Mackintosh’s powerful dystopian debut novel The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton) comes with some dazzling endorsements. ‘Eerie, electric, beautiful’, Daisy Johnson writes, ‘It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book’. Katherine Angel, with whom Sophie was in conversation at the Bookshop, described it as 'immensely assured, calmly devastating.’ Sophie Mackintosh was the 2016 winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in Granta and TANK magazines. Katherine Angel’s Unmastered was published by Penguin in 2012.
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From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? Crudo, the first novel from Olivia Laing, author of three critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. Laing was in conversation with Ali Smith.
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Sociologist Didier Eribon and novelist Édouard Louis were both born into conservative working-class families in provincial France. Oppressed both intellectually and sexually by racism and homophobia, they each escaped to academic life at the Sorbonne, where Eribon was for a while Louis’s tutor. Of Eribon’s ‘Returning to Reims’, first published in 2009 and now reissued by Allen Lane, Édouard Louis has written that it ‘marked a turning point in my writing life.’ Louis’s first book ‘The End of Eddy’ was published in English to huge acclaim by Harvill Secker in 2017, and his second, ‘History of Violence’ (also Harvill Secker) coincides with the reissue of Eribon’s classic memoir. The two authors read from their books and discussed their lives and works with festival moderator and curator Steven Gale.
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Joanna Walsh’s latest book Break.up (Tuskar Rock), a feminist revisionist travelogue, and romance for the digital age, explores the spaces between lovers, between thinking and doing, between fiction and memoir, as well as ‘the sheer fragility of experience and feeling’ (Colm Tóibín). Lara Feigel’s Free Woman (Bloomsbury), ‘the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read’ according to Deborah Levy, is a memoir in which Feigel experiments with sexual, intellectual and political freedom while reading and pursuing Doris Lessing. Walsh and Feigel read from their books, and talked about what writing can, can’t, should and shouldn’t do. The evening was chaired by Jennifer Hodgson, writer, critic and editor of Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories).
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Sheila Heti’s latest novel Motherhood (Harvill Secker) confronts, in the characteristic fiction cum essay style which she pioneered in How Should a Person Be? one of the fundamental dilemmas of early womanhood – to have children or not. She read from her work and discussed it with Sally Rooney, bestselling author of Conversations with Friends (Faber).
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One of the most acclaimed Polish writers of her generation, Olga Tokarczuk has won multiple prizes, most recently the Man Booker International for her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, and published, for the first time in English, by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Tokarczuk was in conversation with Man Booker shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy. This event was part of the Poland Market Focus programme at the London Book Fair, supported by the British Council.
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Hera Lindsay Bird’s debut poetry collection, the eponymous Hera Lindsay Bird (Penguin), became a cult bestseller in her native New Zealand, and led Carol Ann Duffy to describe her as ‘without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance’ – Duffy’s own selection from Bird’s work Pamper Me to Hell and Back has just been published by Smith Doorstop. Jack Underwood, senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, is the author of Happiness (Faber) and co-editor of the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives.
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In 1986, having just been diagnosed with HIV, the artist, film-maker and writer Derek Jarman decided to create a garden at his home on the bleak, beautiful coast at Dungeness. Modern Nature, his journal of a year in that garden, and a moving account of coming to terms with his own (and everything else’s) mortality, was first published in 1991, and now appears in a new edition from Vintage Classics. In her introduction Olivia Laing describes it as ‘the most beautiful and furious book of all time’. To celebrate the life and work of this unique and uniquely talented artist, almost a quarter century after his death, we were joined by Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, Philip Hoare, whose book Leviathan won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006, and film-maker Sarah Wood.
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Hilary Wainwright, co-editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow of the Transnational Institute, has been a significant figure on the left of the Labour Movement since the heyday of the GLC. Her latest book A New Politics from the Left (Polity) reflects on the recent reinvigoration of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and presents a grass-roots up vision of the future that is both profoundly radical and entirely practical. She was in conversation about her book, and the future of the left in Britain, with journalist, activist and author Melissa Benn, and Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate (OR Books).
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Journalist Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark when he interviewed her at her Tuscan home in 1990. It marked the beginning of a long and close friendship. In Appointment in Arezzo (Polygon) Taylor gives a warm and humorous account of that friendship, as well as reflecting on Spark's early life and on her complicated relationships with her Jewish roots, her native Scotland and with her son Robin. He was in conversation about his book, and about the life and work of Muriel Spark, with fellow enthusiast the novelist Ali Smith.
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‘I think to be a mother for five minutes is to know that the world is unjust, and that our hearts are impure.’ In her latest book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Faber) Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, regular LRB contributor and prominent cultural and literary theorist, investigates the question of what we ask of mothers, and what we hold them responsible for, often against all sense of reason. Drawing on literature, newspaper reports and psychoanalysis, Rose uncovers how our expectations of what mothers can and should do are damaging both to women, and the world. She was in conversation about her ideas with Devorah Baum, lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and author of Feeling Jewish and The Jewish Joke.
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Professor Terry Eagleton’s more than 40 books have explored, in consistently invigorating ways, the many and surprising intersections and confluences of literature, culture, ideology and belief. His latest book Radical Sacrifice (Yale) draws on the Bible, the Aeneid, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Henry James in a brilliant meditation on the concept of sacrifice, fundamentally reconfiguring it as a radical force within modern life and thought. Professor Eagleton was in conversation about his latest work with Daniel Soar, senior editor at the London Review of Books.
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Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin) has been attracting ecstatic reviews and endorsements. The poet Fanny Howe writes ‘The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love, is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection’. Kaveh Akbar was joined in reading and conversation by Richard Scott, whose debut collection Soho (Faber) paints an uncompromising portrait of love and shame in contemporary London.
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Timothy Morton was at the shop to discuss his latest work, Being Ecological (Pelican), which argues for a radically different approach to global warming. Rather than continually anticipating an extinction that is already upon us, being ecological and re-joining the biosphere can be liberating: if humans give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we can refocus on pleasure. The evening was chaired by Gareth Evans.
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Novelists Tessa Hadley and Ariana Harwicz discuss the dark art of fiction writing with critic Catherine Taylor. Ariana Harwicz is one of the leading lights of contemporary Argentinian literature, and *Die, My Love*, a gripping thriller set in France, is the first of her books to appear in English. This event marked the launch of Charco Press, a new publisher of outstanding contemporary Latin American literature appearing in English translation for the first time.
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Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, his final work and published in the year of his death in 1768, has been somewhat neglected of late in favour of his earlier The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Narrated by Yorick, one of the dramatis personae of the earlier book and a barely disguised self-portrait of Sterne himself, A Sentimental Journey is marked by the author’s trademark sharp wit, good humour and sense of irony. 250 years after its first publication, this landmark in the history of travel writing was discussed by the writer and traveller Iain Sinclair and the cartoonist Martin Rowson, author of a graphic novel adaptation of Tristram Shandy and illustrator of a new edition of A Sentimental Journey produced by Uniformbooks for the Laurence Sterne Trust, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. This event took place in partnership with the Laurence Sterne Trust.
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Whether railing against the clean eating movement or reviewing fast food restaurants for Vice, journalist, writer and 2013 Bake Off runner up Ruby Tandoh is a refreshing new voice in food writing. In her third book Eat Up! (Serpent’s Tail) Tandoh displays her characteristic straight-talking and self-criticism in a dazzling dissection of food fads, gourmet culture and fake science. She discussed food, sex, race, misogyny and other pressing issues with fellow journalist and writer Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff.
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American poet Danez Smith and Zambian-born British poet Kayo Chingonyi read from their latest collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Kumukanda (both Chatto and Windus). Two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry, their work investigates race and the frustrations of being expected to write only about race, as well as gender, politics, exile, longing, and everything else that poetry can encompass.
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What is distraction? Do we need more or less of it? And how might it be sensed, indulged, or explored in the essay and other kinds of writing? This event brought together three essayists - Adam Phillips, Anne Stillman, and Matthew Bevis - to consider the values and vagaries of distraction and its close relatives. The talk was run in conjunction with the Cambridge Humanities Review, an independent journal of long-form essays and reviews.
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To celebrate the publication of In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (Profile/Wellcome Collection), Susie Orbach was in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi. In this new updated edition, Orbach, who The New York Times called the 'most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud' explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatized case studies.
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In an age of increasing individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal argues that we have lost the art of radical happiness—the art of transformative, collective joy. Lynne Segal was at the shop to discuss Radical Happiness and the political and emotional potential of being together with writer and campaigner Melissa Benn.
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Carol Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester, reflects in her latest book Aurelia (Reaktion) on the very particular place that fairy tales hold in our culture and in the popular imagination. 'Aurelia is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects' writes the essayist Maggie Nelson. Mavor was in conversation with cultural critic, mythographer and historian of the folk tale Marina Warner.
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To celebrate the publication of the London Review Bookshop's beautiful limited edition of Peter Carey’s new novel 'A Long Way From Home', LRB publisher Nicholas Spice spoke to Carey about his deep family connections with cars, maps and stories, the question of race in Australia, and how all these things come together in the new work.
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Acclaimed children's writer, poet, educationalist and broadcaster Michael Rosen was at the shop to present his latest book So They Call You Pisher! (Verso), a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. Born into a Jewish Communist family in the East End of London in 1946, Rosen's early life was one of Party meetings, radical camping holidays, revolutionary hopes and disillusionments, and of political self-discovery. Warm and witty, his memoir gives a vivid account of growing up on the left in post-war Britain. Michael Rosen was in conversation with the medical writer and journalist Anne Karpf, author of, most recently, The School of Life's How to Age.
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Professor Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays Richard Sennett explores displacement in the metropolis through two vibrant historical moments: mid-nineteenth-century Paris, with its community of political exiles, a place where ‘you look in the mirror and see someone who is not yourself’; and Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed restrictions on ‘outsider’ groups – including prostitutes as well as Jews – had some surprising cultural consequences. Richard Sennett discussed these ideas with Sewell Chan, international news editor at the New York Times.
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Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last in the year of her death in 1992. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver Press) brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays together in one volume for the first time, with a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed. To celebrate the publication, Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of the acclaimed Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, discussed Lorde's work and legacy with Sarah Shin, co-founder of Silver Press.
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My House of Sky (Little Toller) tells the hitherto largely unknown story of J.A. Baker, author of nature writing classic The Peregrine. Working with an archive of materials that only came to light in 2013, Hetty Saunders provides an invaluable insight into the life of the reclusive naturalist, whose work has influenced writers and artists as diverse as Richard Mabey and Werner Herzog. To celebrate the publication of this new biography, Hetty Saunders was joined by Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks, and conservationist and editor of Baker's Diaries, John Fanshawe. The evening was chaired by Gareth Evans.
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The two parts of Mary Beard’s latest book were originally given as lectures in the LRB’s prestigious Winter Lecture series, and subsequently appeared as essays in the magazine itself. In each part of the book, Mary Beard deals with the history and politics of women in public life, and draws on personal experience, family history and an unrivalled knowledge of the Classics. On November 21st at 7pm Mary Beard was at St George’s Bloomsbury where she spoke about her latest book *Women & Power* and about her position as one of Britain’s most prominent public intellectuals. Mary Beard was joined by Professor Sarah Churchwell, professorial fellow in American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
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Marx’s Das Kapital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1883, exercised a profound influence on the history and politics of the 20th century, and, despite the expectations of many, continues to resonate through the 21st. In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (Profile), David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate School and the author of many highly acclaimed books on Marx and Marxism, explains in clear and concise language just what it is that makes Marx’s analysis so powerful, and what it still continues to offer us for the future. Harvey was in the bookshop in conversation with architectural critic and journalist Owen Hatherley, author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia and Landscapes of Communism.
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What do we think about when we think about football? Football is about so many things: memory, history, place, social class, gender, family identity, tribal identity, national identity, the nature of groups. It is essentially collaborative, even socialist, yet it exists in a sump of greed, corruption, capitalism and autocracy. At our event in the Bookshop on 2 November, Philosopher Simon Critchley attempted to make sense of it all with writer, critic and Norwich City fan Juliet Jacques.
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Following her Man Booker shortlisted Autumn, Ali Smith was at the shop to present its sequel Winter, (Hamish Hamilton), the second in a quartet of novels reflecting and embedded in the shifting seasons. A book full of truths for the post-truth era, Winter confronts and contrasts this bleakest of seasons with the evergreen qualities of love, memory, art and laughter. Smith was in conversation with Olivia Laing, writer and critic, and author of, most recently, The Lonely City (Canongate).
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Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life, and if any of us can even begin to understand this peculiar sort of city that we sort of call a sort of home, then it's with Sinclair that we begin. The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent. At our event at St. George's, Bloomsbury, he talked about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere.
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Twenty years after Kathy Acker's untimely death, Chris Kraus has provided the first full biography of the avant-garde artist, writer and counter-cultural heroine. Sheila Heti writes of After Kathy Acker (Allen Lane) 'This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there.' On the 25th September, Chris Kraus, the author of amongst many other books I Love Dick ('the most important book about men and women written in the last century.' according to Emily Gould in the Guardian) was joined in conversation about Acker by writer Juliet Jacques, the author of Trans: A Memoir (Verso).
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A very special evening at the Bookshop poet, playwright and translator Anne Carson. With Robert Currie and Ben Whishaw, Anne performed Lecture On The History Of Skywriting, a piece originally commissioned by Laurie Anderson for New York Live Ideas.
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Four of the most interesting poets working today read at the bookshop, to mark the publication of Cambridge Literary Review 10: Vahni Capildeo, Drew Milne, Luke Roberts and Eley Williams.
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'Americans don’t actually believe in death.' Siri Hustvedt and Lisa Appignanesi were in conversation in the bookshop. Hustvedt's latest collection of essays on art, sex and psychology, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, is published by Sceptre; Prospect magazine, reviewing the volume, called her 'a writer of blazing intelligence and curiosity'. Lisa Appignanesi's Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness was published in 2014.
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Horacio Castellanos Moya was in conversation at the Bookshop with Rory O'Bryen. Best known in the UK for novels such as Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador and The Dream of My Return, Castellanos Moya is a writer who, in the words of Natasha Wimmer, 'has turned anxiety into an art-form and an act of rebellion, and redeemed paranoia as a positive indicator of rot'. This event took place in association with Cervantes Institute London and the Embassy of El Salvador.
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Anna Minton, Reader in Architecture at the University of East London and author of Ground Control, asks, in her latest book Big Capital (Penguin), a very big question: 'Who is London For?' As the cost of housing spirals upwards, putting this most essential of all necessities beyond the financial reach of the majority of Londoners, Minton draws on original research to bring us the stories of those in the frontline of the struggle to keep a roof over their heads, to analyse how we got into this mess, and to suggest some practical policies for how we might start to get out of it. Anna was in conversation with Oliver Wainwright, the architecture and design critic for the Guardian.
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Philip Hoare, who won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009 for his magnificent Leviathan, continues his exploration of our watery world with RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (Fourth Estate). In searching the past and present for stories encapsulating the human fascination with the sea, Hoare mixes natural history with travel writing, autobiography and literary criticism to create an invigorating portrait of the oceans, and of their often fatal allure. He was in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, The Trip to Echo Spring and To the River.
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PalFest, The Palestinian Festival of Literature, which brings writers from around the world to Palestine to read to and meet their readers, celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This Is Not a Border is an anthology of essays, poems and stories from some of those writers and artists as they respond to their experiences at this unique festival. Heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and courage in the most desperate of situations. To celebrate the launch of this remarkable anthology, we were joined for an evening of readings and discussion by its editor Ahdaf Soueif, contributors Jeremy Harding and Rachel Holmes, and Bashir Abu-Manneh, lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Kent.
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Andrew O’Hagan’s latest book The Secret Life brings together three of his finest long essays, each of them investigating the strange, vexed intersections and conflicts between the virtual and the real, and what they mean for the nature and construction of identity in the modern world. ‘Ghosting’ tells the story of O’Hagan’s difficult collaboration with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; in ‘The Invention of Ronald Pinn’ he uses the real identity of a deceased young man to create an entirely spurious one that exists only in cyberspace, and ‘The Satoshi Affair’ explores the strange history of Craig Wright, the man who may or may not be the inventor of Bitcoin. As well as being ‘The best essayist of his generation’ (New York Times), O’Hagan is an acclaimed novelist and contributing editor at the LRB. He was in conversation about his latest work with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Gallery and author of Ways of Curating.
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Ali Smith was at the shop to read from and talk about her (now Booker nominated!) novel Autumn, an unconventional love story that plays with boundaries of time and space and is the first in a quartet of seasons. Smith won the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction in 2015 for How to Be Both and has been short-listed for the Man Booker prize on several occasions. Smith was in conversation with The Guardian journalist Alex Clark.
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In his latest book In Writing (Hamish Hamilton) psychoanalyst and regular LRB contributor Adam Phillips celebrates the art of close reading and asks what it is to defend literature in a world that is increasingly devaluing language. Through a vivid series of readings of writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald, Phillips draws on his work as a practicing psychoanalyst to demonstrate, in his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to, and of, each other. He was joined in conversation by Dr Devorah Baum, Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is the co-director of the feature film The New Man (2016) and author of two forthcoming books, Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke (Profile).
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Paul Beatty, winner of 2016's Man Booker Prize, will be in conversation with Lola Okolosie, Guardian journalist and editor-at-large of Media Diversified. The Sellout (Oneworld) was the first novel by a US author to win the Booker; Beatty's other novels, being released in new paperback editions, are The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff and Slumberland.
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Writer, filmmaker, architectural critic and essayist Jonathan Meades was in conversation with his publisher, John Mitchinson (Unbound Books) to discuss his career in literature, criticism and journalism. Meades’ literary works include novels Filthy English (1984) and Pompey (1993) and autobiography An Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014). His most recent work, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (2017), is his first cookbook.
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To celebrate the publication of Vanishing Points, a new showcase of writing from El Salvador, Tania Pleitez Vela and Claudia Castro Luna were at the shop to discuss the anthology, which aims to challenge the traditional concepts of nationality and the idea of a 'national literature'. The anthology includes stories from the likes of Horacio Castellanos Moya, Jacinta Escudos, Miguel Huezo Mixco, Rafael Menjívar Ochoa and Ana Escoto, showcasing authors that reside in El Salvador as well as authors that have emigrated to the United States, Mexico, Argentina and Europe. Thus, Vanishing Points offers both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking readers an array of linguistic, thematic and aesthetic contrasts. This is Kalina’s second volume––the first one was dedicated to poetry and published in 2014––and also a first of its kind: a bridge and an opportunity for Salvadoran writers to establish a dialogue with the literary community at large. This event took place with the support of the Embassy of El Salvador.
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Laurent Binet, who won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman for his first novel HHhH, was at the shop to read from and discuss his second, The 7th Function of Language (Harvill Secker). The new book is a global conspiracy thriller encompassing the death of Roland Barthes, semiotic theory and the sex life of Michel Foucault. 'It had me rolling on the floor of the Paris Metro when I read it', wrote Alex Preston in the Observer. Binet was in conversation with Christopher Tayler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books.
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In Future Sex, Witt captures the experiences of going to bars alone, online dating, and hooking up with strangers. After moving to San Francisco, she decides to say yes to everything and to find her own path. From public health clinics to cafe conversations about 'coregasms', she observes the subcultures she encounters with a wry sense of humour, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality - open, forgiving, and unafraid. Witt spoke at the Bookshop in conversation with Katherine Angel.
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Patricia Lockwood was at the shop to read from her new memoir, Priestdaddy (Penguin), a hilarious account of growing up with a Catholic priest for a father, and her 2013 collection of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. It was the first UK reading from one of the liveliest poets writing at the moment, whose other occupations include trolling the Paris Review on Twitter. Patricia was in conversation with Dawn Foster, whose most recent book, Lean Out, was published last year by Repeater Books.
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Ocean Vuong was in conversation with Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers (Faber and Faber), and read from his eagerly-awaited first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Cape Poetry). Vuong’s work has won plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic: in the New Yorker, Daniel Wenger wrote that ‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move’. In 2016, Vuong was awarded the Whiting Award.
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On the publication of the first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short fiction,The Debutante and Other Stories (Silver Press) and the republication of her memoir Down Below in this centenary year of her birth, cultural critic Marina Warner and novelist Chloe Aridjis discussed Carrington's absurd, funny and provocative fiction and paintings. Carrington first started to paint and draw among Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s, escaped the war via New York to Mexico City where she met Diego Riviera, Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz and became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement. Warner, who came to know Carrington in the 1980s in New York, and Aridjis, Carrington's friend from Mexico City, discussed the life and legacy of a singular artist and writer with Silver Press publishers Joanna Biggs and Alice Spawls.
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Though he was admired by some of the liveliest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or celebrated in the way that Eliot, Beckett or Joyce have been. Thomas Dilworth's biography - the first full biography of Jones, and thirty years in the making - aims to redress this oversight, reframing the poet, visual artist and essayist as a true genius and the great lost Modernist. Thomas Dilworth discussed Jones's life and work with writer and journalist Rachel Cooke, with readings from the book's editor and publisher, poet Robin Robertson.
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In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond, looking for those poems which see most clearly, which speak most vividly, and which have meant the most to them as readers and writers. Don and Nick will be at the shop to read from and discuss this essential new work.
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Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls? Well, no, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne Cordelia Fine argues, it’s a lot more complicated than that. She spoke about her latest book Testosterone Rex (Icon Books), an examination of the vexed and fascinating interplay between nature and nurture in the construction of gender, with writer, broadcaster and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez.
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Paul Auster discussed his first novel in seven years, the extraordinary 4 3 2 1 (Faber) in which a single individual, born in 1947 in Newark, follows four divergent paths through the life and history of mid-twentieth-century America. Auster’s work, in prose, poetry, memoir and film, has often explored multiple and shifting identities, and in 4 3 2 1 - whose protagonist, like Auster himself, is part of the Baby-Boomer generation - he continues his uniquely powerful exploration of selfhood, time and the relationship between fiction and reality. Auster was in conversation with author and journalist Alex Preston.
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For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and featured rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, New York and Queen Mary University of London.
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For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and featured rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, New York and Queen Mary University of London.
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For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and features rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.
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Gwendoline Riley was at the bookshop to talk about her new novel, First Love, an exploration of marriage as battleground. Anne Enright described her previous novel, Opposed Positions, as ‘more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart’; Stuart Kelly called it ‘a continual joy’. Riley was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin 2012); the discussion was chaired by Joanna Biggs, author of All Day Long (Profile 2015) and editor at the London Review of Books.
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Money makes the world go round: but what is it really? And how is it produced? Above all, who controls its production, and in whose interests? Money is never a neutral medium of exchange. Political economist Ann Pettifor and journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan discuss history’s most misunderstood invention: the money system - a system that is dominated by men. While women are largely responsible for managing household budgets, they have on the whole been excluded from managing the nation’s financial system and its budgets. At present the networks that dominate the financial sector are overwhelmingly male, and often shockingly sexist. Their dismissive attitude towards half the population and their enjoyment of an unequal distribution of knowledge are not coincidental. Feminism is uniquely well-placed to ask: how can democracies can reclaim control over money production? Can we subordinate the out-of-control finance sector to the interests of society and the ecosystem? The creation and management of society’s money does not currently loom large in contemporary feminism. But it is a feminist issue, and is central to the liberation of women from the servitude of unpaid work. Ann Pettifor's latest book The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers is published by Verso Books.
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Édouard Louis was born into poverty in northern France, as Eddy Belleguele, in 1992. His autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, newly translated into English as The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker), draws an unsparing portrait of the violence, alcoholism, racism and homophobia of the milieu into which he was born, and quickly became a sensational bestseller both in France and throughout Europe. Louis was at the shop to discuss his work with the novelist Tash Aw.
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Grand Hotel Abyss is a majestic group biography exploring who the Frankfurt School were and why they matter today. Combining biography, philosophy and storytelling, Jeffries explores how the Frankfurt thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. In conversation with Sarah Bakewell, the author of the critically acclaimed At the Existentialist Café, portraying the lives and ideas of the existentialists, Jeffries discussed how the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society, and how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.
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'Never has the story been told so well,' said the New York Review of Books of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason, a history of Western philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. In The Dream of Enlightenment he continues the story with the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Gottlieb was in conversation with Julian Baggini, author of numerous works on philosophy, including The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 Other Thought Experiments and his most recent, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will (Granta), for an evening of conversation about the history of philosophy, and how to write about it for a popular audience.
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Roger Hardy worked for more than 20 years as a Middle East analyst with the BBC World Service. In his new book, The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East, he argues that the causes of the region’s troubled present are rooted in the era of Western colonial domination. Hardy discussed his book with Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Hazem Kandil, lecturer in political sociology at Cambridge, and BBC broadcast journalist Robin Lustig.
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Icon of radical American Letters Eileen Myles has produced more than 20 volumes of fiction, memoir and poetry over the past three decades, a body of work that led the novelist Dennis Cooper to describe them as 'one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature.' To mark the publication of their novel Chelsea Girls in paperback and a new collection of poetry I Must Be Living Twice (Serpents Tail and Tuskar Rock respectively) Eileen Myles was at the shop to read from and discuss their work with Olivia Laing, author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and most recently The Lonely City.
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In this podcast, Ruth Padel reads from and discusses her new long poem, 'Tidings', a Christmas tale featuring a little girl, a homeless man and a fox, that takes us on a journey from Australia to London and New York via Rome and Bethlehem, She is in conversation with fellow poet Sarah Howe.
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Renowned arabist and regular LRB contributor Robert Irwin was in the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel 'Wonders Will Never Cease' (Dedalus), his return to fiction after a break of 17 years. Set during the Wars of the Roses, the book promises to be a mind-altering blend of fantasy, fact and fiction, encompassing the Swordsman’s Pentacle, the Draug, the Miraculous Cauldron, the Curse of the Roasted Goose, the Talking Head and the Museum of Skulls. In this podcast, listen to Irwin in conversation with Nicholas Lezard, whose weekly ‘Choice’ column in the Saturday Guardian has made him one of Britain’s most influential book reviewers.
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The revolutionary Leveller movement grew out of the explosive tumult of the 1640s and the battlefields of the English Civil Wars. They were central figures in those turbulent years which resulted in the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the House of Lords, and brought Britain to the edge of a radical republican government. From the streets of London and the clattering printers’ workshops that stoked the uprising to the rank and file of the New Model Army and the furious Putney debates, at which the Levellers argued with Oliver Cromwell about the fate of English democracy, the Levellers' story demonstrates the revolutionary potential of ordinary people, and provides hope and inspiration for the future. In this podcast listen to historian and activist John Rees discuss his new book 'The Levellers' Revolution' with Diane Purkiss, Professor of English at Keble College, Oxford and author of 'The People’s History of the English Civil War' and 'Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War'.
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Listen to Cockburn discuss his latest book 'The Age of Jihad' (Verso) with 'Guardian' journalist Rachel Shabi, author of 'Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands'. Award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn’s chronicles of the collapse of Syria/Iraq and the devastating role of the West have become essential reading for anyone interested in the dominant conflict of our time – the Sunni-Shia war – and in the birth of ISIS. So prescient have his analyses of the region been that last year the judges of the British Journalism Awards advised the UK government to ‘consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead.’
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Poet, essayist, novelist, broadcaster, artist and film-maker John Berger celebrates his 90th birthday this month. To mark the occasion we have declared him our Author of the Month for November. John Berger’s work, across a range of media, has been transforming the way we look at art, life and everything else, from Ways of Seeing in 1972 to the present day. In our latest podcast in collaboration with Verso, Gareth Evans, Tom Overton, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Mike Dibb discuss Berger's art and politics and its continuing relevance.
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Sheila Rowbotham was one of the leading figures behind the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain and is one of the best-loved feminists of our times. In conversation with Melissa Benn, Rowbotham discussed her latest book 'Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States' and its transatlantic story of six radical pioneers, showing how rebellious ideas were formed and travelled across the Atlantic.
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Ben Lerner and Andrea Brady in conversation at the London Review Bookshop. Lerner is a novelist, poet and critic, whose most recent collection is No Art, and whose controversial critical essay The Hatred of Poetry began as a piece in the LRB. Brady is a professor, poet and editor at Barque Press, whose most recent book is Mutability: Scripts for Infancy, published by University of Chicago Press.
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From the tyranny of exercise to the crisis of policing, via the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), Mark Greif’s Against Everything is an essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism and a vital scrutiny of the contradictions arising between our desires and the excuses we make. In a wide-ranging conversation for the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop, Mark Greif and Brian Dillon discuss modes of critique and cultural forms, and the role of the intellectual in stripping away the veil of everyday life.
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In the aftermath of the failed military coup, two of Turkey’s most prominent young writers discuss Turkey, its past, present and future. Ece Temelkuran’s 'Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy' is published by Zed Books, and Kaya Genç’s 'Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey' is newly published by I.B. Tauris. The chair for this evening was Daniel Trilling, editor of the New Humanist and author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right.
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Listen to this podcast of poetry 'up close' with 'Prac Crit' founding editor and winner of the T.S Eliot Prize, Sarah Howe. Four recently featured poets – Vahni Capildeo, Mark Waldron, R.A. Villanueva and Maureen McLane – read and discuss their latest work.
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Listen to Sarah Moss reading from and talking about her fifth novel 'The Tidal Zone' (Granta) an exploration of parental love, illness and recovery. She was in conversation with Max Porter, 'Granta' editor and author of 'Grief is a Thing With Feathers' (Faber and Faber), winner of the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize.
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Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an 'age of riots' as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. In this podcast listen to award-winning poet and theorist Joshua Clover and writer and philosopher Nina Power unpick a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, how can future antagonists be guided in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon?
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Curator Gareth Evans and scholar Esther Leslie discussed the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, published in *[The Storyteller][1]* (Verso) in English translation for the first time. The actor Flossie Draper, Walter Benjamin’s great-grand-daughter, gave readings from the book. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore, in an intriguingly different way, many of the themes that are familiar from Benjamin's philosophical work. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of Paul Klee. *The Storyteller* has been translated and edited by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.
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The flaneur – an almost invariably male idler dawdling through city streets with no apparent purpose in mind – is familiar to us from the works of Baudelaire, Benjamin and Edmund White. In a glorious blend of memoir, cultural history and psychogeography, Lauren Elkin investigates the little-considered female equivalent, from George Sand to Agnes Varda and Sophie Calle, leading us through the streets of London, Tokyo, Venice, New York and, of course, Paris. Lauren Elkin, a contributing editor at the White Review, discussed the phenomenon of the flaneuse, and her own walking life with Brian Dillon.
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In this podcast George Monbiot and John Lanchester discuss Monbiot’s latest book 'How Did We Get into this Mess?' (Verso) and assess the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do. One of the most vocal and eloquent critics of the current consensus, Monbiot makes a persuasive case for change in our everyday lives, our politics and economics, the ways we treat each other and the natural world.
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In his latest book White Sands (Canongate) inveterate traveller, novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer investigates, through ten journeys to places as distant from one another as Mexico, Beijing, French Polynesia and LA, the mystery of why we travel. Geoff Dyer's unique blend of humour and intellectual heft was on dazzling display in this evening of conversation with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery.
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Psychoanalyst Darian Leader was at the shop to present his latest book 'Hands: What We Do with Them and Why' (Hamish Hamilton), in conversation with the novelist and essayist Tom McCarthy. Hands, in Leader's analysis, both as things in themselves and as metaphors, figures of speech and elements in folklore, are a fundamental constituent of humanity's distinctive nature.
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In the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop, Esther Leslie, Marina Warner and Michael Rosen join Gareth Evans to discuss Walter Benjamin's experimentation with form and media, his concept of storytelling and the communicability of experience, and the themes that run throughout Benjamin’s creative and critical writing.
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In this podcast, listen to Maggie Nelson in conversation with author Olivia Laing in the bookshop.
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Gabriel Josipovici came to the bookshop to discuss his new book, Hamlet Fold on Fold, a scene-by-scene examination of Hamlet resisting grand interpretative narratives in preference for focusing on our physical experience of watching, reading and...
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In this podcast listen to a discussion chaired by Tariq Ali, celebrating the life and work of historian and sociologist Benedict Anderson, who died in December last year shortly after completing his memoir, 'A Life Beyond Boundaries' (Verso). Tariq Ali is in conversation with Laleh Khalili and T.J. Clark. Interdisciplinary and always innovative, Anderson’s many books, most notably 'Imagined Communities', brought about a fundamental shift in the way we think about the history of nationalism, nationhood and globalisation.
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What does it mean to be middle class or working class? How does class affect us? Lynsey Hanley and Dawn Foster came to the bookshop to discuss Hanley's latest book, *Respectable* (Allen Lane), which argues that class remains resolutely with us, as strongly as it did fifty years ago, and with it the idea of aspiration, of social mobility, which received wisdom tells us is an unequivocally positive phenomenon, for individuals and for society as a whole.
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Seymour Hersh has been a towering presence in American journalism for nearly 50 years. In 1970 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his articles exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In 2015 his 10,000 word article 'The Killing of Osama Bin Laden' proved so popular that it crashed the London Review of Books's website. In between, he has written articles on Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel and countless other topics, their common thread being their refusal to take government explanations and denials at face value. Hersh talked about his work with LRB contributing editor Adam Shatz, and in particular about his new book The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (Verso).
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Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard in discussion about her latest book, *[SPQR][1]* (Profile), in our special off-site event at Senate House. Natalie Haynes wrote in the *Observer* of Beard, 'She is never less than a vastly engaging tour guide around some of the best-known parts of the Roman story, debunking its myths with ease.' This podcast is her in conversation with James Davidson, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick University and a regular contributor to the *LRB*.
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Rupert Shortt in discussion with Dr Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, on Shortt's new book *God is No Thing*. Even though parts of the Western world now appear almost totally secularised, Christianity remains the most potent worldview on earth alongside Islam. In *God is No Thing* Rupert Shortt argues that Christianity is a much more coherent, progressive body of belief — philosophically, scientifically and culturally — than often supposed by its critics. Alert to the menace posed by religious fundamentalism, as well as to secularist blind spots, he shows how a self-critical faith is of huge consequence to wider human flourishing and offers an erudite and eloquent argument for the importance of Christian values in modern life. Rupert Shortt is religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a former Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. His books include *God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation*, *Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack*, and *Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop*.
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James Macdonald Lockhart's first book *[Raptor][1]*, (HarperCollins) documents a series of journeys in search of each of Britain's breeding birds of prey, from Scotland's mighty eagles to the tiny merlin. In this podcast Lockhart, an associate editor of and regular contributor to *Archipelago* magazine, is in conversation about this exciting project with [Tim Dee][2], BBC Radio producer, dedicated birdwatcher and author of *[The Running Sky][3]* and *[Four Fields][4]*. [1]: /on-our-shelves/book/9780007459872/raptor-a-journey-through-birds [2]: /profiles/tim-dee [3]: /on-our-shelves/book/9780099516491/running-sky-a-bird-watching-life [4]: /on-our-shelves/book/9780099541370/four-fields
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When asked about the meaning of the late string quartets Beethoven famously remarked 'Oh those are not for you, they are for a later age.' Has that later age arrived? In a talk illustrated by musical excerpts both recorded and live, the leader of the Takács Quartet Edward Dusinberre discusses the significance and challenge of these extraordinary pieces of music with editor-in-chief of *Gramophone* James Jolly. **Presented in association with *Gramophone* and EFG International.**
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In Lean Out (Repeater Books) writer, journalist and LRB contributor Dawn Foster takes issue with the corporate-style feminism outlined in Sheryl Sandberg's influential bestseller Lean In. Does this trickle-down feminism offer any material gain for women collectively, or is it merely window-dressing PR for the corporations who caused the financial crash? She concludes that leaning out of the corporate model is a more effective way of securing change than leaning in. Foster was joined by Zoe Williams, Guardian journalist and author of Get It Together (Cornerstone).
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Gregor Hens discussed his new book Nicotine with Will Self. Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a life of addiction, from the epiphany of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behaviours. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, the validity of hypnosis, and the most insignificant city in the United States, where he lived for far too long. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of the dependency and offers a brilliant disquisition on the psychopathology of addiction.
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Marina Warner wears many hats, as cultural critic, mythographer, historian and essayist, but one of her best-fitting hats is her writer of short fiction hat. Her latest volume is *Fly Away Home* (Salt). Helen Simpson may have fewer hats, but is nonetheless one of the finest writers of short stories in the language. Her latest collection is Cockfosters* (Cape). Marina Warner and Helen Simpson came to the shop and read from and talked about their work. In this podcast they debate the status of short fiction in the literary canon.
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A new novel from Edna O'Brien is without question a major literary event, and *The Little Red Chairs* (Faber) is her first for a decade. A hunted war criminal from the Balkans takes refuge in an isolated village on Ireland's West coast, masquerading as a faith healer, and exercises a fatal attraction over its inhabitants. At this event in the Bookshop, O'Brien talked about the novel with *LRB* mainstay Andrew O'Hagan.
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Ten years after the publication of his highly acclaimed and prize-winning 1599 James Shapiro moves the Shakespeare story on to 1606, the year of *King Lear*, *Macbeth* and *Antony and Cleopatra*. At the shop talking about *1606* (Faber) with Shapiro was Charles Nicholl, author of *The Reckoning*, *The Lodger* and *Traces Remain*.
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Claire-Louise Bennett and Joanna Walsh met at the London Review Bookshop to read from and discuss their new books, Pond (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Hotel (Bloomsbury). The discussion was chaired by Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin).
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Elena Ferrante's translator, Ann Goldstein, was joined by Joanna Biggs, Lisa Appignanesi and Alex Clark to discuss the appeal and mystery of the enigmatic Italian author.
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Dino Joannides, consummate food fanatic, bon viveur and author chaired a panel of writers and chefs to discuss the question: 'Is there such a thing as Italian cuisine?'. On the panel was food educator and journalist Katie Parla, historian Professor John Dickie and celebrated chef Francesco Mazzei.
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In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a Guardian column. Interweaving the personal with the political, Trans: A Memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics in a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. It is also a moving and involving portrait of an artist, tracing Jacques’s path to becoming a writer, via her explorations of film, music and art. With award-winning novelist and writer Chloe Aridjis, Jacques discussed the cruxes of writing and identity and the problems of performance and confessional writing.
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Seventy-five years ago, on 26 September 1940, perhaps the 20th century's greatest cultural critic died in a small town on the Spanish border as he attempted to leave France, escaping the Nazis. This summer, writer and commentator Brian Dillon imagined a retracing of Benjamin's steps, tracking his life's work to that terminus in the Pyrenees. Scholar and Benjamin biographer Esther Leslie has recently edited and translated Benjamin's *On Photography* (Reaktion Books) and translated his *Archive* (Verso Books). Together they considered the extraordinary range, achievement and reach of this remarkable and hugely influential writer. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans.
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Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University and, according to Simon Jenkins 'geographer royal by appointment to the left' was at the shop to present a new edition of his *Inequality and the 1%* (Verso), in conversation with Dawn Foster. 'Dorling asks questions about inequality that fast become unswervable,' wrote Zoë Williams in the *Guardian*. 'Can we afford the superrich? Can society prosper? Can we realize our potential?'
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Alexandra Harris, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool University, was at the shop to talk about her latest book Weatherland (Thames and Hudson), a study of the complex relationship between English artists and writers and the infamous British weather, from Chaucer in the 14th century to John Piper in the 20th. Harris was in conversation with art historian and biographer Frances Spalding.
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Three of the best new poets in years were reading in the Bookshop. Helen Mort’s *[Division Street][1]* (Chatto) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (almost unheard of for a debut collection) and the Costa Prize; Liz Berry’s *[Black Country][2]* (Chatto) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; and Sarah Howe’s just-released *[Loop of Jade][3]* (Chatto) is shortlisted for the same award. United by a strong sense of place, any one of them on their own would be worth turning out for – on a rare triple-bill, presenting an evening of poetry and conversation, they’re unmissable.
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Steven Nightingale's Granada: The Light of Andalucía (Nicholas Brealey) is a rhapsodic celebration of one of Spain's most beautiful and fascinating cities, and his adoptive home. From the extraordinary flourishing of Granada under the Moors, when it became the effective cultural and philosophical capital of the known world, through the horrific ethnic cleansing of the 15th and 16th centuries, to the tragedy of Civil War and one of the city's most famous sons Federico GarcÍa Lorca in the 20th century, Nightingale's account is as captivating and digressive as the tangled streets of El Albayzín itself. Steven Nightingale was in conversation with the historian of Arabic literature Robert Irwin, whose study of Granada's most famous landmark, The Alhambra, is published by Profile.
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Israeli author Etgar Keret has been described by Clive James as 'one of the most important writers alive', by Salman Rushdie as 'A brilliant writer ...The voice of the next generation' and by the New York Times as 'A genius.' Keret is mainly celebrated for his short – often very short – stories, but he has also written graphic novels, and screenplays for film and television. Etgar Keret joined us at the shop to read from and talk about his latest book The Seven Good Years (Granta), a darkly absurd memoir of the author's recent past that ruminates on everything from his three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind 'Angry Birds', and whose anti-hero is a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to pursue Keret to, and possibly beyond, the grave. He was in conversation with the novelist Naomi Alderman, whose most recent novel The Liars' Gospel is published by Penguin.
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Two very different books, Iain Sinclair’s Black Apples of Gower and Brian Catling’s The Vorrh share a measure of common ground: the Cave of Origin (in which all narratives fester and cook). The two writers discuss and read from their work.
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Over the past two decades Carcanet’s New Poetries anthologies have been discovering the best new poets in English, and have provided readers with their first taste of authors such as Sophie Hannah, Patrick McGuinness, David Morley and Sinéad Morrissey. To celebrate the publication of New Poetries VI we hosted an evening of readings by some of the featured poets; Jee Leong Koh, Rebecca Watts, Joey Connolly, Vahni Capildeo and (our very own) John Clegg.
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Alice in Wonderland is 150 years old this year. To celebrate her anniversary we have invited Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Magdalen College, to talk about his latest book The Story of Alice (Harvill Secker), a triple biography of Caroll's Alice books, of their subject Alice Liddell, and their creator Charles Dodgson. Douglas-Fairhurst will be in conversation with Vanessa Tait, author of The Looking Glass House (Atlantic), and the great grand-daughter of Alice Liddell.
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In On Elizabeth Bishop novelist and essayist Colm Tóibín provides a deeply personal meditation on one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and one who has had a powerful influence on his own work. ‘Above all,’ writes Saskia Hamilton, ‘he honours Bishop’s exact ways with language, and his sifting of what is said from what is unsaid in her poetry illuminates his own watchful and patient art as a novelist.’ Tóibín joined us at the shop to talk about Elizabeth Bishop with the poet and critic Ruth Padel whose most recent collection, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, was published by Chatto in 2014.
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'The more conscious a work of art is of its audience, the more curated it becomes.'‘Curation’ has become a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows in a way that can eclipse the contributions of individual artists. At the same time, curatorial-studies programs continue to grow, and businesses are adopting curation as a means of adding value to content. David Balzer joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with Zoe Pilger, author of Eat My Heart Out (Serpent's Tail). The pair discussed Balzer's new book, Curationism (Pluto Press), and questioned: what is a curator, exactly?
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Alberto Manguel is a Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic, but most of all, he is a reader. In his latest book Curiosity (Yale) Manguel guides us through the history of questioning using the authors he has particularly valued in his own reading life – among them Aquinas, Montaigne, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson and, pre-eminently, Dante. Alberto Manguel joined us at the Bookshop to speak about his book, and about the pleasures, dangers and rewards of reading, with John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.
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The May General Election looks likely to be the closest in a generation. But what happens after it? The gap between the two main parties is narrower than ever, and their share of the vote in the election is set to reach a new low. What hope is there that in these conditions, a progressive agenda will re-emerge in British political life? What forces – economic, social, environmental – are likely to shape the landscape of British politics over the next five years, or the next twenty? Can the centre hold, or will we see a fragmentation and radicalisation of politics? Aaron Bastani, founder of Novaramedia.com, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at University of East London and author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in the Age of Individualism and Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist and author of Get it Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics joinined Paul Myerscough of the London Review of Books to discuss the future of British politics.
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Elena Poniatowska’s work, in both fiction and journalism, has always been devoted to giving a voice to the voiceless, the disenfranchised and the oppressed. Her most famous book La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) dealt with the massacre of up to 300 protesters in Mexico City in 1968. Others of her books have been recreations of the lives of ordinary Mexicans, such as the victims of the 1985 earthquake, and of well-known artists and radicals such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti. Her most recent novel Leonora, recently translated for Serpent’s Tail by Amanda Hopkinson, is based on the life of the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington who sought and found refuge in Mexico, the country where she created most of her finest work and where she died in 2011. Poniatowska will be appearing at the shop to talk about her career with the poet and publisher Michael Schmidt.
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Writer and film-maker Jonathan Meades joined us at the Bookshop to present and discuss *Pedigree Mongrel* (Test Centre), a new album composed of specially-recorded readings from his books *Pompey* (1993), *Museum Without Walls* (2012) and *An Encyclopaedia of Myself* (2014). Combined with the distinctive soundscapes of Mordant Music, *Pedigree Mongrel* is both a unique retrospective of Meades’s fictional and essayistic writings, and a new and significant standalone work.
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Short stories don't have to be like short stories. They can be experiences, visitations, slices of events or part revelations of a truth or a lie. Kirsty Gunn and Deborah Levy joined us at the Bookshop to discuss how they go about making up their own short fiction and the influence of modernism in their recent collections, Infidelities and Black Vodka.
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Katharine Norbury's affecting memoir The Fish Ladder (Bloomsbury) deals with grief, recovery and the redemptive power of stories and journeys. Abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent, Norbury was brought up by loving adoptive parents. As an adult, and having recently suffered a miscarriage, she embarked with her nine-year-old daughter on a journey to trace a river from sea to source. The novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri has described her book about that journey as an 'extraordinary exploration of how we use narrative to understand our place in the world'. Katharine Norbury was joined at the shop by novelist, poet and fellow memoirist Blake Morrison for an evening of literary conversation. Blake Morrison's many books include two masterpieces of family literature And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Granta) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (Vintage). His latest title Shingle Street (Chatto) is his first full-length poetry collection for nearly 30 years. Set on and around the Suffolk coast, it handles matters personal, political and ecological with Morrison's characteristic honesty and verbal dexterity.
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Patrick Cockburn, regular contributor to the LRB and Middle East correspondent for the Independent, is, according to Seymour Hersh, 'Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today'. His latest book The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Verso) describes the origins of the new rebel state in Iraq and Syria, setting it in the context of the region's turbulent recent history, and reflecting on its possible futures. Cockburn joined us at the Bookshop to discuss his book, and its implications, with Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News international editor and author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution.
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Islamic scholar Robert Irwin joined us at the Bookshop in discussion with mythographer Marina Warner about a groundbreaking new translation of Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, and its implications for our understanding of the classical Arabic storytelling tradition. The 18 medieval tales collected here (by Penguin Classics), probably originating in the 9th and 10th centuries, are the earliest examples of Arabic stories known to have survived. A few of the stories were collected and adapted, centuries after their composition, in The Arabian Nights. The remainder have never before appeared in English
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Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, most recently Summer of Hate, and two books of art and cultural criticism. The New York Observer describes her as 'the art world's favorite novelist,' and her recent monograph, Lost Properties, about conceptual art and economic activism, was published for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is a co-editor of the independent Semiotexte, with Hedi El Kholti and Sylvere Lotringer, and founded the Native Agents imprint that initially published first-person female writing. Torpor, her third novel, will be re-published in a critical edition this winter. She teaches at the European Graduate School, and is presently writing a critical biography of the American writer Kathy Acker. On a rare visit to London, she spoke with Zoe Pilger, author of Eat My Heart Out (Serpent's Tail) about schizophrenic projects, male muses and wilful amateurism.
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James Ellroy’s hardboiled, idiosyncratic explorations of Los Angeles police corruption and midcentury Washington power politics have earned him a worldwide following; his new novel, Perfidia (Cornerstone), is the first in a new trilogy featuring some familiar characters, including the gleefully amoral Dudley Smith. Ellroy joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with the American novelist David Vann, whose most recent book is Goat Mountain (Windmill). Warning: contains strong language.
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Writing about place – a sub-genre of travel writing that subverts it by being about staying put, rather than moving – has been enjoying an extraordinary vogue of late. Three of the genre’s finest practitioners joined us at the shop to discuss its significance and future. Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground (Granta) explores the small part of Cornwall to which he has recently transplanted himself; Julian Hoffman, in The Small Heart of Things (Georgia) finds home around the shores of Greece's Prespa lakes, and Ken Worpole in The New English Landscape, a collaboration with the photographer Jason Orton (Field Station), proposes a new paradigm for topographical beauty based on the post-industrial landscape of the Thames estuary. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans.
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When I was in eighth grade my history teacher wrote on my report card: “She only does what she wants to do.” She thought that was a bad thing, and it’s not.Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear transplanted to 20th-century Iowa. She joined us at the shop to read from her latest novel, Some Luck (Mantle), the first book in a projected trilogy, which returns to rural Iowa in the 1920s. Charlotte Mendelson wrote of the book: ‘So here it is at last, the Great American Novel and, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the great Jane Smiley would be the one who wrote it.’ Jane Smiley spoke in conversation with Alex Clark.
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Our top 1% take 15% of all income. That’s the highest share of anywhere in Europe. Our bottom fifth are the poorest in Europe. In Inequality and the 1% (Verso) Danny Dorling (Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford, or, as Simon Jenkins more pithily put it, 'geographer royal by appointment to the left'), goes in pursuit of the latest research into how the lives and ideas of the richest 1 per cent affect the remaining 99 per cent of us. The findings are shocking. Inequality in the UK is increasing as more and more people are driven towards the poverty line, with profound implications for education, health and life expectancy. Danny Dorling joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, and co-author (with Richard Wilkinson) of the ground-breaking The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
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In 'The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It' (Allen Lane) Owen Jones analyses the people and institutions that govern our lives – government, the media, the banks and the accountancy firms – and exposes usually invisible networks that bind them together. Far from working on our behalf, as they often claim, these institutions are, Owen Jones argues, the biggest threat to our democracy today. Owen joined Paul Myerscough at the Bookshop to present his argument, and to debate its implications.
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Leading sociologist of art [Sarah Thornton][1] goes behind the scenes with 33 living artists including Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman and Isaac Julien to ask the apparently simple but vexing question, ‘What is an artist?' Thornton joined us at the Bookshop to talk about her new book, *[33 Artists in 3 Acts][2]* (Granta), with the celebrated artist Isaac Julien.
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In what may well be the largest work of public art in history, Turner prize-winner Mark Wallinger placed a uniquely designed labyrinth in each of London's 270 Underground stations. The project was commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of London Underground. His extraordinary art-work is documented in Labyrinth: A Journey Through London’s Underground, published by Art / Books in association with Art on the Underground and with contributions from Christian Wolmar, Marina Warner and Will Self. Mark Wallinger came to the Bookshop to talk about the project with Will Self.
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Vasily Grossman, now widely regarded as the greatest Russian novelist of the 20th century, died 50 years ago this month. The author of the remarkable Everything Flows and Life and Fate (the only manuscript ever to be itself arrested by the Soviet authorities), Grossman was a crucial witness to the multiple horrors of the period. He did not live to see his greatest books published. This was a unique evening of readings and discussion: Robert Chandler, Grossman’s finest translator, reported back from the first Grossman conference in Russia; historian Antony Beevor and journalist John Lloyd provided commentary; and Janet Suzman gave a reading of extracts and stories. The panel went on to discuss Grossman’s extraordinary achievement and his legacy both in Russia and internationally, in a conversation chaired by Gareth Evans.
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James Meek came to the bookshop to talk about his new book, Private Island (Verso), a scathing assessment of the last two decades’ privatisation of public assets, ranging from electricity to postal services to municipal housing. What has been lost? Who has benefited? And what’s been the impact on Britain’s wider polity? In the words of John Lanchester, ‘some of it will make you sad, some of it will make you furious, but you are guaranteed to be left feeling that you understand this country much better.’ James Meek was in conversation with journalist Dawn Foster.
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Will Self’s latest novel Shark explores the hidden history of the late 20th century, taking in the American invasion of Cambodia, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and reckless experimentation with psychotropic drugs. Self joined us at the Bookshop to read from Shark and take on questions from the audience.
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six autobiographical novels, published in Norway between 2009 and 2011 under the series title *Min Kamp* (‘My Struggle’) have excited controversy and critical acclaim in equal measure. Knausgaard’s unflinching and almost uncritical laying on of detail has led some critics to call him ‘the Norwegian Proust’. ‘There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book’, wrote James Wood in the *New Yorker*. ‘Even when I was bored, I was interested.’ Karl Ove Knausgaard was joined by Andrew O'Hagan at Saint George's Church, Bloomsbury for a discussion of writing and the boundaries of autobiography.
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Ali Smith has been described by Kate Atkinson as ‘one of the few contemporary writers ploughing a genuinely modernist furrow.’ Her latest novel *how to be both* continues her almost reckless experimentation with form and content, adapting the artistic techniques of fresco painting to literature in telling a dual-time tale of art, love, injustice and redemption. Ali came to the Bookshop to give a reading from her novel, and went on to discuss it with Alex Clark of the *Guardian*.
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'Who has the temerity to call themselves a philosopher? The word “philosopher" is an honorific. It should be bestowed upon you by others.' Lars Iyer’s latest novel Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House) concerns the academic career of a group of Cambridge philosophy students, deeply under the influence of their teacher, whom they have nicknamed ‘Wittgenstein’. ‘Wittgenstein’s’ austere, exacting philosophy provides a tragicomic counterpoint to the chemical excesses of student life as the novel moves towards an unexpectedly hopeful and touching conclusion. Lars Iyer joined us at the Bookshop to read from his work, and to discuss it with the philosopher and Wittgenstein biographer Ray Monk.
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‘It's a bit mysterious, but somehow the emotion I feel at the heart of whatever I'm writing comes through, usually by my not insisting on it.’ Lydia Davis made a rare London appearance at the Bookshop to read from and discuss her unique body of work. She spoke with Adam Thirlwell about titles, translation and small thoughts.
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Helen Macdonald and Tim Dee came to the Bookshop to talk about birds, and about writing about birds. Radio producer Tim Dee propelled himself into the front rank of British nature writing in 2009 with his remarkable birdwatching memoir The Running Sky, followed in 2013 by Four Fields. Helen Macdonald, writer, poet, naturalist, conservationist, historian and some-time falconer, has recently published H is for Hawk which recounts how, under the literary tutelage of T.H. White and in part as a strategy for overcoming personal grief, she acquired and trained a goshawk of her own.
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As the world commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War historian Douglas Newton recounts the hidden history of Britain’s decision to enter the conflict. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, including the private papers and correspondence of leading politicians of the time, Newton pays particular attention to the widespread and vehement opposition to the war, both inside parliament and in the country at large, and reveals how Asquith, Edward Grey and Winston Churchill colluded, against the wishes and instincts of many of their parliamentary colleagues, to bring the country into the war, by any means necessary. Douglas Newton was in conversation with Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers, on 4 August, the hundredth anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany.
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Nigel Smith, currently Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton, was in conversation about the thought, literature and legacy of the Ranters with Sir Stephen Sedley, formerly a judge in the Court of Appeal, frequent contributor to the LRB and an acknowledged authority on the history of English radicalism. Folk singer Leon Rosselson performed two of his songs at the event: 'Abiezer Coppe' and 'The Diggers'.
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Best known in Britain for her award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels is also an acclaimed poet. Her latest collection, Correspondences, shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Prize, is an extraordinary and utterly sui generis collaboration with painter Bernice Eisenstein. In a unique, accordion-style format, Michaels’s resonant book-length poem, a historical and personal elegy, unfolds on one side of the book’s pages. On the other, and in unison, Bernice Eisenstein's haunting portraits depict the 20th century writers and thinkers the poem summons: Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, W.G. Sebald, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi and others, each accompanied by quotations that illuminate the deeper connections among them. Anne Michaels joined us for an evening of readings and discussion in conversation with Gareth Evans, publisher of Railtracks, Michaels’s meditative dialogue with John Berger, produced in association with the bookshop in 2011. With thanks to Ledbury Poetry Festival.
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Geoff Dyer’s latest book Another Great Day at Sea (Visual Editions), illustrated with the photographs of Chris Steele-Perkins, recounts daily life aboard an American aircraft carrier the USS George H. W. Bush, on which Dyer spent time as a kind of writer in residence. Philip Hoare wrote of it in the Guardian: ‘This is beautiful writing. It is urgent, funny, utterly in-the-moment and achingly honest. … Like the captain, like the crew, like the ship, Dyer's superb book constantly reiterates its excellence. It virtually stands to attention on its own.’ Geoff Dyer came to the Bookshop to speak about the project with Chris Mitchell.
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Leslie Jamison’s essays deal with illness, art, running, loss, the female body and everything else besides. She joined us at the shop to discuss her work with the author Olivia Laing. The conversation touched on artificial sweeteners, the essay as a form and the difficulties of writing about pain.
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'The first thing you find out in any textbook about maps is that they don't work. There's no such thing as a good map.'What is a map? And what is a map’s relation to the real world? In Mapping it Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies (Thames and Hudson) a stellar cast of modern artists, architects, scientists and theorists, including Yoko Ono, Mona Hatoum, Tim Berners-Lee, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst, reimagine, vertiginously, the visual techniques we use for representing space, time and reality. Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator, art critic and the originator of the project, joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy, who provided the introduction to the book.
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Film-maker, graphic designer, animator, cartoonist, photographer, internet and new media pioneer, installationist, novelist, critic, publisher – the French artist Chris Marker, who died in 2012 on the day of his 91st birthday, was as versatile as he was prolific. He is best known for his film masterpieces Sans Soleil and La Jetée (the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys) but his influence has been felt, perhaps even more keenly since his death, in almost every field of artistic endeavour. In an evening of readings, screenings and discussion, Chris Darke, critic and co-curator of the first retrospective of Chris Marker’s work across all media, was in conversation with the acclaimed cultural commentator and essayist Brian Dillon about Marker’s writing in all forms, from little known novels and short stories through essays and critical pieces to his outstanding film scripts. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans, Film Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event was presented with thanks to, and in association with, the Whitechapel Gallery.
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Almost a century after Einstein first proposed it, the full ramifications of the General Theory of Relativity are still being debated. Pedro Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and his new book The Perfect Theory brings to life both the science and the scientific controversies which have surrounded the General Theory since its conception. Pedro was at the Bookshop in conversation with Marcus du Sautoy, who wrote of him: ‘You couldn't ask for a better guide to the outer reaches of the universe and the inner workings of the minds of those who've navigated it.’ Their discussion ranged over the origins and implications of the theory - from black holes to time travel - and explored where research into general relativity might take us in the future.
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In Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel The Blazing World (Sceptre) artist Harriet Burden, consumed by fury at the lack of recognition she has received from the New York art establishment, embarks on an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts who exhibit her work as their own, to universal acclaim. ‘All intellectual endeavours’ Burden herself remarks pugnaciously at the novel’s opening ‘fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work … it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.’ Siri Hustvedt was joined in conversation by the art critic Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World. The pair discussed the book's themes of art, gender bias and subterfuge, lighting upon neuroscience, the nature of celebrity and wine-tasting along the way.
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John Berger came to the Bookshop to celebrate the life and work of Aimé Césaire on the occasion of Archipelago's reissue of Césaire's long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1936). Born in Martinique in 1913, Césaire was one of the founding voices of the négritude movement in Francophone literature. He considered this work his “break into the forbidden,” at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity. The English translation by John Berger and Anya Bostock retains the visceral, lyric energy of the French original. John Berger opened the evening with a reading from Return to My Native Land, and was then joined in conversation by the poet and translator David Constantine. The pair discussed Césaire's work, exploring what it means to write in one's mother tongue and the nature of hope. Berger concluded the evening with a reading of Peter Blackman's 'Stalingrad'.
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Javier Cercas rose to fame in the English-speaking world with The Soldiers of Salamis which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and was one of our early bestsellers. He continued his exploration of modern Spanish history with The Anatomy of a Moment, a work of non-fiction that investigated the failed coup of 1981. Now he returns to fiction with Outlaws, a fast-paced and morally complex tale of disaffected youth set in the period just after the end of the Franco dictatorship. Javier was joined in conversation by Paul Preston, Príncipe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the LSE and author of The Spanish Holocaust.
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Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt’s The Novel – A Biography (Harvard) invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English. Michael Schmidt spoke with Michael Wood, author and regular contributor to the London Review of Books, in a conversation chaired by novelist Kirsty Gunn. The discussion covered the 13-year process of writing the book, the social function of the novel, an appalling misprint involving Martin Amis and favourite reads old and new.
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'The tutored and passionate eye of the director holds the space, which otherwise would be without boundary, indiscriminate and endless.' Since making her first film at the age of 14, Sally Potter has established herself as one of Britain's leading directors – of dance and theatre as well as of cinema. In her new book, Naked Cinema (Faber),she strips bare the art of directing actors for the camera. Potter has always been noted for her extraordinary rapport with performers, and for her ability to coax extraordinary performances out of them. Here she leads the reader through the film-making process, from casting to screening, always placing the actor at the heart of her account. Concrete examples are provided by a series of revealing interviews with actors she has worked with, including Julie Christie, with whom she worked on her first feature film The Gold Diggers, Annette Bening (Ginger and Rosa) and Jude Law who dragged up for her in Rage. Sally spoke about her book and her career with Gareth Evans, The Whitechapel Gallery's curator of film.
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Following the hugely enjoyable launch event last year for [*The Flamethrowers*][1], Rachel Kushner returned to the shop to mark the UK publication (by Vintage) of her first novel [*Telex From Cuba*][2], set among the American expatriate community on the eve of Castro's revolution. Rachel was in conversation with Robert Collins, Deputy Editor of the *Sunday Times* and an early champion of *The Flamethrowers*. The pair explored the history of United Fruit Yellow, how best to throw a hand grenade, and the mysterious character of Rachel K...
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In his new book, 'Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism' (Profile), David Harvey unravels the paradoxes at the heart of capitalism – its drive, for example, to accumulate capital beyond the means of investing it; its imperative to use labour-saving technologies that leave consumers bereft of adequate means of consumption; and its compulsion to exploit nature to the point of extinction. Such are the tensions that underpin the persistence of mass unemployment, the downward spirals of Europe and Japan, and China’s and India’s unstable lurches in uncertain directions. Not that these contradictions are all destructive in the short term: they produce the crises through which capitalism has historically reconstituted itself in new guises. But can capitalism survive in the long run by staggering from crisis to crisis? David was in conversation with Owen Jones, author of 'Chavs' (Verso).
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To celebrate the publication of The Bloomsbury Cookbook (Thames & Hudson), we held an exclusive evening at the Bookshop, a stone’s throw away from the kitchens and dining rooms where the Bloomsbury group would converge. Author Jans Ondaatje Rolls was in conversation with artist Cressida Bell on the world of the Bloomsbury group. The talk was accompanied by a menu of recipes and cocktails inspired by the book, courtesy of Terry Glover of the London Review Cake Shop; the evening opened with a cocktail devised by Vanessa Bell, followed by salmon mayonnaise, a good deal of truffle cream and the potent Green Dragon Quaglino....
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In 2010 Nick Hunt set out on an epic walk in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, across the whole European continent ‘from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn.’ Relying, like his hero, on the hospitality of strangers and using Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings as his only guide, Hunt crossed Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, partly to see how much had changed, and how much hadn’t, but mainly in order to have a ‘good old-fashioned adventure.’ His account of his journey Walking the Woods and the Water is published by Nicholas Brealey. Nick Hunt was in conversation with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s friend and biographer Artemis Cooper, who in 2013 worked with Colin Thubron to complete Paddy’s final work The Broken Road.
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May-Lan Tan and Will Eaves joined us at the Bookshop for the launch of their respective books, Things to Make and Break (since shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award) and The Absent Therapist (since shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize), both published by CB Editions. The authors treated us to a selection of passages from their work, featuring night-schools, spanking clubs and ex-girlfriends.
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Since their last appearance at the LRB Bookshop, the poets of New Poetries V have been busy: five debut collections (and one forthcoming), prestigious awards, general excitement. Reunited at last, Tara Bergin, OIi Hazzard, Helen Tookey, Rory Waterman, Julith Jedamus and Lucy Tunstall read from their new volumes, in an evening that marked out the territory for the next generation of British poetry.
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Adam Foulds’s latest novel, In The Wolf’s Mouth (Jonathan Cape), expands on the themes of violence, conflict and the distortions of history that have characterised his work since 2007’s The Broken Word. Set in Sicily as the Second World War moves into its endgame, the novel is a vivid study of the moral compromises and historical elisions forced on us by war and its aftermath. Adam was in conversation with Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, whose most recent book is Silver: Return to Treasure Island (Vintage). Daniel Marc Janes reviewed this event for Litro Magazine: 'Though Foulds treats questions of humans’ capacity for violence[...] it would be wrong, Motion suggests, to overlook the quiet optimism of works such as The Broken Word and In the Wolf’s Mouth. These works are concerned not just with violence but with reconstruction.'
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Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s memoir A Sense of Direction is an account of three pilgrimages – the Camino de Santiago, a tour of Buddhist temples on the island of Shikoku, and a journey to the tomb of a Hasidic Rabbi in the Ukraine – undertaken in the wake of a family crisis. Gideon was at the shop to talk about pilgrimage, writing and reconciliation with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Christian Lorentzen, senior editor at the London Review of Books.
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Film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author Derek Jarman died on 19 February 1994. To mark the 20th anniversary of his death, we hosted an evening of readings and discussion. Our focus was a very little-known but crucial part of Jarman’s work, his poetry, and in particular the volume 'A Finger in the Fishes Mouth', unavailable for over 40 years and now reprinted in facsimile by the estimable Test Centre. Derek's partner Keith Collins and his biographer Tony Peake were joined by Ali Smith and Sophie Mayer to consider the poetic in Derek's oeuvre and to read from the collection. In the spirit of collaboration for which Derek was renowned, the reading was also offered to the audience, so that the whole collection was heard on this most poignant of anniversaries. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans.
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To mark the paperback publication of Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Philip 'Leviathan' Hoare’s acclaimed new book The Sea Inside, we held an evening exploring the wondrous world of whales. One of our best non-fiction writers and a fine broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick and directed three films for BBC’s ‘Whale Night’. He was also co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the Moby-Dick Big Read . Artist film-maker Jessica Sarah Rinland focuses on whales in both long and short works. She presented a screening of her film A Boiled Skeleton, depicting the journey of a bottlenose whale, caught in 1860 and currently stored in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum. Ex-whaler John Burton read live from the newspaper article that covered the whale’s journey. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans.
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'The past is a mosaic; we make it out of present materials.'Jonathan Lethem’s latest book Dissident Gardens (Cape) tells, in a ‘torrent of potent voices, searing ironies, popculture allusions, and tragicomic complexities’ the story of three generations of a radical New York family, at the same time painting a vivid portrait of the American Century. Jonathan Lethem was in conversation with Benjamin Markovits, author of A Quiet Adjustment and named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists of 2013.
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Will Self was at the shop to discuss the work of Guy Debord, and in particular The Society of the Spectacle, a 1967 work which offered an eerily accurate prediction of our mediated, image-saturated times. Self's introduction to the new Notting Hill edition beathes fresh life into the original 1970 translation. He writes: 'Never before has Debord’s work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold. Open it, read it, be amazed ...’ Self was joined in discussion by film-maker Patrick Keiller, whose recent book The View from the Train explores the cities and landscapes of modern Britain. The event was chaired by Matthew Beaumont, Senior Lecturer at UCL and editor of Restless Cities.
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In a year that might well see the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom, one of our foremost historians of national identity provides an analysis of the various Acts of Union that have until now more or less held the country together. In her latest book Acts of Union, Acts of Disunion (Profile), published to coincide with a 15-part Radio 4 series, she draws on art, architecture and literature as well as political history to ask what Britishness has meant in the past, what it means now, and what it might mean in the future.
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In his second collaboration with landscape photographer Jason Orton, Ken Worpole – ‘for many years one of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the English social landscape’ ('The Independent') – examines the shifting perspective of England’s landscape aesthetic in the latter half of the 20th century, away from the rural interior towards the more disrupted landscapes of East Anglia and the Thames estuary. Listen to Ken Worpole in conversation about 'The New English Landscape' (Field Station) and its implications for landscape architecture, topography and psychogeography with author Rachel Lichtenstein and chaired by Gareth Evans.
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In American Smoke (Hamish Hamilton), the third part of a loose trilogy of topographical ruminations that began with Hackney: That Rose-red Empire and Ghost Milk, Iain Sinclair follows the traces of the writers of the American Beat generation – Kerouac, Burroughs, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Malcolm Lowry and more – in a journey that takes in the Old West, Mexico, volcanoes, murder, and a good deal else besides. He was at the shop to talk about the book with writer, editor and curator Gareth Evans.
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Gillian Darley and David McKie’s study of Nairn - Ian Nairn: Words in Place – published by Five Leaves, reintroduces to a new generation an architectural critic whose work has influenced writers and critics such as J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades, who once described Nairn as ‘a great poet of the metropolis’. Gillian Darley and David McKie discussed Ian Nairn’s life and work, and Owen Hatherley, author of A New Kind of Bleak and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain chaired this discussion.
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Polish poet, novelist, painter and translator Jacek Dehnel appeared at the shop in conversation with his translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones.Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature and this evening was the occasion of her being presented with the Found in Translation Award for the second time (given by the Polish Book Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute London and the Polish Cultural Institute New York). Jacek talked with Antonia about how his writing reflects and interacts with literary and art historical tradition, as well as Polish culture, history and politics. This event was supported by the Polish Cultural Institute London.
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With Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine, and Footnotes in Gaza, graphic novelist Joe Sacco introduced to his chosen genre a politically charged seriousness that changed it for ever. In his latest work he turns to the past with a harrowing depiction of war in the trenches. To mark the publication of The Great War (Jonathan Cape), Joe Sacco appeared at the shop with David Boyd Haycock, whose group biography of five First World War artists A Crisis of Brilliance was published in 2009. Their conversation provided a compelling exploration of art, journalism and violence.
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Philosopher Simon Critchley took on Shakespeare's Hamlet, and our abiding preoccupation with it, via a series of classic interpretations, notably those of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche. The discussion was chaired by Dr Shahidha Bari of Queen Mary, University of London.
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In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
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The inaugural discussion of a new series to commemorate Frank Kermode's highly influential work saw Jacqueline Rose and Michael Wood, among others, ranging freely and informally across his contributions to criticism in numerous fields, from apocalyptic theory to contemporary fiction.
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What would happen if a story were successively translated by a series of novelists, each one working only from the version immediately prior to their own – the aim being to preserve that story’s style? Adam Thirlwell's Multiples set out to explore this idea. To celebrate its UK publication, several writers from the anthology - Tash Aw, A.S. Byatt, Joe Dunthorne, Adam Foulds, Ma Jian and Francesco Pacifico - joined Adam Thirlwell at the Bookshop to talk about the project.
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"Kushner isn’t only a novelist. She is also a regular contributor of sharp criticism to such free-thinking American publications as Artforum, and however good her stories and sparkling her prose, she has other aims in her novel too. Its subject is inequality – economic, social, sexual – but the art world, with its attendant performances, is always there to complicate it." Naomi Fry (LRB 18 July 2013) Rachel Kushner came to the bookshop to talk about her new book, 'The Flamethrowers'. Set in the art world of the 1970s, the novel explores themes of gender, terrorism and authenticity. She spoke in conversation with Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of 'One-Dimensional Woman'.
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Author Joshua Cohen came to the shop celebrate the publication of Attention! a (short) history' (Notting Hill). He was joined by writer and critic Brian Dillon for a dicussion of the cultural history of the concept of attention: an evening of conversation which ranged across centuries and subjects, from Saint Augustine to amphetamines.
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Distinguished critic and translator Edith Grossman was in conversation with Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation.
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China Miéville read from his work, and discussed some of the issues raised by it with Ben Eastham, co-founder and editor of The White Review.
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Sheila Heti was in conversation about writing, life and the future of fiction with the critic and experimental novelist Adam Thirlwell.
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Ben Marcus talks to Christian Lorentzen about his novel The Flame Alphabet, as well as previous works The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women. Topics covered include online fiction magazines, mathematics, creating a religion, why writing courses are unfairly criticised, the influence of Borges, encyclopaedias as a source of literary delight and ‘Reader’s Cream’, a lotion Marcus is developing to improve reader sensitivity. Marcus’s latest book is Leaving the Sea.
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Turkish writer Kaya Genç discussed with Maureen Freely how his writing reflects and interacts with literary traditions, as well as Turkish culture, history and politics.
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Michael Symmons Roberts has been described by Jeanette Winterson as ‘a religious poet for a secular age’ and by Les Murray as ‘a poet for the new chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned.’ His latest collection Drysalter (Jonathan Cape) is a series of 150 poems each of 15 lines and takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, while drawing formal inspiration from the Book of Psalms. Michael will be at the shop to read from his work, and to discuss his poetry and its inspirations with fellow poet and essayist Jean Sprackland.
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James Wood visited the Bookshop to talk about his new collection of pieces, The Fun Stuff, and to discuss life, literature, and the role of the critic.
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Translators Adriana Hunter and Polly McLean shared their versions of a specially-commissioned short story by the French writer Emma Becker, with Sarah Ardizzone in the chair and Emma Becker herself on the panel. The event explored the particular challenges of translating erotic fiction, discussing the decisions the translators made about voice and vocabulary.
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Our first Literary Friendships event brought together Colm Tóibín with his friend the writer László Krasznahorkai.
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Glyn Maxwell offers us a guide to reading poetry in seven chapters: ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Form’, ‘Pulse’, ‘Chime’, ‘Space’ and ‘Time’. Described by Katy Evans-Bush in Poetry Review as being ‘as highly charged as a stick of poetry dynamite’, On Poetry sold out its first printing in less than a week.
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Our first Live Translation event of the 2012-13 season explored the work of Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon, named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá.
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To mark the publication of the paperback edition of Mother, Brother, Lover, Jarvis Cocker joined us at the shop for a conversation with the novelist Jon McGregor – ‘Cocker’s lyrics were what made me want to tell stories’, McGregor wrote in the Guardian’s ‘My Hero’ column.
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Our International Translation Day event celebrated the distinguished career of Anthea Bell, who was in conversation with Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Literary translators are often compared to ventriloquists, but few have as many and varied voices as Anthea Bell.
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Will Self leads a panel discussion about questions thrown up by new technology, with special reference to ‘Kafka's Wound’, the digital literary essay he produced in collaboration with the LRB for The Space, a project from the Arts Council and BBC digital arts.
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Teju Cole came to the Bookshop to discuss his first novel, Open City. The book, which follows a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11, was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Cole spoke in conversation with writer and journalist Max Liu. Their discussion took in the cities of Lagos, London and New York; W.G. Sebald; twitter as a literary medium; and the disturbing revelation which closes the novel.
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'To the River' is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf’s river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Olivia came to the bookshop to talk about 'To the River' with Jean Sprackland, who won the 2012 Portico Prize for non-fiction for 'Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach', a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool.
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Robert Macfarlane, perhaps the most accomplished exponent of the ‘New Nature Writing’, was at the Bookshop to describe his journeys, and to discuss what they can tell us about our nation, its history, present and people.
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Two of Britain’s most eminent female writers discussed literature, fiction, women, the short story and much else besides.
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Award-winning Swedish crime writers Karin Alvtegen and Håkan Nesser, chaired by Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL, explore the power behind crime fiction's gripping narratives, its incisive portrayal of society and its confrontation with ideas of good and evil in a shades-of-grey world, where simple moral certainties aren't so easy to find.
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Two translators – Shaun Whiteside and Mike Mitchell – went head to head with their versions of a previously untranslated work. Novelist Daniel Kehlmann provided the challenge, with the event chaired by Daniel Hahn, interim director of the BCLT and chair of the Translators Association.
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Novelists Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Markovits share interests in their work in biography, genius and failure, charisma and the question of how to give voice to real historical figures but have differences too; both make fuel for a very interesting conversation.
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Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. Nasr was in conversation with prizewinning British poet Ruth Padel, who has published seven poetry collections, a wide range of non-fiction, and a novel, Where the Serpent Lives.
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Writing in El Pa’s, Jordi Gracia described Os libros arden mal as 'a novel that could have been history or biography, but is instead a work of literature written by an author at the height of his powers'. Manuel Rivas read from his work and talked with Jonathan Dunne, who has translated several of his books into English.
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The Anatomy of a Moment is a patient dissection of a key episode in recent European history – the attempted coup in Spain in 1981. In his meticulous analysis of the moment when gunmen stormed the Spanish parliament, Javier Cercas has created an intriguing book which occupies a fascinating space between fiction and reality. Paul Preston, Professor of Spanish History at LSE joined Cercas to discuss the challenges of historical writing in a conversation chaired by Lisa Hilton, acclaimed author of Queen’s Consort.
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One of the Netherlands' most distinguished living authors, Cees Nooteboom discussed short stories, death and translation with A.S. Byatt. Chaired by Jan Dalley, Arts Editor of the Financial Times.
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Catalan novelists Najat el Hachmi, Carles Casajuana and Teresa Solana, chaired by Peter Bush, discussed their work and the experience of being Catalan novelists.
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Ali Smith read from her novel There but for the (Hamish Hamilton) and discussed her work with the audience.
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Richard Sennett came to the Bookshop to discuss The Foreigner, a pair of essays in which he explores displacement in the metropolis through two vibrant historical moments: mid-19th-century Paris Renaissance Venice.
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An evening of poetry was held at the Bookshop to celebrate the publication of David Harsent's collection, *Night*. Jo Shapcott and Don Paterson joined David Harsent for a spellbinding set of readings, touching upon bee-keeping, Rothko, saints and siestas, and culminating in an atmospheric reading from *Night* itself.
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Patti Smith's reading, drawn from her extensive body of work, including Just Kids, and alongside those writers she has long loved and advocated, was programmed in association with Artevents.
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On the eve of its confirmation as one of the six Man Booker shortlisted books for 2010, Tom McCarthy's ambitious and exhilarating novel C was the subject for discussion between its author and novelist Lee Rourke. McCarthy reads from C and considers its structure and themes – in particular its roots in the work of key 20th century theorists, literary, philosophical and psychological.
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Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, described by Le Monde as the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, was regarded as so dangerous to the Soviet state that Mikhail Suslov declared that it could not be published for at least 200 years. Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman, Vasily's daughter by his first wife, came to know her father only gradually. At first she saw little of him except during New Year holidays. In the mid-1950s she moved from the Ukraine to Moscow, and they became close in the last ten years of his life.
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Yang Lian's poems collapse distances by combining a deep attention to the particular with the allusiveness of classical Chinese poetry, in which a word or image can contain all of tradition: 'With the cry of a wild goose, I am drawn into the Tang Dynasty at the instant of hearing, making Lee valley's waters flow twelve hundred years upstream.' Yang Lian was in conversation with his translator, Brian Holton, and Iain Sinclair, poet, documentary-novelist and East Londoner.
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This event took place in association with English PEN, which exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly cooperation of writers and free exchange of ideas. PEN's Writers in Translation programme has, during the past five years, championed over 35 titles by writers from all over the globe, and supports the three speakers here.
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How can the same thing be said in a different language, when the language carries the assumptions of a whole culture with it? How do you balance spirit and accuracy? What do you do with slang and puns and untranslatable words? However many questions we ask about translation in the abstract, we rarely see how it actually works. This event was about giving time and attention to that process.
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Edward Said described Elias Khoury as an artist who gives 'voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages'. Khoury was in discussion with the writer and journalist Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, who has written extensively on Khoury's life and work.
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An important champion of francophone literature, Mabanckou is both a writer engage, and a very engaging man. Teaching at the time in the French literature department at UCLA, he made a rare visit to London for the festival. Mabanckou talked about his work with Helen Stevenson, translator of Broken Glass and author of several books, including Instructions for Visitors: Life and Love in a French Town.
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Julian Bell and Peter Campbell talked about things that painters can and can't do, in particular about the relationship painters have had to old art and the limits and opportunities that arise from society, its technology and its institutions.
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In conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem read from Chronic City and discussed, inter alia, Manhattan's virtuality, the inspiration behind the character of Perkus Tooth, the price of things, and talking animals.
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With his new play about Auden and Britten, The Habit of Art, playing to packed houses at the National Theatre, Alan Bennett visited the Bookshop to read from his introduction to the play and to answer an eclectic range of questions from the audience.
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LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, and contributors Jeremy Harding and John Lanchester, discussed the pleasures and pitfalls of writing family histories, under the chairmanship of LRB publisher Nicholas Spice.
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A.S. Byatt and Adam Thirlwell both talked about their work, and discussed European literature and the art of the novel.
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Sarah Dunant and Hilary Mantel read from Sacred Hearts and Wolf Hall, their respective latest novels, and discussed the particular challenges of writing historical novels and the importance of research with Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College.
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A few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ma Jian discussed his Tiananmen novel Beijing Coma with the Independent's literary editor Boyd Tonkin, interspersed with extracts from the novel read by his translator Flora Drew.
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Faïza Guène discussed immigration in France, her success as a writer and what the French papers made of it all, the pleasures of writing in the first person and much more with her translator Sarah Ardizzone at the Bookshop's inaugural World Literature Weekend. Interpreter: Carine Kennedy.
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Four past winners of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gathered in the Paul Hamlyn Library to discuss the difficulties of selling translated literature, the cultural resources available to translators, working on dead authors, translating dialect, and a host of other tricky areas involved in literary translation. The panel was chaired by the Arts Council's Kate Griffin.
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Launching the Bookshop's inaugural World Literature Weekend, Hanan al-Shaykh gave a lively reading from her memoir of her mother, The Locust and the Bird, as well as discussing the book with novelist Esther Freud.
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As part of Faber & Faber's 80th anniversary celebrations, the London Review Bookshop welcomed two Faber authors to read from and discuss their first works: Sarah Hall's debut novel Haweswater and Clare Wigfall's collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing.
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Iain Sinclair's appearance at the Bookshop always heralds a frantic scramble for seats. This event was no different, an opportunity to hear a reading from his new work, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire: A Confidential Report.
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A veteran of peace initiatives across the Middle East and beyond, Alistair Crooke provides an account of the wellspring of Islamist movements, a defence of their underpinning intellectual traditions, and a cogent argument for engagement and dialogue.
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In conversation with John Sutherland, Hanif Kureishi expanded on and discussed his cogitation on psychoanalysis, Something to Tell You.
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Jenny Diski was at the London Review Bookshop to be cheered up, apologise, and read from her latest book, Apology for the Woman Writing, a story drawn from the marginal notes that exist about Marie de Gournay, Montaigne's editor and onetime 'stalker'.
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In his first public appearance as Benjamin Black, John Banville read from Black's new novel The Lemur, and discussed the experience of writing as two different people.
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Having confessed to the audience her apprehension about speaking in public, Janice Galloway displayed no trace of it in her accomplished reading from and lively discussion with Jenny Diski of her memoir, This Is Not About Me.
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Tariq Ali's sold-out event at the Bookshop presented an insightful picture of Pakistan's long and complex reationship with the West, and in particular with the United States of America.
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For the first time since being labelled a 'snakeoil salesman, an ingrate and a hypocrite' for his opinions on the international presence in Afghanistan, Rory Stewart spoke at the Bookshop about international intervention and 'Afghanistan rhetoric and reality'.
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Sebastian Barry and Richard Mason shared their own versions of what it is to be a lonely and possibly mad old woman, reading from their newly-published novels The Secret Scripture and The Lighted Rooms respectively, on the publication date of the former.
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On the day of publication of Taking Pictures, Anne Enright confessed to a full house at the Bookshop that 'I can't tell you how relieved I am not to be reading about suicide', before reading from the new collection.
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In Flat Earth News (Chatto & Windus), Nick Davies exposes the reality of daily life in the Fleet Street news factory and makes a passionate appeal for a return to the first principles of truth-telling journalism. He was at the Bookshop to discuss his work and its reception.
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In typical full-throttle style, eieek takes the opportunity to hit back at criticisms of Violence published in the LRB and elsewhere, and to expand on both his work and that of other philosophers.
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In London: City of Disappearances, Iain Sinclair turns away from official versions and approved histories, and with the help of a host of contributors, brings to light the fugitive scraps, faded newspaper cuttings and patterns in the dust. Novelist and psychogeographer Will Self and the outspoken architectural commentator Jonathan Meades discussed and read from the book.
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Although best known in the English-speaking world for his autobiography I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti has published 14 volumes of poetry. After treating the audience to a reading from his work in both English and (briefly) Arabic, he answered a range of questions from both the audience and Ruth Padel, focusing primarily on the political background to his work.
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Shortly after its publication, Andrew O'Hagan reads from Be Near Me, his powerful third novel on cultural clash between an English priest and Scottish village society.
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Iain Sinclair spirals outwards from the centre of London as he reads from and discusses Edge of the Orison, examining family history and the disintegration of middle England through the prism of John Clare's Journey out of Essex.
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David Hare free-associates on politics, theatre and writing, inspired by his collection Obedience, Struggle and Revolt.
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The actress and political activist Betsy Blair discusses Hollywood in the 1950s, her marriages to Gene Kelly and Karel Reisz, her tangles with the Blacklist, her adventures in Europe and the writing of her memoir, The Memory of All That.
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One of the original Beats, Michael McClure was back in London for the first time in thirty years and gave an exclusive reading at the Bookshop.
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Robert Chandler reads from his newly-published translation of Nikolay Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk on which the libretto of Shostakovich's opera is based.
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Don Paterson read from his 2004 collection Landing Light (Faber), which won both the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot prize.
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On the day following press night at the National Theatre, Alan Bennett spoke at the London Review Bookshop about The History Boys. The play asks questions about history and how it should be taught, and about education and its purpose.
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To celebrate the publication of Carcanet's new anthology of the New York School poets, editor Mark Ford, poets Lee Harwood and Sarah Maguire, and translator Piotr Sommer read selections from the new collection.
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Terry Castle, editor of The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Aristo to Stonewall, explored the emergence of and transformation of the idea of lesbianism, and how it has been collectively embellished over the last five centuries.
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In one of the first events held at the London Review Bookshop, Mary Beard and Robert Irwin squared up to each other to debate the relative greatness of two magnificent structures, the Alhambra and the Parthenon.
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