London Review Bookshop Podcast

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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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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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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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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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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‘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.

Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/

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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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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 of the 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.

Buy the book: lrb.me/wilsoniliad

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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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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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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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Buy The Future Future: https://lrb.me/thefuturefuture

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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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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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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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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.

Upcoming events at the bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod

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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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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.

Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod

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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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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.

Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod

Read Arrangements in Blue: lrb.me/amykeyblue

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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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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.

Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod

Buy a signed copy of Watershed: lrb.me/watershedbook

Or a copy of Re-Dreaming Sylvia Plath...: lrb.me/plathbeebook

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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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Buy Shell Vestige Disputed: lrb.me/ianpattersonpod

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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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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.

Find upcoming events on the Bookshop website: lrb.me/eventspod

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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.

Buy tickets to our forthcoming events, including livestreams, here: https://lrb.me/events

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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.

Find upcoming events on the Bookshop website: lrb.me/eventspod

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.

Find more events on our website: lrb.me/eventspod

Grab a copy of Losing the Plot from the Bookshop: lrb.me/owusupod

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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.

Buy a copy of s t a g c u l t from the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/stagcult

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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.

Buy a copy of Look! We Have Come Through!: https://lrb.me/lawrencefeigel

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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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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 and Sterling 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.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

Buy the books here.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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‘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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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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