London Review Bookshop Podcasts

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carrie Brownstein was at the shop to discuss her book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, with Lavinia Greenlaw. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.