London Review Bookshop Podcasts

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

‘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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Five Dials 57, ‘To Leave and to Be Left Behind’, explores the imaginative space of the journey – where it can take us and how it can change us. Guest-edited by Sophie Mackintosh, it brings together a range of playful, intimate and risk-taking voices from across contemporary fiction and poetry. To celebrate the launch of this special issue, Sophie was joined in conversation by three of the magazine’s contributors – Rachael Allen, Bridget Minamore and Yara Rodrigues Fowler.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In conversation with Dave McKean, Richard McGuire talks about his graphic novel, Here, a book-length expansion of his groundbreaking 1989 sequence of the same name,  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Two of Ann Quin’s admirers, novelist and essayist Deborah Levy and writer and critic Juliet Jacques, will be joined in conversation about her life and work by Jennifer Hodgson, editor of The Unmapped Country.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Corsair) won Morgan Parker a wide UK readership; Magical Negro takes and expands on the achievement of that first collection, dealing as it does with objectification, loneliness, stereotyping and the stubbornness of ancestral trauma. Danez Smith has called Parker ‘one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights’. Parker read from Magical Negro, and was in conversation with Georgina Lawton, journalist and essayist, who writes for the Guardian and gal-dem magazine.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Are we English, British, European, citizens of the planet Earth or none of the above? The ‘Citizens of Everywhere’ project invites writers, artists and journalists to respond to the seismic shifts in European and American politics, and their implications for the future, in ways that are creative, surprising, and, most importantly of all, useful. Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, Labour peer and former director of Liberty, novelist Tom McCarthy and campaigner Eloise Todd were at the shop to debate the future of citizenship in Britain, Europe and beyond. Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse and co -director of the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool, was in the chair.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The fleeting appearance of black faces in Tudor paintings marks the silent presence of a community's untold story. Who were the black men and women who lived, loved, and died in Renaissance Britain? How did they arrive? And how can we recover their voices when all we have is a glimpse in a portrait here, or church and court record there? At this event the writer Fred D'Aguiar and historians David Olusoga and Catherine Fletcher joined Nandini Das, director of TIDE, to explore the challenge of using fiction to recover those lost voices in history.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Polity) Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi engage in a critical dialogue that seeks to expand our understanding of capitalism, revealing it to be not merely a system of economic relations, but rather a form of institutionalised social order, and one that continually reinvents itself through crisis. Nancy Fraser, Professor of Political & Social Science at the New School for Social Research, was in conversation about capitalism and its discontents with Ann Pettifor, Director of Prime (Policy Research in Macroeconomics), Fellow of the New Economics Foundation and author of The Production of Money (Verso).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and, according to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 'the geographer royal by appointment to the left', returned to the Bookshop to talk about his new book A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier (London Publishing Partnership). Dorling's book looks at the evidence for a successful politics that would promote happiness and health and suggests policies that take account of this evidence. Dorling was in conversation with Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, and Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Radio producer and naturalist Tim Dee has curated in Ground Work (Cape) an essential collection of autobiographical essays from distinguished writers, all of which explore, in diverse ways, the complex and increasingly vexed relationship between the human and natural. Tim Dee was in conversation with two of the book's contributors, Marina Warner and Ken Worpole.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Adam Mars-Jones talks about his newly-published novel, ‘Box Hill’ with Richard Scott.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 hereYou can order Slowdown from us here: lrb.me/order  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mick Herron’s hero/anti-hero Jackson Lamb is everything Le Carré’s Smiley isn’t, as well as quite a lot of what he is. Drunk, obese, bone-idle and ridiculously talented in the dark arts of spycraft, he is also ridiculously loyal to the inhabitants of Slough House, a group of misfits, addicts and screw-ups who have been exiled from the security services for a range of misdemeanours both real and concocted. His five Slough House novels so far are brutal, ruthless, intricately plotted and, it’s important to mention, also extremely funny. Herron presented the sixth of them, Joe Country (John Murray) in the company of historian and novelist Miranda Carter who has, as M.J. Carter, herself created a series of brilliant thrillers, beginning with The Strangler Vine.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

‘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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.