London Review Bookshop Podcasts

Chloe Aridjis’s third novel Sea Monsters (Chatto), set in Mexico in the late 1980s, describes the elopement of Mexico City schoolgirl with a boy she barely knows, in search of freedom, independence and rather more oddly, a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped from a Soviet travelling circus. Aridjis was at the shop to read from and talk about her new book, described by Garth Greenwell as ‘mesmerizing, revelatory … a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world.’ Aridjis was in conversation with Juliet Jacques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Édouard Louis, one of France’s most acclaimed young writers, shot to international fame with his first novel, the semi-autobiographical End of Eddy. His latest book Who Killed My Father (Harvill Secker) revisits many of the same locations and subjects — poverty, homophobia and social exclusion — in non-fictional essay form, and is a powerful polemic exploring the bonds, often persistent even when apparently sundered, between parent and child. He discussed his work with Kerry Hudson, a novelist and journalist whose own work, notably in her first novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma and in her forthcoming non-fiction work Lowborn, also investigates with wit and candour the outer and inner lives of the often neglected working class. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up to her award-winning 2014 debut Bright Travellers, is one of the most hotly-anticipated poetry collections of 2019. Its harrowing central sequence is a retelling of Greek myth, depicting Zeus as a serial rapist; other poems, including the Forward-shortlisted ‘Ruins’, engage with depression, female sexuality and early motherhood. Fiona was in conversation with Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under (Jonathan Cape), shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Things fall apart when empires crumble. Rediscovery of past glories is attempted again and again, until eventually those living in what was once the heart of the empire become reconciled with their fate. Many of the British are not yet reconciled. A major cause of Brexit was a stoked-up fear of immigrants, but Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (Biteback Publishing) argues that at its heart the rhetoric of Brexit was the playing out of older school curricula that had been dominated by empire. Brexit was led by people, almost all men, who mostly had fond memories of something that never was as great as they believed it to be. Co-authors Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson were in conversation. The conversation was chaired by writer and researcher Maya Goodfellow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First published by Irish independent Tramp Press, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self became a phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller. Now picked up on this side of the water by Hamish Hamilton, Pine’s debut collection of autobiographical essays is a poignant, radically honest and fiercely intelligent account of the pains and joys of living as a woman in the 21st Century. She was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall, is a Kafkaesque nightmare whose richly-imagined world is very different from our own and yet all too familiar. Like 2012’s Capital (recently made into a TV series starring Toby Jones), Lanchester speaks to our contemporary preoccupations with an unnerving exactness. Keith Miller, reviewing Capital, noted that, ‘like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people; the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions’. Lanchester was in conversation with Daniel Soar, editor at the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the disintegration of the most significant relationship of his life, the demons Luke Turner has been battling since childhood are quick to return - depression and guilt surrounding his identity as a bisexual man, experiences of sexual abuse, and the religious upbringing that was the cause of so much confusion. It is among the trees of London's Epping Forest where he seeks refuge. But once a place of comfort, it now seems full of unexpected, elusive threats that trigger twisted reactions. Turner was in conversation with Olivia Laing (*Crudo*; *The Lonely City*). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Garfield – 'The schoolteacher who made the time fly, a one-man Blue Peter team for intelligent adults, a great British explainer’, according to the Observer – is never less, and usually much more, than entertaining. He was at the shop to talk about his latest book In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World, published by Canongate, and was in conversation with Andy Miller, presenter of Backlisted podcast and author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Man Booker International-shortlisted novelist Mathias Enard, 'the most brazenly lapel-grabbing French author since Michel Houellebecq', returns with Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (tr. Charlotte Mandell), his fourth novel to appear in English after Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass. In 1506, Michelangelo – a young but already renowned sculptor – is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople. Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a thrilling novella about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another. Enard was in conversation with Elif Shafak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. In Everyday Madness (4th Estate) Appignanesi explores her own and society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives. Appignanesi was in conversation with Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman (Bloomsbury). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Time Bomb Danny Dorling presents the evidence that in 2018 the growth in UK income inequality may have finally peaked. Inequality began growing in the 1970s and the damaging repercussions may continue long after the peak is passed. There will be speculation and a little futurology. Danny was in conversation with Faiza Shaheen, director of the think tank CLASS and former Head of Inequality and Sustainable Development at Save the Children UK. Faiza recently explained that the rich, like viruses, also develop resistance, in their case to redistributive taxes. They use their wealth and power to carve out tax loopholes and lower tax rates. Their fortunes balloon. Inequality grows. In which case why should inequality peak now? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Does the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin prevent it from genuinely understanding Russia? In Russia Without Putin (Verso), LRB contributor and Russophile Tony Wood argues that the core features of Putinism—a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society—are integral to the system set in place after the fall of Communism, a legacy of Yeltsinism rather than a resurgence of Soviet authoritarianism. Tony Wood was in conversation with James Meek, LRB Contributing Editor and author of Private Island (Verso). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Like Björk and FKA Twigs, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together.’ The Guardian As a musician and artist, Jenny Hval is renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery, and in her debut novel, Paradise Rot (Verso) she presents a hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire, where the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. ‘As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician,’ says Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, ‘Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder.’ Hval was in conversation with Laura Snapes, deputy music editor at the Guardian. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is it about the particularities of painting that has allowed artists to explore, in a variety of ways and with a sometimes surprising degree of freedom, the vexed relations between the mundane and the celestial? In his latest book Heaven on Earth (Thames and Hudson) art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. Professor Clark will be in conversation with LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Living With Buildings (Profile), Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions – through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way. Walking is Sinclair's defensive magic against illness and, as he moves, he observes his surroundings: stacked tower blocks and behemoth estates; halogen-lit glasshouse offices and humming hospitals; the blackened hull of a Spitalfields church and the floating mass of Le Corbusier's radiant city. Sinclair was in conversation with Patrick Wright, Professor of Literature and Visual & Material Culture, Kings College London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Democracy Hacked, Martin Moore examines how our own fragile political systems are being gamed by authoritarian states, shadowy hackers and unaccountable social media firms. Is our democracy more vulnerable than we realise? Can these sinister think-fluencers be reined in, and what can we do to restabilise and secure our political sphere? Martin Moore was in conversation with David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge and author of, most recently, How Democracy Ends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Marcus is one of contemporary American fiction’s most masterful writers. His new book of short stories, Notes from the Fog (Granta), is an emotional handbook to the baffling times we live in; a cabinet of brain-rearranging stories which are both horrifyingly strange and deeply touching. From parent/child relationships thrown off kilter to scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Marcus is the a chronicler of the present uncanny and the peculiar future. He was in discussion with Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marina Warner’s new collection of essays, Forms of Enchantment (Thames and Hudson), collects her writing on art from 1988 to the present, including pieces on (among others) Louise Bourgeois, Joan Jonas and Paula Rego. She brings to artists and artworks the same anthropological and mythological approach which informs her previous books, including Stranger Magic, From Beast to Blonde and Monuments and Maidens, arguing that the social position filled by art and aesthetics is increasingly best understood in terms of magic. Warner was in conversation with Eleanor Birne, author and contributor to the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Powers, one of America’s greatest novelists, often compared to Pynchon and Roth, read from and talked about his twelfth novel ‘The Overstory’ (Heinemann). Powers has always been remarkable for the seriousness with which he takes science and nature and their intersections with literature, and in ‘The Overstory’, which stretches in time and place from antebellum New York to the Pacific North West timber wars in the late 20th century, he provides us with an arboreal equivalent to Moby Dick, and a book that will permanently change – and for the better – the way you view the world around you. Powers was in conversation with the novelist Benjamin Markovits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In his new book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (Penguin) Slavoj Zizek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realisation of Marx's prediction that 'all that is solid melts into air.' With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? Zizek was in conversation with William Davies, author of Nervous States (Jonathan Cape). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.