London Review Bookshop Podcasts

W.G. Sebald was one of the most important literary figures of the bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries. Twenty years after his death, we were joined by acclaimed biographer Carole Angier, the author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury), described by Alberto Manguel as ‘an extraordinary achievement, able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions’. She was in conversation with Caroline Moorehead, the biographer of Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and others, whose most recent book is A House in the Mountains (Harper Collins). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker bobs and weaves between humour and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television, and collapses distinctions between the personal and the political, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Parker read from the collection and talked to Rachel Long, whose Forward nominated debut collection My Darling from the Lions was published by Picador last year. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond (Fitzcarraldo), has been a firm bookshop favourite since its release, for its unique, irreverent voice and attention to the parts of experience which go overlooked or unspoken. Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up, is one of our most eagerly-anticipated books of 2021; Bennett was in conversation with Sheila Heti. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Owen Hatherley’s Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso) argues for the city as a socialist project. Hatherley was in conversation with Juliet Jacques. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

In twelve witty and insightful essays novelist, memoirist and all-round thinker Jeanette Winterson explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity. Drawing on mythology, religion, art, history and gender theory as well as on science, Winterson’s take on the future of our species is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Winterson was in conversation with Victoria Turk, features Editor at Wired magazine. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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