London Review Bookshop Podcasts

John Clegg and Jess McKinney launch their new Hazel Press poetry collections with reading and conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion (Granta) is a one-of-a-kind ‘lyric epic’, weaving memoir, essay and poetics into one of 2021’s most eagerly awaited debut poetry collections. Sy-Quia read from the book and was in discussion with Will Harris, whose own Granta debut RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The event was chaired by Rachael Allen, Granta’s poetry editor, whose most recent collection is Kingdomland (Faber). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of autobiographical novels published in English as My Struggle propelled him to international fame, near universal acclaim and not a little controversy. His latest book The Morning Star (Penguin Press) is both a radical departure from that series, and a return to fiction as we traditionally know it. A group of holidaymakers in southern Norway witness the sudden and mysterious appearance of a new star, with consequences far beyond what they, or anybody else, could have predicted. Knausgaard is in conversation with journalist Jake Kerridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

What could be simpler than a dish of pasta with tomato sauce? According to food historian Massimo Montanari’s latest book A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce (Europa), quite a lot. Montanari was in discussion with food writer Rachel Roddy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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 – ‘alway

Leo Boix and Andrew McMillan read and talk to celebrate the publication of Boix's long-awaited debut collection in English, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto), a book described by Ilya Kaminsky as of ‘a wide tilt and scope; it sings the doors open.’ Andrew McMillan’s third collection pandemonium is just out from Jonathan Cape, following hot on the heels of the prizewinning physical and playtime. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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

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