London Review Bookshop Podcast
Listen to the latest literary events recorded at the London Review Bookshop, covering fiction, poetry, politics, music and much more. Find out about upcoming events and discover author of the month, book of the week and more. Subscribe to the London Review of Books and explore their Close Readings podcast, audiobooks, and store.
Episodes
Lavinia Greenlaw & Mark Wallinger: On Difficulty (and Poetry)
In On Difficulty (Faber), her latest book of non-poetry, poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw explores the fascination, terror and opportunity of wrestling with the opaque, the obscure, the complex and the indeterminate. Is poetry really difficult, and do we like it more when it is? Can difficulty provide its own solution? These and other questions are answered by Lavinia Greenlaw in conversation wi
Claudia Rankine & Victoria Adukwei Bulley: Triage
Triage (Allen Lane), Claudia Rankine’s new book, is an unclassifiable piece of writing, blending narrative, criticism and lyricism to create something capable of facing ‘the collective devastation of the present’ (in Saidiya Hartman’s words). Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence: we eavesdrop on their conversation, memories and enduring friendship. Rankine was in conversatio
Transitions: Sita Balani & Jay Bernard
In Transitions, the latest title in MACK’s ‘Discourse’ series writers Sita Balani and Jay Bernard, guided by Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘conjuncture’, draw on literature, social theory, and lived experience to offer an urgent account of our fractured present. Their dialogue takes in Britain’s colonial past, the advent of AI and the legacy of extractive capitalism to ask the urgent question: what does
Amy Larocca and Gaby Wood: ‘How to Be Well’
In How to Be Well, journalist and essayist Amy Larocca takes on the behemoth which is the contemporary ‘wellness’ industry, in prose which Joanna Rakoff has described as a ‘magical synthesis of crackerjack reporting, incisive cultural commentary, and, most importantly, elegant, self-reflective memoir’. From active charcoal toothpaste to green juice enemas, Larocca explores the science and history
Edna Bonhomme & Lola Olufemi: Tending to Our Wounds
Haitian-American scholar Edna Bonhomme, now based in Berlin, is well placed to unpick what it means to be Black at home and abroad. In Tending to Our Wounds, part memoir, part history, part polemic, she unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism, and charts a breathtaking course between the individual and the collective, between past and future, and between oppression and re
Sex, Poetry and the Turning World: Sarah Howe, Sandeep Parmar and guests
Sex in novels is commonplace, but how do poets write about sex--and is it any good? Join Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar for a live recording of the LRB podcast Poetry and the Turning World, with special guests Sophie Robinson (Prairie Oyster) and Oluwaseun Olayiwola (Strange Beach). Poetry and the Turning World is a special short series on the LRB Podcast, looking at the ways in which contemporary
Holly Pester & Luke Roberts: Cafés
Holly Pester’s Cafés (Fitzcarraldo) continues the trajectory which, since her debut Comic Timing, has made her one of the most exciting poets writing. An elegy for lost communal space, and a stylish political intervention, Francesca Wade has described Cafés as embodying ‘a public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester's brilliance builds this cafe up and inv
Sara Baume & Emily LaBarge: Opening Night
Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, the
Sophie Lewis & Keiran Goddard: Femmephilia
In a series of provocative essays encompassing Marilyn Monroe, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats, Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now, seeks to put the femme back into feminism. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized fe
Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles: Andrew Dickinson and Peter McDonald
To call Elizabeth Bishop one of the greatest female American poets of the 20th century is to make too many qualifications. Increasingly, critical opinion has converged with Dwight Garner’s assertion that she was perhaps ‘the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century’. To mark the publication of his new book, Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing, Andrew Dickinson was in conversation with the poet
Colin Grant & Michael Rosen: What We Leave We Carry
Historian Colin Grant and WritersMosaic writers have travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather the voices and experiences of immigrants living in Britain. In What We Leave We Carry we meet, amongst others, a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, and a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Together, these accounts
Erin Maglaque & Hannah Dawson: Presence
Erin Maglaque’s first book, Presence, explores the hidden history of the female body through deep archival research: fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries come together to make tangible a vanished past, unfamiliar because of its deliberate suppression. The artist Celia Paul has described Presence as ‘a landmark book’, which makes the fema
Eli Davies & Rebecca May Johnson: The Spinster Cookbook
The kitchen has always been a complex space for women: a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself? In The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo Press) Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships an
Rachel Long & Sarah Howe: Sparrow on the Rooftop
Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Prize, the Costa, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus) is the eagerly-awaited follow-up: Saba Sams has described it as ‘gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny’. Long read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Howe, poet
Michael Bracewell & Leo Robson: The Smiths
In Michael Bracewell’s new novella The Smiths an anonymous narrator recounts the impact of the iconic pop group on his life. Accompanied by the French actress Carole Bouquet he embarks on a picaresque journey from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood, via a park bench in Cavendish Square. Deeply romantic and laced with comedy - not unlike the band themselves – The Smiths is an affectionate ce
Martha Sprackland & James Butler: John of the Cross
The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot. Dark Night (Penguin Classics) gathers all of John’s poetry, together with a selection of his prose. The book’s translator, poet Martha Sprackland, joined LRB contributing editor James Butler for a
Olivia Laing & Jack Parlett: The Silver Book
Venice, September 1974. A chance meeting between a young English artist and Danilo Donati, production manager for Fellini and Pasolini, leads us into a tale of queer love, political intrigue and brutal murder. Emily Watlington wrote in Art in America ‘In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing's novel feels eerily timely.’ To mark the paperback publication of
Lauren Elkin & Shahidha Bari: Vocal Break
In Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power Lauren Elkin uses her own experience of training as a young soprano in the 1990s as a springboard for a powerful investigation of the female voice, from Maria Callas to Beyoncé and beyond. Part manifesto, part cultural history and all full-throated celebration, Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms and hymn of praise. Lauren Elkin was in conversation with w
Doireann Ní Ghríofa & Rachael Allen: Said the Dead
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s new book Said the Dead is part history, part ghost story and part unreliable memoir, exploring the lives, presences and forgotten voices of a derelict Victorian mental asylum in Cork. Ní Ghríofa, whose previous book A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was in conversation with Rachael Allen, author of the poetry collections Kingdomland and God Comple
Daniel Trilling & William Davies: If We Tolerate This
Regular LRB contributor Daniel Trilling has been researching and writing about the far right in Britain and beyond for more than a decade. His latest book If We Tolerate This (Picador), published ahead of the momentous English local, Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections on May 7, is a short and powerful polemic examining how far right ideas have come to dominate the political agenda, and outli
M. John Harrison & Julia Armfield: The End of Everything
The great M. John Harrison – ‘The closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ according to the New Statesman – returns to the shop to present his latest novel The End of Everything. In a post-apocalyptic Britain a beachcomber makes his living collecting artefacts washed up on the Channel shore. But when he comes across a strange, shape-shifting creature he realises he must take it i
Brian Dillon & Olivia Laing: Ambivalence
In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in
David Keenan & Andrew O’Hagan: Boyhood
David Keenan’s Boyhood (White Rabbit) opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, blessed with the power to see into the past and future by a perhaps imaginary angel, leads us on a journey from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, as the novel builds to an extraordi
Andrew Durbin & Tash Aw: The Wonderful World That Almost Was
Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary burning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living w
Michelle Tea: Valencia at 25
Michelle Tea’s queer autofictional classic Valencia, which Torrey Peters described as ‘one of the few truly life changing books I've encountered’, is a quarter of a century old; to celebrate, her UK publisher Serpent’s Tail have released a 25-year anniversary special edition, with a new introduction by Maggie Nelson. Tea was in conversation with Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear and Don’t F
Chloe Aridjis & Jennifer Higgie: The Shadow of the Object
While recuperating in hospital in Mexico, Flora meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. Then things take an unexpected turn…
Ardijis was reading from The Shadow of the O
Sarah Schulman & So Mayer
To celebrate the publication of their respective new books, So Mayer (Bad Language) and Sarah Schulman (The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity) discussed the radical affinities between their work in exposing the power structures underpinning both the ways in which we communicate, and the language we use to do so.
You can buy Bad Language and The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity from the Londo
Margaret Drabble: The Great Good Places
Margaret Drabble’s new collection, The Great Good Places, is an omnium gatherum of essays, stories and memoir, drawing on a lifetime’s worth of insight and wisdom. ‘Generous, perceptive, and good-humoured, Margaret Drabble is always a delight to read’, wrote Joan Bakewell; The Great Good Places has all these qualities in evidence. Drabble was in conversation with Tessa Hadley, whose most recent no
Polly Barton & Chal Ravens: What Am I, A Deer?
What Am I, A Deer?, Polly Barton’s debut novel, takes on the vagaries of translation – linguistic translation, self-translation, and reinvention – which she’s previously explored in the much-loved Fifty Sounds, also published by Fitzcarraldo. ‘The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schrödinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the ‘black box’ of the kara
Luke Kennard & Will Eaves - Black Bag
In an audacious new take on the campus novel Luke Kennard’s protagonist, a penniless out-of-work actor, takes on a job unlike any other. He is hired to sit silently at the back of a lecture hall, concealed within a black bag. Black Bag (John Murray) examines, hilariously, modern masculinity, romance, identity and much else besides. ‘Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being
Claire-Louise Bennett & Ben Pester: Magic & Mechanics
In Magic and Mechanics, the latest in Scratch Books’ ‘Reverse Engineering’ series, six writers – George Saunders, Claire-Louise Bennett, Mark Haddon, Camilla Grudova, Amber Medland and Colin Barrett – present and disassemble one of their recent short stories. To celebrate its launch, join Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with novelist Ben Pester as they discuss their work, exploring the ways
Jeremy Harding & Kevin Okoth: Analogue Africa
In Analogue Africa, (Verso) essayist and LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding explores the anti-colonial imagination through the works of African artists and film-makers, including Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina.
‘In Analogue Africa, [Harding] is writing at the peak of his powers’, writes Adam Shatz, ‘eloquent, per
John Lanchester & Hattie Crisell: Look What You Made Me Do
When a steamy Netflix show called ‘Cheating’ becomes the much-talked-about megahit of the moment, baby-boomer Kate is alarmed to find it contains secrets from her marriage to architect husband Jack that only she should know. John Lanchester, LRB contributing editor and author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital, explores popular culture, the dynamics of marriage and intergenerational conflict in h
Wayne Holloway-Smith: RABBITBOX
Rabbitbox is Wayne Holloway-Smith’s first foray into long-form narrative, but retains the originality, compression and power which characterize his poetry collections (most recently Love Minus Love, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize). Exploring a mother and her young son’s reactions to an all-consuming domestic threat, Joelle Taylor has described how, in Rabbitbox, Holloway-Smith ‘bunches langu
Lauren J. Joseph & Olivia Laing: Lean Cat, Savage Cat
Artist and film-maker Lauren J. Joseph’s first novel At Certain Points We Touch, described by Olivia Laing as ‘A stone-cold masterpiece’ was hailed as a Debut Novel of the Year by the Observer in 2022. Her second novel takes us from the night-spots of Soho to the febrile Berlin music scene. A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to fee
Isabel Waidner & Sarah Wood: As If
Isabel Waidner’s latest novel As If (Hamish Hamilton) is an existential farce exploring fading hopes and lost dreams through the medium of two very different, but very similar men. ‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ wrote Jude Cook in the Guardian. Waidner was in conversation with artist and film-maker Sarah Wood.
You can buy a copy of As If from the
Vigdis Hjorth & Catherine Taylor: Repetition
Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has been a shop favourite ever since we discovered Long Live the Post Horn, a powerful tale about loneliness and the struggle between capitalism and humanity told through the microcosm of the Norwegian postal service.
Hjorth is in conversation with Catherine Taylor to discuss Repetition (Verso), her sixth novel to be published in English, translated by her indefatig
James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me
In his latest novel Your Life Without Me (Canongate) journalist and novelist James Meek investigates the unpredictable links between personal trauma, family dysfunction and political violence. A retired schoolmaster is invited by the police to meet a former pupil accused of plotting to destroy St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘This is his best novel yet, writes Alex Preston, ‘a dark and unsettling meditation
Gavin Francis & Philippe Sands: The Unfragile Mind
Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder. One in four adults are prescribed psychiatric medication. These numbers represent a huge and recent expansion in mental health labelling, but reveal nothing of the experience of those seeking help.
In The Unfragile Mind, Gavin draws on conversations with patients, colleagues, and his thirty years of practice to
Anouchka Grose & Katherine Angel: The Revolution Will be Internalised
Anouchka Grose, a psychotherapist specialising in climate anxiety, became disillusioned with the apparent futility of activism as it is normally conceived, resolved to look inwards, seeking a way to revolutionise the self in response to polycrisis. The Revolution Will Be Internalised (Indigo) documents that inward journey, encompassing ego-dismantling retreats, animal communication, and tantra. Gr
Amber Husain & Emily LaBarge: Tell Me How You Eat
In Tell Me How You Eat (Hutchinson Heinemann), Amber Husain draws on her own experience of the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders as well as on an omnivorous diet of reading that ranges from Eleanor Marx to the Black Panthers and beyond to ask profound questions about our relationship with food, and what a truly healthy diet might be, both for ourselves and for society as a whole. She was
Vittles 2: Lauren J Joseph, Sheena Patel, & Odhran O’Donoghue
To mark the release of the second print edition of contemporary food and culture magazine Vittles, writers Sheena Patel and Lauren J Joseph will discuss the short stories they contributed to the issue. One of the through lines of Issue 2 – which is themed around the notion of ‘Bad Food’ and celebrates the gross, vulgar and unaesthetic aspects of how we feed ourselves that don’t align with the aspi
Rebecca Perry & K Patrick: May We Feed the King
In Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King (Granta) the narrative switches between two increasingly intermingling timelines, medieval and contemporary, as a modern curator becomes absorbed in the story of a half-forgotten monarch struggling to maintain his rule. Perry is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections Beauty/Beauty and Stone Fruit and was in conversation about her debut novel with fel
Chantal Joffe & Olivia Laing: Painting Writing Texting
In 2016 the painter Chantal Joffe approached the writer Olivia Laing to ask if they would sit for a portrait. Out of that meeting emerged a close friendship and collaboration, and out of that collaboration has emerged Painting, Writing, Texting (Mack), an account in words and images of what can happen when two ways of looking at the world converge. Painter and writer were at the shop to talk about
Aftershock: Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili & Tom Stevenson
In an episode of the LRB podcast Aftershock recorded live at the London Review Bookshop, Daniel Soar and contributors discussed the long aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror, from Iraq and Afghanistan to drone strikes, mass surveillance and the weaponisation of the financial system. What is the legacy of Bush and Cheney’s ‘forever war’ in today’s White House? Joining Daniel Soar were Patrick Co
Juliet Mitchell & Frances Morris: Psychoanalysis and Feminism
When Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published in 1974 Freudianism was seen by most feminists as ineradicably patriarchal and inimical to the women’s movement. Mitchell’s brilliant exegesis, drawing on Lacan and Laing as well as Freud himself, instead sees Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and seeks to use
Marie-Laure Bernadac & Lauren Elkin: Knife-Woman
To mark the publication of Knife Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois (Yale) its author, curator and art historian Marie-Laure Bernadac was in conversation about the life and work of Louise Bourgeois with the book’s translator, Lauren Elkin. ‘Bernadac's remarkable biography has made the telling of Louis Bourgeois's life into a new art’ (Juliet Mitchell).
You can buy a copy of Knife Woman: The Life
Jeanette Winterson: One Aladdin, Two Lamps
Author of thirteen novels, several collections of short fiction, memoirs, books for children and screenplays, Jeanette Winterson is one of our greatest and most accomplished storytellers. In her latest book One Aladdin , Two Lamps (Cape) Winterson turns to the art of storytelling itself, using the legend of Shahrazad in The Thousand and One Nights as a springboard to ask, and suggest answers to, s
Michèle Roberts & Alice Blackhurst: French Cooking for Two
Michèle Roberts discusses the follow-up to Bookshop bestseller French Cooking for One with Alice Blackhurst.
You can buy a copy of French Cooking for Two from the London Review Bookshop.
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Joe Sacco & Skye Arundhati Thomas: The Once and Future Riot
In The Once and Future Riot (Cape) cartoonist Joe Sacco turns to the communal riots that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 2013. With works such as Palestine, Safe Area Goradze, The Fixer, War Junkie and Footnotes in Gaza Sacco single-handedly invented the genre of graphic reportage, and remains its leading exponent. He was at the shop to talk about his work on the frontline of global conflict, and the role
Isabella Hammad & Laleh Khalili: Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun
Ghassan Kanafani, born in Acre in 1936, displaced by the Nakba in 1948 and assassinated in Beirut in 1972, was one of the leading Palestinian writers of his generation. In an event to mark a new edition of his masterpiece Men in the Sun (Verso) British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad (Enter Ghost) was in conversation about his work, both literary and political, with Laleh Khalili, Professor of
Holly Smith & Owen Hatherley: Up In the Air
In Up in the Air (Verso) architectural historian Holly Smith tells the story of Britain's multi-storey council housing from its beginnings to the present day, charting how at different times it became the symbol of the welfare state’s idealistic principles, and of its failures. Building on extensive research, Smith tells the story of high-rise housing from the perspective of those who lived there,
Anne Enright & Clair Wills: Attention
Attention (Jonathan Cape) collects for the first time Booker prize-winning novelist Anne Enright’s non-fiction. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, taking us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, delving into Enright’s own family history and offering new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. Enright was in c
Julia Blackburn & Sarah Clegg: Remedies
In Remedies (Hazel Press) playwright, poet, novelist, biographer, historian and much else besides Julia Blackburn meditates on the images, amulets and incantations that have been used to cure illnesses from ancient times to the present day, offering a set of poetic keys to unlock the mysterious, subtle space between mind and body. Blackburn was in conversation with the folklorist Sarah Clegg, auth
Chiara Barzini & Olivia Laing: Aqua
The Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork, carries water from the Owens Valley, across the desert to a barren corner of California. Without it, the city of Los Angeles and the film industry as we know it would not exist. In Aqua (Canongate) writer and film-maker Chiara Barzini explores this contested land and waterscape, blending travel writing, philosophy, cultural history and m
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and So Mayer: Something About Living
ena Khalaf Tuffaha was born in Seattle but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and her poetry reflects on her Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage and on her experience as a first-generation American immigrant. In Something About Living (the87press), winner of the National Book Award in 2024, her poems interweave the history of Palestinian suffering and resistance with the challenges of livi
Lynne Tillman & Brian Dillon: Thrilled to Death
Over the last four decades, Lynne Tillman has established herself as one of America's most audacious writers with works such as Haunted Houses (1986) and Weird Fucks (2021). In Thrilled to Death (Peninsula) Tillman has curated a definitive selection from her short fictions, by turns outrageous and melancholy, meditative and abrupt. Tillman read from her work, and was in conversation with Brian Dil
Georgi Gospodinov & Chris Power: Death and the Gardener
In his latest novel Death and the Gardener Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s leading writer of fiction and winner of the International Booker Prize (forTime Shelter), reflects on the subject of loss in a tale about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia.
Gospodinov will be presenting his work in conversation with writer and critic
Sarah Perry & Amy Key: Death of an Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry discussed her extraordinary new memoir with Amy Key.
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Patricia Lockwood & Joe Dunthorne: Will There Ever Be Another You
In her second novel Will There Ever Be Another You (Bloomsbury), LRB contributing editor Patricia Lockwood, one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, conducts a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times, centring on the life of a young woman whose internal disarray echoes that of the world at large. Lockwood was in con
Sarah Howe & Sandeep Parmar: Foretokens
T.S. Eliot prizewinning poet Sarah Howe discusses her new collection with Sandeep Parmar.
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Christopher Clark & Marina Warner: A Scandal in Königsberg
Our preeminent historian of Germany turns, in A Scandal in Königsberg (Allen Lane), to an intriguing sequence of events that has fascinated for many years. In 1830 Königsberg, now the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was a somewhat sleepy backwater, famous mainly for having once been the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But its tranquility was shattered by a religious scandal, implying
Ian Patterson & Ali Smith: Books – A Manifesto
In Books: A Manifesto (Weidenfeld) subtitled How to Build a Library, poet and critic Ian Patterson reflects on a life spent with and formed by books. Now, as he constructs the last of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of reading in our lives - from Proust to Jilly Cooper, from golden-age detective novels to avant-garde poetry. He talked about books and librari
Stephen Grosz & Helen MacDonald: Love’s Labour
In his bestselling debut The Examined Life psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explored how we learn to live. Now in Love’s Labour (Chatto) he turns to the equally perplexing topic of how we love. Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there? Grosz was in conversation
Ruby Tandoh & Olivia Sudjic: All Consuming
In All Consuming (Serpent’s Tail) Ruby Tandoh wittily explores the way we eat now, from social media to restaurant critics to the perfect dinner party to the meteoric rise of bubble tea. Felicity Cloake, author of Completely Perfect, writes ‘Fascinating, funny and devastatingly honest, a must-read on modern food culture in all its technicolour cheese-drenched glory.’ Tandoh was in conversation wit
Lorna Goodison & Fawzia Muradali Kane: Dante’s Inferno
Leading Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison will be in London to present her latest work, Dante’s Inferno (Carcanet). As much a transformation as a translation, Goodison’s reworking casts the great Jamaican folklorist and poet Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett-Coverley as Virgil, and moves the action to the Caribbean, where we encounter other poets, including Goodison’s friend Derek Walcott, local politicians, r
Michael Symmons Roberts & Hannah Westland on John Burnside
The Empire of Forgetting (Cape) is the final collection of the Scottish poet, novelist and essayist John Burnside, who died in May last year. Fellow poet Kathleen Jamie describes him as ‘a titan of literature…. His passing leaves a gap not only in our literature, but in our ability to exist in the world. He increased the possible ways of our being.’ To coincide with this publication, Cape are reis
Miriam Toews & Octavia Bright: A Truce That Is Not Peace
In her first work of non-fiction A Truce That Is Not Peace (4th Estate), acclaimed novelist Miriam Toews spirals out from a question asked of her at a literary festival in Mexico City – ‘Why do you write?’ – in a dazzling exploration of grief, guilt, futility and creativity. Toews read from her work, and discussed it with Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace.
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Camilla Grudova & Jennifer Hodgson: Ágota Kristóf’s ‘I Don’t Care’
Forced to leave her native Hungary by the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, Ágota Kristóf took up residence in Switzerland and began writing in French. Most famous for her Notebook Trilogy – ‘A book through which I discovered what kind of person I really want to be’ (Slavoj Žižek) – her short stories, now available for the first time in English as the Penguin Classic volume I Don’t Care
Lauren Elkin & Lou Stoppard on Simone de Beauvoir
Inspired by the new editions of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1966 novel The Image of Her and travel diary America Day by Day (Vintage), translator and novelist Lauren Elkin and writer and curator Lou Stoppard talked about the life, works and legacy of one of feminism’s most enduring icons.
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Ariel at 60: Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Lavinia Greenlaw & Richard Scott
Sylvia Plath’s second collection Ariel (Faber) was published in 1965, two years after the poet’s death, in a version somewhat reconfigured from her draft copy by Ted Hughes. Plath’s original arrangement was restored in 2004 in an edition edited by her daughter Frieda Hughes. To mark Ariel’s 60th birthday and the new Faber edition, poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Richard Scott read from Plath’s w
Edna Bonhomme & Rachel Connolly: A History of the World in Six Plagues
Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola and COVID-19 – in Edna Bonhomme’s groundbreaking analysis of six pivotal moments in medical history, the pandemic is revealed to be inevitably political. Urgent and illuminating, A History of the World in Six Plagues is far more than a history of disease – it is a call to reimagine a more equitable future in the face of ongoing global he
Andy Beckett & Melissa Benn: Can the Left Save Labour?
Throughout its history the Labour left has been a key source of energy and ideas for the party – but left-right tensions have long been the cause of damaging divisions. What lessons does this story hold for today’s left and the struggling Starmer government? Are they irreconcilable enemies - or can they ever work together?
Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out, Pin
Peter Gizzi & Anthony Joseph: Fierce Elegy
Reviewing Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy in the Guardian, Oluwaseun Olayiwola described how, ‘in its beautiful, fiery insistence, this collection redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living’. The judges of the 2024 T.S. Eliot prize agreed. Gizzi read from his work and was in conversation with Anthony Joseph, chair of the judges, who was awarded the Eliot prize in 2023 for his Sonnets fo
Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife
Alexander Baron’s cult classic The Lowlife, first published by Black Spring in 1963, has recently been reissued by Faber. Set in Hackney in the aftermath of WW2, Baron’s novel follows the descent of Zola-reading gambler Harryboy Boas into the murky world of East End gangsters, hoodlums and loan sharks. Iain Sinclair, who has written an introduction about Baron for the new edition, was discussing t
Marina Warner & James Butler: Sanctuary
Drawing on a lifetime’s engagement with myth, literature and history as well as on her work with young refugees in Sicily in the ‘Stories in Transit’ project, Marina Warner’s latest book Sanctuary (William Collins) explores the concept of hospitality, the cult of relics, shrines and festivals, the imagination of place, and travelling tales and asks profound questions about political ideas of a rig
Samuel Fisher & Helen Charman: Migraine
’Samuel Fisher’s prose moves with swift and sure tread across the glinting particulars of locality, until that condition, that curse, with its pains and pleasures, becomes universal. Our fate. Our challenge. Our discarded future' – Iain Sinclair
In a London ravaged by climate change, where the few survivors suffer from an epidemic of chronic pain, accompanied by haptic and visual hallucinations
Kim Hyesoon & Will Harris: Autobiography of Death
Kim Hyesoon is one South Korea’s foremost poets. Her groundbreaking and radically feminist poetry – ‘a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism’ (Griffin Prize Judges) – has been translated into English by poet Don Mee Choi for over a decade.
We celebrate the latest of these translations – the Griffin Prize-winning masterpiece on mourning and survival, Autobiography of Death,
Nell Stevens & Olivia Laing: The Original
In The Original (Scribner), Nell Stevens’s second novel, Grace Inderwick grows up as the ward of a cold Victorian family in which the only warmth and affection is provided by her cousin Charles. After many years missing at sea, Charles returns to the household. But is this the real Charles or an impostor? Nell Stevens brilliantly reconfigures the familiar trope of the returning stranger as a gripp
Liliane Lijn & Jennifer Higgie: Liquid Reflections
In 1958 the 18-year-old Liliane Lijn left New York for Paris, determined to become an artist. Her captivating memoir Liquid Reflections (Hamish Hamilton) tells the story of her meetings with poets, painters, philosophers and revolutionaries and of the development of her groundbreaking artistic practice, pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and feminine mytholo
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