London Review Bookshop Podcasts

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 memoir in a hugely entertaining meditation on water, film, dreams versus reality, and an empire on the brink of catastrophe. Barzini was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, who has described Aqua as ‘outrageously good’ and ‘unforgettable’.

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 living in a world full of violence and the gentle pleasures we embrace in order to survive that violence. Tuffaha will be reading from her work, and discussing it with writer, bookseller and film curator So Mayer, whose most recent book is Bad Language.

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 Dillon.

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 Chris Power. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Sarah Perry discussed her extraordinary new memoir with Amy Key.

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 conversation with writer and poet Joe Dunthorne, whose books include O Positive, Submarine and Children of Radium.

T.S. Eliot prizewinning poet Sarah Howe discusses her new collection with Sandeep Parmar.

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 that beneath the town's somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. Clark’s deft treatment of the material, combining erudition and humour, makes this forgotten piece of history very much a tale for our times. Clark was in conversation with acclaimed mythographer, historian and iconologist Marina Warner.

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 libraries with the novelist Ali Smith who, in Public Library and Other Stories, explored our many-faceted fascination with the book.

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 with Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights.

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 with the essayist and novelist Olivia Sudjic.

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, reggae pioneers and other figures from the island’s past, at the same time endowing Jamaican patois with a startling beauty and power. Goodison was in conversation with poet and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane.

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 reissuing Burnside’s three volumes of memoir, A Lie About My Father, Waking Up in Toytown and I Put a Spell on You with new introductions. Poet and essayist Michael Symmons Roberts and editor Hannah Westland paid tribute to Burnside and celebrated his life and work.

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.

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 (tr. Chris Andrews), have been described by Max Porter as ‘pure genius’. In this episode, Canadian writer Camilla Grudova discusses Kristóf’s work and place in the late modernist literary firmament with Jennifer Hodgson. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠ Get in touch: podcas

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.

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 work and from their own, and examined the abiding legacy of one of the 20th century’s most influential literary documents. Fellow poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw was in the chair.

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 health challenges. Edna Bonhomme was in conversation with journalist and novelist Rachel Connolly.

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, Pinochet in Piccadily and The Searchers, a joint portrait of Labour mavericks Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, was in conversation with journalist and novelist Melissa Benn, whose selection of her father Tony Benn’s political writings The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? was recently published by Verso. In the chair was historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, whose most recent book Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1985 is published by Oxford.

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 for Albert.