London Review Bookshop Podcasts

André Aciman talked to Brian Dillon about his latest book, Homo Irrealis (Faber and Faber), a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as Freud, W.G.Sebald, the films of Eric Rohmer and the cityscapes of Alexandria and St Petersburg.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In The Lark Ascending (Faber) Richard King, author of Original Rockers and How Soon is Now?, explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature. From the far west of Wales to the Thames Estuary and the Suffolk shoreline, taking in Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Dylan Thomas, Gavin Bryars, Greenham Common and the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, The Lark Ascending listens to the land and the music that emerged from it, to chart a new and surprising course through a familiar landscape. King was in conversation with Luke Turner, editor of the influential online music publication The Quietus and author of the memoir Out of the Woods.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following on from his bestselling and hugely entertaining Germania and Danubia, Simon Winder continues his idiosyncratic journey through Europe’s past with Lotharingia (Picador). Now almost forgotten, Lotharingia arose from the ashes of the Carolingian Empire and stretched from the North Sea coasts of what is now the Netherlands all the way to the Alps, encompassing myriad languages and nationalities. Despite its disappearance and ensuing obscurity Lotharingia, Winder shows, has exercised a surprising and powerful influence on the history of the continent of Europe, from the Early Middle Ages to the present day. Winder was in conversation about Europe’s lost country with psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In his book Conversations About Sculpture (Yale) art historian Hal Foster recapitulates the discussions he has had, over a period of two decades, with the legendary minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. Professor Foster, a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, was in discussion about his book, and about Serra's extraordinary work, with Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From this 2017 event: Bertolt Brecht, poet, playwright, theatre director and refugee, was a passionate critic of fascism and war. During World War Two, already many years into his exile from Nazi Germany, Brecht started creating what he called ‘photo-epigrams’ to create a singular visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. As his family fled from the Nazis, 'changing countries more often than our shoes,' Brecht took photographs from newspapers and popular magazines and added short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. These photo-epigrams are collected in War Primer, a remarkable work first published in 1955 and made newly available in a new edition by Verso.Chair Gareth Evans is joined by Deutsche Borse Prize-winning photographer Oliver Chanarin, Brecht scholar and translator Tom Kuhn and scholar and critic Esther Leslie in a panel discussion about this outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, re

Dana Spiotta was reading from her novel Innocents and Others, and talking about her work with with journalist and critic Alex Clark.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From this 2017 event, Canadian poet and novelist Anne MIchaels, author of the multi-award winning fiction Fugitive Pieces, 'the most important book I have read for forty years' (John Berger), presents two new titles. Infinite Gradation (House Sparrow Press), her first volume of non-fiction, is an astonishing meditation on the moral, emotional and philosophical implications of language and the creative act. All We Saw (Bloomsbury), Anne's latest collection of poetry, continues her mesmerising and lyrical exploration of love, loss and the mystery at the heart of being. She was in conversation with writer and broadcaster Bidisha.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rich with arguments that speak directly to our moment - a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before - Building and Dwelling (Allen Lane) draws on Richard Sennett's deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities. Sennett was in conversation with Anna Minton, author of Big Capital (Penguin).   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this event from 2018, Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine and author of several books of essays, fiction, history and art criticism, talked about his first book, In the Dark Room, published by Penguin in 2005 and now available again in a handsome new edition from Fitzcarraldo, with Sophie Ratcliffe, Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and author of On Sympathy (Oxford, 2008). Exploring the intersections of grief and memory, in his own personal history and beyond, Dillon evokes, in prose of great beauty and lucidity, the pain both of loss, and that of remembering the lost.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lynsey Hanley's Estates, first published by Granta in 2008, has become over the past decade one of the key texts to analyse Britain's urban landscape in the post-War period. To mark a new edition of her seminal work, Hanley, a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman, was in conversation with fellow journalist Dawn Foster, who has written widely on housing and social issues.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this event from June 2017, Brian Dillon talks to Max Porter about his latest book, Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Dillon has been fascinated by the essay form throughout his reading and writing life, and Essayism is at once a paean to this venerable and still vibrant genre, and a dazzling contemporary example of it. Porter is the author of the prize-winning Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Russian twentieth-century poetry is one of the pinnacles of European literature and we still know little about it. This event includes readings from Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Maria Petrovykh, Varlam Shalamov (still better known for his prose) and the emigre poet Georgy Ivanov, one of the very greatest of all Russian lyric poets. Stephen Capus, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and James Womack read some of their translations included in the new Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As the nights close in, what could be better than to gather around the (virtual) hearth and consider multi-award winning poet Robin Robertson's shadow-wracked new collection, Grimoire (Picador).A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits, and in Robertson's intense Celtic take, it tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology. This is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.Joining Robertson in conjuring the spirit of place, people and purpose are Alasdair Roberts, the extraordinary singer-songwriter and keeper of the tradition, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield, whose most recent collection is Byssus. With host, Gareth Evans..

Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air (Granta), following on the tails of her pamphlets understudies for air and capriccio, is one of the mostly hotly-awaited debut collections of 2020. She read from the collection, and was in conversation about it with Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland (Faber) and Lafarge’s editor at Granta.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

London, the Capital of world capitalism, a centre of global finance and a place of immense wealth and privilege, has an often unacknowledged red underbelly, stretching from Herbert Morrison in the 1930s to Sadiq Khan in the 2020s. In Red Metropolis (Repeater), Tribune culture editor and historian Owen Hatherley looks back at that tradition, and argues that a socialist, democratic, pluralist city could become a beacon of hope for the whole country and beyond. Hatherley is in conversation with Novara Media’s senior editor Ash Sarkar.Buy the book from us here: londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/owen-hatherley  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga presented her latest novel, the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber). The third in a trilogy which began with Nervous Conditions and continued with The Book of Not, This Mournable Body tells the ongoing story of Tambudzai and her struggles with patriarchy and the legacy of colonialism as she tries to make her way, on her own terms, in 1990s Harare. Dangarembga has for many years been as involved in politics as in literature and film (for her all three are intimately connected), and has served as education secretary for the Movement for Democratic Change. She is currently awaiting trial in connection with her role in peaceful anti-corruption protests in Zimbabwe, charges which have led many prominent writers around the world to leap to her defence.Dangarembga was in conversation with Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a gothic romance set in Georgian London which combines

In our event from 16 July 2019, Geoff Dyer talks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and, presciently, the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Historian and biographer Frances Wilson's most recent book is Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On publication of Andrew Motion's new book of poetry, Essex Clay, he joined Alan Hollinghurst in conversation at St George's Bloomsbury.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo) is a series of essays, each of them taking as its pretext a single sentence drawn from literature. What emerges is a dazzling experiment in criticism, a personal and at times polemical investigation of style, meaning and sense. Dillon was in conversation about his work with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather and Crudo.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Novelist, memoirist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB John Lanchester sets out to chill you to the virtual bone with his first ever collection of short fiction Reality and Other Stories (Faber). As if modern life weren’t unsettling enough, Lanchester makes it even more so with tales of haunted mobile phones, selfie sticks with demonic powers and other stories of technology gone horribly, horribly wrong in this retread of M.R. James for the Zoom generation.As we prepare for what might be the strangest Hallowe’en in living memory, John Lanchester discussed the uncanny with the LRB’s head of special projects Sam Kinchin-Smith.Buy the book from us here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/products/reality-and-other-stories-by-john-lanchester  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.