London Review Bookshop Podcasts

Sophie Mackintosh’s powerful dystopian debut novel The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton) comes with some dazzling endorsements. ‘Eerie, electric, beautiful’, Daisy Johnson writes, ‘It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book’. Katherine Angel, with whom Sophie was in conversation at the Bookshop, described it as 'immensely assured, calmly devastating.’ Sophie Mackintosh was the 2016 winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in Granta and TANK magazines. Katherine Angel’s Unmastered was published by Penguin in 2012.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? Crudo, the first novel from Olivia Laing, author of three critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. Laing was in conversation with Ali Smith.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sociologist Didier Eribon and novelist Édouard Louis were both born into conservative working-class families in provincial France. Oppressed both intellectually and sexually by racism and homophobia, they each escaped to academic life at the Sorbonne, where Eribon was for a while Louis’s tutor. Of Eribon’s ‘Returning to Reims’, first published in 2009 and now reissued by Allen Lane, Édouard Louis has written that it ‘marked a turning point in my writing life.’ Louis’s first book ‘The End of Eddy’ was published in English to huge acclaim by Harvill Secker in 2017, and his second, ‘History of Violence’ (also Harvill Secker) coincides with the reissue of Eribon’s classic memoir. The two authors read from their books and discussed their lives and works with festival moderator and curator Steven Gale.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Joanna Walsh’s latest book Break.up (Tuskar Rock), a feminist revisionist travelogue, and romance for the digital age, explores the spaces between lovers, between thinking and doing, between fiction and memoir, as well as ‘the sheer fragility of experience and feeling’ (Colm Tóibín). Lara Feigel’s Free Woman (Bloomsbury), ‘the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read’ according to Deborah Levy, is a memoir in which Feigel experiments with sexual, intellectual and political freedom while reading and pursuing Doris Lessing. Walsh and Feigel read from their books, and talked about what writing can, can’t, should and shouldn’t do. The evening was chaired by Jennifer Hodgson, writer, critic and editor of Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sheila Heti’s latest novel Motherhood (Harvill Secker) confronts, in the characteristic fiction cum essay style which she pioneered in How Should a Person Be? one of the fundamental dilemmas of early womanhood – to have children or not. She read from her work and discussed it with Sally Rooney, bestselling author of Conversations with Friends (Faber).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One of the most acclaimed Polish writers of her generation, Olga Tokarczuk has won multiple prizes, most recently the Man Booker International for her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, and published, for the first time in English, by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Tokarczuk was in conversation with Man Booker shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy. This event was part of the Poland Market Focus programme at the London Book Fair, supported by the British Council.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hera Lindsay Bird’s debut poetry collection, the eponymous Hera Lindsay Bird (Penguin), became a cult bestseller in her native New Zealand, and led Carol Ann Duffy to describe her as ‘without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance’ – Duffy’s own selection from Bird’s work Pamper Me to Hell and Back has just been published by Smith Doorstop. Jack Underwood, senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, is the author of Happiness (Faber) and co-editor of the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1986, having just been diagnosed with HIV, the artist, film-maker and writer Derek Jarman decided to create a garden at his home on the bleak, beautiful coast at Dungeness. Modern Nature, his journal of a year in that garden, and a moving account of coming to terms with his own (and everything else’s) mortality, was first published in 1991, and now appears in a new edition from Vintage Classics. In her introduction Olivia Laing describes it as ‘the most beautiful and furious book of all time’. To celebrate the life and work of this unique and uniquely talented artist, almost a quarter century after his death, we were joined by Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, Philip Hoare, whose book Leviathan won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006, and film-maker Sarah Wood.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hilary Wainwright, co-editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow of the Transnational Institute, has been a significant figure on the left of the Labour Movement since the heyday of the GLC. Her latest book A New Politics from the Left (Polity) reflects on the recent reinvigoration of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and presents a grass-roots up vision of the future that is both profoundly radical and entirely practical. She was in conversation about her book, and the future of the left in Britain, with journalist, activist and author Melissa Benn, and Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate (OR Books).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Journalist Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark when he interviewed her at her Tuscan home in 1990. It marked the beginning of a long and close friendship. In Appointment in Arezzo (Polygon) Taylor gives a warm and humorous account of that friendship, as well as reflecting on Spark's early life and on her complicated relationships with her Jewish roots, her native Scotland and with her son Robin. He was in conversation about his book, and about the life and work of Muriel Spark, with fellow enthusiast the novelist Ali Smith.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

‘I think to be a mother for five minutes is to know that the world is unjust, and that our hearts are impure.’ In her latest book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Faber) Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, regular LRB contributor and prominent cultural and literary theorist, investigates the question of what we ask of mothers, and what we hold them responsible for, often against all sense of reason. Drawing on literature, newspaper reports and psychoanalysis, Rose uncovers how our expectations of what mothers can and should do are damaging both to women, and the world. She was in conversation about her ideas with Devorah Baum, lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and author of Feeling Jewish and The Jewish Joke.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Professor Terry Eagleton’s more than 40 books have explored, in consistently invigorating ways, the many and surprising intersections and confluences of literature, culture, ideology and belief. His latest book Radical Sacrifice (Yale) draws on the Bible, the Aeneid, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Henry James in a brilliant meditation on the concept of sacrifice, fundamentally reconfiguring it as a radical force within modern life and thought. Professor Eagleton was in conversation about his latest work with Daniel Soar, senior editor at the London Review of Books.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin) has been attracting ecstatic reviews and endorsements. The poet Fanny Howe writes ‘The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love, is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection’. Kaveh Akbar was joined in reading and conversation by Richard Scott, whose debut collection Soho (Faber) paints an uncompromising portrait of love and shame in contemporary London.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Timothy Morton was at the shop to discuss his latest work, Being Ecological (Pelican), which argues for a radically different approach to global warming. Rather than continually anticipating an extinction that is already upon us, being ecological and re-joining the biosphere can be liberating: if humans give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we can refocus on pleasure. The evening was chaired by Gareth Evans.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Novelists Tessa Hadley and Ariana Harwicz discuss the dark art of fiction writing with critic Catherine Taylor. Ariana Harwicz is one of the leading lights of contemporary Argentinian literature, and *Die, My Love*, a gripping thriller set in France, is the first of her books to appear in English. This event marked the launch of Charco Press, a new publisher of outstanding contemporary Latin American literature appearing in English translation for the first time.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, his final work and published in the year of his death in 1768, has been somewhat neglected of late in favour of his earlier The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Narrated by Yorick, one of the dramatis personae of the earlier book and a barely disguised self-portrait of Sterne himself, A Sentimental Journey is marked by the author’s trademark sharp wit, good humour and sense of irony. 250 years after its first publication, this landmark in the history of travel writing was discussed by the writer and traveller Iain Sinclair and the cartoonist Martin Rowson, author of a graphic novel adaptation of Tristram Shandy and illustrator of a new edition of A Sentimental Journey produced by Uniformbooks for the Laurence Sterne Trust, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. This event took place in partnership with the Laurence Sterne Trust.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Whether railing against the clean eating movement or reviewing fast food restaurants for Vice, journalist, writer and 2013 Bake Off runner up Ruby Tandoh is a refreshing new voice in food writing. In her third book Eat Up! (Serpent’s Tail) Tandoh displays her characteristic straight-talking and self-criticism in a dazzling dissection of food fads, gourmet culture and fake science. She discussed food, sex, race, misogyny and other pressing issues with fellow journalist and writer Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

American poet Danez Smith and Zambian-born British poet Kayo Chingonyi read from their latest collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Kumukanda (both Chatto and Windus). Two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry, their work investigates race and the frustrations of being expected to write only about race, as well as gender, politics, exile, longing, and everything else that poetry can encompass.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is distraction? Do we need more or less of it? And how might it be sensed, indulged, or explored in the essay and other kinds of writing? This event brought together three essayists - Adam Phillips, Anne Stillman, and Matthew Bevis - to consider the values and vagaries of distraction and its close relatives. The talk was run in conjunction with the Cambridge Humanities Review, an independent journal of long-form essays and reviews.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To celebrate the publication of In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (Profile/Wellcome Collection), Susie Orbach was in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi. In this new updated edition, Orbach, who The New York Times called the 'most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud' explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatized case studies.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.