London Review Bookshop Podcasts

In Abolish The Family, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis asks us to imagine a world without families. She traces the history of family abolitionism, before introducing us to the groundbreaking politics of radical feminists and gay liberationists that have called for a society organised without the family at its core.Lewis was joined by Lola Olufemi, author of Experiments In Imagining Otherwise.Find more events at the Bookshop website: https://lrb.me/eventspodSubscribe to Close Readings: https://lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vigdis Hjorth’s latest novel Is Mother Dead (translated by Charlotte Barslund; Verso) is a characteristic blend of thriller, metafiction, meditation on art, motherhood, belonging and surveillance. She cites as influences Brecht and Céline. Others have compared her to Kafka and Thomas Bernhard, but in truth, she is quite unique. Hjorth was in conversation with writer and broadcaster, Shahidha Bari.Find more events on the Bookshop website: https://lrb.me/eventspodSubscribe to Close Readings: https://lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chantal Mouffe is one of the world’s leading left thinkers on power and populism. In her latest book, she proposes the creation of a broad coalition of movements under the banner of a Green Democratic Revolution to confront the impending ecological crisis.Mouffe was joined in conversation with James Schneider, co-founder of Momentum and author of Our Bloc: How We Win.Find more events at the Bookshop website: https://lrb.me/eventspodSubscribe to Close Readings: https://lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A storyteller, mythologist and poet, Martin Shaw’s latest collection, s t a g c u l t (Hazel Press, 2022) lifts a lantern to a kind of haunting we can’t quite exorcise, or don’t wish to. Shaw was joined in conversation by Claire Armitstead, associate culture editor at the Guardian and presenter of their weekly books podcast.Buy a copy of s t a g c u l t from the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/stagcultFind more events at the website: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the spring of 2020 Lara Feigel found herself locked down with her partner, her two children and the works of D.H. Lawrence. In Look! We Have Come Through! (Bloomsbury) she blends biography, autobiography and literary criticism in a way familiar to readers of Free Woman, her book about Doris Lessing.Feigel was joined in conversation about Lawrence and her own rediscovery of him with author Lauren Elkin.Buy a copy of Look! We Have Come Through!: https://lrb.me/lawrencefeigelFind upcoming events at the Bookshop website: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Perdendosi: an instruction, typically at the end of a piece, for musicians to gradually diminish in volume, tempo and tone, to the point of disappearance. Photographer Norman McBeath uses the term to describe the way his images of fallen leaves portray how they lose colour and volume, turning from living things into something like parchment. During lockdown, McBeath’s images were a constant companion to artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who responds to them here with a series of texts evoking change, decay and transformation, a unique collaboration beautifully documented in a new book from Hazel Press.McBeath and de Waal are in conversation with Alexandra Harris, Professor of English at Birmingham University and author of Weatherland and Romantic Moderns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows was published in 1922 and is only now beginning to receive its due. The collection stands alongside the better-known masterpieces of that year in its distillation of the spirit of the age and its outsize influence.Writer, researcher, and LRB contributor Kevin Okoth joined poet Raymond Antrobus and author Paul Mendez to discuss McKay's extraordinary life and work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his fifth novel The Last White Man (Hamish Hamilton) Mohsin Hamid continues his exploration of cultural and racial displacement, commenced so brilliantly with Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West. In what has been described as a contemporary remoulding of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ a man awakes one morning to find that his skin has turned dark. Hamid was in conversation with Jo Hamya, author of Three Rooms (Vintage). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dawn Foster, chronicler of austerity Britain and leading voice from the housing crisis, passed away last year aged 34. Foster, author of Lean Out (Repeater, 2016) and LRB contributor, was a working class feminist who rose to prominence as a newspaper columnist and broadcast commentator; she was a fearless champion for those at the sharp end. In the week of the Queen's funeral, friends and colleagues discussed her life and legacy: K Biswas, critic and director of Resonance FM and On Road Media; James Butler, LRB contributing editor and co-founder of Novara Media; Lynsey Hanley, broadcaster and author; and Gary Younge, author and sociology professor at the University of Manchester.Read Dawn Foster's work in the LRB: lrb.me/dawnfosterFind more Bookshop events via the website: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chef proprietor at London’s Quo Vadis, Jeremy Lee’s commitment to locality, excellence and simplicity has made the restaurant a must-eat-at destination for every resident or visiting gourmet. He’s also, in stark contrast to the popular image of the celebrity chef, the jolliest and most affable host you might ever hope to be fed by. His new book Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many (4th Estate), ‘one of the most beautiful cookery books I have ever seen’ according to Rachel Roddy, encapsulates his approach to food and cooking: first and foremost, it is about giving and receiving pleasure.Lee is in conversation about food and pleasure with the writer and critic Olivia Laing, who has written of him: 'I worship Jeremy Lee … He has a true gift for living, and for writing about it too.Find out about upcoming events: https://lrb.me/upcomingevents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Knocking Myself Up (Dey St.), Michelle Tea brings all her characteristic passion, wit and occasionally alarming candour to bear on the trials, tribulations and joys of trying to become, and becoming, a queer parent. Witch-enhanced honey, intrusive medical procedures, impertinent questions and generous drag queens collide in a memoir that is both hugely entertaining and, in the end, profoundly moving.Tea was in conversation with Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff and Sterling Karat Gold.Find more upcoming LRB Bookshop events via the website: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Now published for the very first time, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping (House Sparrow Press) is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Somewhere between a fairytale, acid trip and road movie, the work lays the foundations for many of the themes and styles that characterise Jarman’s work in film, painting and design.Joining host So Mayer, author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula), to explore the book were writer Philip Hoare, Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen and artist Michael Ginsborg. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Remember the Details, Skye Arundhati Thomas reflects on the Indian protest movement that began in mid-2019 against xenophobic and casteist citizenship laws. In the wake of the state erasure of these events, it asks what it means to remember, and how words and imagery inscribe reality into history. Thomas was joined by Preti Taneja, writer, activist, and contributing editor at The White Review.Find more upcoming LRB Bookshop events via the website: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Mort’s latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has just been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the latest accolade in what has been an incredibly productive year: 2022 has also seen the publication of her memoir of walking and motherhood, A Line above the Sky, and a collaborative lyric essay (with Kate Fletcher), Outfitting, exploring fashion and wild ecology.Caroline Bird’s latest book is Rookie, a long-awaited selection gathering material from her seven Carcanet collections – including The Air Year, which won the Forward Prize in 2020. She is also a playwright, and was an official poet for the London Olympics in 2012.Mort and Bird discuss and read from their work.Find upcoming events at the Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/upcomingevents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In Small Fires (Pushkin), essayist and food writer Rebecca May Johnson takes a different path, rewriting the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge, revelation and radical thought.Johnson, author of the popular Substack ‘Dinner Document‘, was in conversation with Jonathan Nunn, who writes about the London food scene for eater.co.uk and edits the ‘Vittles’ newsletter.Find more upcoming LRB Bookshop events via the website: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in English for the first time a century ago thanks to the efforts of his tutor at Cambridge Bertrand Russell, set out to solve all of the problems of philosophy in less than 100 pages, through a hierarchically numbered series of logical statements, or prepositions. He didn’t succeed, exactly – indeed, Wittgenstein himself was one of the book’s harshest critics – but that didn’t stop it becoming widely recognised as the most important work of philosophy of the 20th century. And its influence has extended into other artistic and intellectual fields too, from literature to cinema and music, and beyond.Joining Ray Monk, biographer of Wittgenstein and Russell and professor of analytic philosophy, for a conversation about the power of the Tractatus and the unparalleled breadth of its influence, were Signe Gjessing, whose Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, a dazzling poetic reimagining, was published earlier this year, and the celebrated composer, musician and i

Andrey Kurkov is the celebrated Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin and 18 other novels. His letters from Ukraine about his family’s flight from Kyiv became essential daily listening on the Today programme in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion.Two weeks after the Russian invasion began, Kurkov was joined by Oksana Zabuzhko, Robert Chandler, James Meek, Ilya Kaminsky, and Lyuba Yakimchuk for a special event chaired by Peter Pomerantsev.All the proceeds from ticket sales were donated to the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, an NGO coordinating the provision of medical care by civilian doctors on the Ukrainian front line.Find more upcoming LRB Bookshop events via the website: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her journalism Juliet Jacques writes about art, literature, culture and politics from a distinctive trans perspective. Front Lines (Cipher Press) collects seminal pieces written between 2007 and 2020. Juliet Jacques writes in her introduction ‘I never believed any journalism was objective, nor that there was any point in even trying to be. Above all, activism is needed to fight this, with journalism to support it: there is no point in pretending to be objective in our work, as the stakes remain just as high as they were back in 2010, perhaps even higher.’ Jacques is in in conversation with journalist Owen Jones.Find more upcoming events at the Bookshop here: http://lrb.me/upcomingevents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two exciting young poets were at the shop to read from and talk about their work. Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut poetry collection Quiet (Faber) circles around ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood. ‘This book is a seismic event,’ writes Kayo Chingonyi. ‘Its vibrations will be felt for a long time to come.’ Editor of Poetry London André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection High Desert (Bloodaxe) is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest, encompassing wildfires, Spanish colonial history, racial tensions and the recent pandemic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As he enters late middle age, Geoff Dyer turns, in The Last Days of Roger Federer, to the question of late – or, indeed, last – style. Lisa Appignanesi writes, ‘Geoff Dyer's wry meditations on mortality and late style have a dazzling way of dispelling gloom. Nietzsche and the Turin horse, vaporised Turner, dolorous Dylan, antics on courts and at Burning Man, Dyer's Last Days had me laughing aloud, a sure signal of deft seriousness. What is there to say except if this is late Dyer, it's great Dyer.’ Geoff is in conversation with the poet and critic Mark Ford.Find more upcoming events at the Bookshop here: http://lrb.me/upcomingevents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.