London Review Bookshop Podcasts

Since 2019, the Orwell Prize has celebrated the best in contemporary political fiction. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Isabel Waidner, both on the prize’s 2022 shortlist, are in conversation with Sana Goyal, one of this year’s judges, talking about their novels there are more things and Sterling Karat Gold – books which not only take political issues as subject-matter but enact radical politics through their form. Find more upcoming events at the Bookshop here: lrb.me/upcomingevents Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Everything started with a photo. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely towards the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father. Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything natural but were the result of external forces - society, masculinity, my father - and that things could have been otherwise.’Édouard Louis’s tender memoir of his mother is an exquisite portrait of womanhood, motherhood, the trials of both and the transcendent, fragile joy of eventual liberation. Louis, one of the leading French writers of his generation, discussed A Woman's Battles and Transformations (Harvill Secker) with its English translator the novelist Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Harmony Silk Factory and author most recently of We, The Survivors. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seán Hewitt’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (Cape), won the Laurel Prize in 2020; Max Porter praised it for its reverence to the natural world and ‘gorgeous wisdom’, both of which are apparent in his new book, All Down Darkness Wide, a unique memoir of queer longing, trauma and depression.Hewitt talks to Andrew McMillan, whose debut collection, physical (Cape), was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award. His most recent book, pandemonium, was published in 2021.Find out about upcoming events: lrb.me/eventspod Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

At one time something of a backwater in the musical world, over the past few decades Scandinavia has become a musical powerhouse, encompassing all genres from Esa-Pekka Salonen to Björk. Copenhagen-based music journalist Andrew Mellor has travelled from Reykjavik to Rovaniemi to investigate the glories and the dark side of Nordic music, encountering composers, performers and audiences and to explore our complex fascination with the unique culture of the north.He was in conversation with James Jolly, radio presenter and former editor of Gramophone. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two journalists with a multilingual background – Anna Aslanyan, the author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, and Daniel Trilling, the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe – examine the role translation plays in reportage.News is an international commodity, subject to constant translation and retranslation as journalists frame, adapt and contextualise their source material to match their target audience. There is a curious contradiction between the right to information and the disinformation that results from it, precipitated by time pressure. Most journalism is done in a hurry, but is being the first to bring your readers a story from a distant part of the world worth the risk of spreading fake news?Find our upcoming events, online and in-person, here: lrb.me/upcomingevents Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed and The Idiot, joined us to read from and talk about her latest novel Either/Or. International travel, Harvard, Hungary and of course literature and philosophy collide in a heart-breaking and hilarious coming-of-age story by one of our most consistently thought-provoking writers.She was in conversation with Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, author of several works of non-fiction and most recently the annotator of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Margo Jefferson talks to Colin Grant about her latest book, Constructing a Nervous System. It’s a memoir unlike any other, taking as its focus each ‘influence, love and passion’ which have gone to shape Jefferson as a person: her family, musicians, dancers, athletes and artists, and one which, in Maggie Nelson’s words, ‘takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs’. Vivian Gornick describes it as ‘one of the most imaginative – and therefore moving – memoirs I have ever read’.Find our upcoming events, online and in-person, here: lrb.me/upcomingevents See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kate Folk's debut collection of short stories, Out There, combines science fiction, horror and psychological realism to explore the Kafkaesque precarities of social media and late capitalism: a house viscerally consumes its tenants, a curtain of void envelops the world, an army of AI chatbots is unleashed on the dating apps of San Francisco. Folk read from the book and was in conversation with Sharon Horgan, creator and star of the much-loved Channel 4 series Pulling and Catastrophe, who is working with Folk on adapting the collection's title story for television. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Written in 1954 but unpublished until after her death, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables is an intimate portrait, based on life, of female friendship on the cusp of womanhood. Its translator into English Lauren Elkin writes in her introductory note ‘“So is it any good?” people have asked me when I’ve told them I’m translating a ‘lost’ novel by Simone de Beauvoir … And I am relieved to say: yes. It is more than good. It is poignant, chilling and eviscerating.’Elkin, author of Flâneuse and No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute was in conversation with novelist and essayist Deborah Levy who has contributed an introduction to the UK edition. The event was chaired by Alice McCrum, programs manager at the American Library in Paris. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Back in March 2018 Iranian-born Kaveh Akbar launched his debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf with us at the bookshop. He joined us again in digital form, for his second, Pilgrim Bell (Chatto), a rich and moving collection which explores issues of ambivalence around ethnicity, national identity and religious belief. He read a selection from his work, and discussed it with Seán Hewitt, fellow poet and author of Tongues of Fire and forthcoming memoir All Down Darkness Wide (Cape). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Julian Barnes’s latest novel Elizabeth Finch, his first since The Only Story in 2018, is very much a novel of ideas. As a student sorts through the notebooks of his former teacher, the inspirational Elizabeth Finch, her ideas unlock for him the philosophies of the past and illuminate the present, underpinned by the story and ideas of Julian the Apostate, the late Roman Emperor who abandoned Christianity in favour of a neo-Platonic Paganism. Barnes was in conversation with Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man (Faber). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From debut author Nick Blackburn, a therapist specialising in LGBTQ+ issues, comes The Reactor, a powerful new addition to the literature of grief and recovery. Following the death of his father Blackburn examines the nature of destruction, both natural and human-made, drawing on a repertoire of film, music and pop-culture. Olivia Laing has described The Reactor as ‘Beautiful, strange and completely compelling’ and Helen Macdonald praises it as ‘One of the finest accounts of the mysterious workings of grief I have ever read.’ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Niven Govinden’s sixth novel Diary of a Film (Dialogue) follows an unnamed director through the streets of an Italian town as he muses on cinema, queer love and the creative process; on its hardback publication, during first lockdown, the Financial Times described it as ‘a wise and skilfully controlled novel, which can be read in an afternoon, but which radiates in the mind for much longer.’ To celebrate the novel’s release in paperback, Govinden talks to Gareth Evans, the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Moving Image curator.Find our upcoming events, online and in-person, here: lrb.me/upcomingevents See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On 29 November 2019 Usman Khan murdered Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers’ Hall in London. Recently released from prison after serving a sentence for terrorism-related offences, Khan was attending an event to mark the anniversary of a writing course he had attended while in prison. Novelist Preti Taneja had been one of his tutors.In Aftermath (And Other Stories), described by Nikesh Shukla as ‘a masterclass work of literary brilliance’, Taneja has created from the horrific events of that day a searing lament, interrogating the language of terror, trauma and grief, a powerful indictment of the prison system and an equally powerful plea for its abolition. Shewas in conversation with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Although born 20 years after Gwen John’s death, Celia Paul has always felt a strong affinity with the older artist. In Letters to Gwen John (Cape), described by Julia Blackburn as ‘A miraculous, door-opening book’, Paul has created in words and images an imaginary correspondence, and a spell-binding portrait of two women artists creating work against the grain, and entirely on their own terms. Paul talks about the book with the polymathic Olivia Laing, whose latest book is Everybody (Picador).Find out about our upcoming event, online and in person: lrb.me/lrbevents See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In her latest book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford) Helen Thompson argues that while the earthquake that was the Covid-19 pandemic profoundly shocked the world order, the fault lines along which it operated had been building for decades. Her story begins with the energy crises of the 1970s, takes in the financial crash of 2008 before leading us to our current state of unease, disorder and instability. Thompson is in conversation with Ann Pettifor, economist and author of The Production of Money and The Case for the Green New Deal.Find our upcoming events, online and in-person, here: lrb.me/upcomingevents See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After twenty years novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra makes a triumphant return to fiction. Described by Amit Chaudhuri as ‘his best work yet’ and by Neel Mukherjee as ‘unforgettable’, Run and Hide (Hutchinson Heinemann) explores, through the lives of three friends riding the high tide of India’s boom years, the implications and human costs of the thirst for wealth and power. Mishra, a regular contributor to the LRB, was in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Central to this modern myth is the ‘savage creative storm’ of 2-23 February 1922, when Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and completed the Duino Elegies in less than three weeks. 100 years on from its conclusion, the poet and critic Ange Mlinko discusses Rilke, the cult of Orpheus and intense productivity with Don Paterson, whose versions of the Sonnets to Orpheus were published by Faber (and the LRB) in 2006, and the writer and artist Edmund de Waal, for whom the work of Rilke has been a constant touchstone.Find our upcoming digital and in-person events here: https://lrb.me/lrbevents See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Fernanda Melchor first came to the attention of the English-speaking world with 'Hurricane Season', a tale of murder in a lawless Mexican village, described by Ben Lerner as ‘Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal’. In 'Paradais' she continues her exploration of violence, class and misogyny with a chilling story of two misfit teenagers living in a luxury housing complex, haunted by macabre fantasies of escape. Melchor discusses her work with Nicole Flattery. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

‘How do you write after Ulysses?’ asked the twice Booker-nominated novelist Tom McCarthy, author of C, Satin Island and most recently The Making of Incarnation, in the LRB in 2014. He reflects on working in Ulysses’s wake – as we all must – with the Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz, whose past installations have drawn extensively on Joyce’s writing (and interest in music). She also sings live. Chaired by the LRB's Head of Special Projects, Sam Kinchin-Smith.Presented in partnership with Shakespeare and Company. Photo credits: Nicole Strasser and Franziska Sinn. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.