London Review Bookshop Podcasts

2021’s Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah is in conversation about his work with author Kamila Shamsie. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Diane Di Prima began writing her revolutionary ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago. To launch an expanded 50th anniversary edition of Revolutionary Letters from Silver Press our event featured readings by Helen Charman, CA Conrad and Mira Mattar and a conversation about Di Prima with Sophie Lewis, Francesca Wade and Sarah Shin. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Oppositions collects Mary Gaitskill’s essays of 30 years; taking in subjects as diverse as Nabokov, horse-riding and the Book of Revelation, they’re as sharp and incisive as her fiction. Gaitskill is in conversation about the book with Octavia Bright, author and host of the ‘Literary Friction’ podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In ​The Woman Who Buried Herself (Hazel Press) Alys Fowler takes us deeper and deeper into, and under the soil, until there is no longer a separation. This story emerged like a fairy tale told to her during long hours daydreaming whilst weeding, in a sense it is her garden’s own tale which ventures into mythic realms, exploring the seen and unseen, mysteries of science, the animal and the organic in consciousness of life and love.Fowler was reading from the book and in discussion with Bee Wilson, LRB contributor and the author of the recent The Way We Eat Now (Harpercollins). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dante’s Purgatorio is as much an allegory of spiritual transformation as it is one of psychological rebirth, personal healing, and self-transcendence. Combining a graceful lyricism with decades of study, D.M. Black’s translation and commentary reveal new dimensions in Dante’s many portraits of people trying to find their way through life and what comes after. This fresh, bilingual edition of Purgatoriowas published on September 14th 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Black is in conversation with writer and translator Robert Chandler and psychoanalyst Giovanna di Ceglie. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

John Clegg and Jess McKinney launch their new Hazel Press poetry collections with reading and conversation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tariq Ali has been observing and commenting on Afghanistan for more than four decades. He vehemently opposed the Soviet occupation in 1979, and the NATO invasion and subsequent invasion in 2001. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan (Verso) collects together for the first time his most important writings on this troubled country, and contains a new introduction written in the wake of NATO’s ignominious retreat.Ali is in conversation with LRB contributing editor James Meek, who as foreign correspondent for the Guardian witnessed the war in Afghanistan at first hand. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion (Granta) is a one-of-a-kind ‘lyric epic’, weaving memoir, essay and poetics into one of 2021’s most eagerly awaited debut poetry collections. Sy-Quia read from the book and was in discussion with Will Harris, whose own Granta debut RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The event was chaired by Rachael Allen, Granta’s poetry editor, whose most recent collection is Kingdomland (Faber). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hazel Press’s four 2020 titles were all LRB Bookshop bestsellers; we’re proud to be launching the first tranche of their four 2021 titles, one an electrifying collaborative poem, one a unique anthology.Katrina Naomi and Helen Mort were reading from Same But Different, a lockdown collaboration which began as simply an exchange of poems; but like Wang Wei and Pei Di’s Wang River Collaboration, their poems soon started to speak to one another. Belinda Zhawi, Ella Duffy, Maggi Hambling and Georgie Henley read their own and one other poem from O, an anthology about sensuality, masturbation, orgasms, and pleasure, with ourselves and with others; offering a safe space to celebrate our bodies, lust, passion, fun, joy, defiance, tenderness and intimacy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of autobiographical novels published in English as My Struggle propelled him to international fame, near universal acclaim and not a little controversy. His latest book The Morning Star (Penguin Press) is both a radical departure from that series, and a return to fiction as we traditionally know it. A group of holidaymakers in southern Norway witness the sudden and mysterious appearance of a new star, with consequences far beyond what they, or anybody else, could have predicted. Knausgaard is in conversation with journalist Jake Kerridge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, in Dialogue with a Somnambulist (House Sparrow Press) her stories, essays and personal portraits, collected here for the first time, reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in the long.Chloe talks to the novelist, essayist and critic Lynne Tillman, and Gareth Evans. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What could be simpler than a dish of pasta with tomato sauce? According to food historian Massimo Montanari’s latest book A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce (Europa), quite a lot. Montanari was in discussion with food writer Rachel Roddy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

William Gardner Smith’s roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living against the backdrop of violence of Algerian War-era France, has been out of print for decades, but as one reviewer put it, ‘the issues Smith raises … resonate at least as much now as they did six decades ago.’ The story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn’t find in America, its account of his disillusionment and dawning consciousness of Algeria’s struggle for independence includes one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris Massacre of 1961.Adam Shatz, who wrote the introduction for NYRB’s new edition, discussed The Stone Face’s achievement and contemporary resonances with Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities at UCL and the Holberg Prize-winning author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic and Darker Than Blue.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival. But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB’s new selection of Fitzgerald’s writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late in life … she was an old hand as a literary journalist.’ It is this Fitzgerald, ‘a reviewer, a writer of introductions, a literary judge, and a speaker on panels and at literary festivals’, who is the subject of this special event to mark the publication of the LRB’s latest Selections volume.Lee is in conversation with Susannah Clapp, who worked on many of her LRB pieces, and has described her as an ideal contributor who needed no ‘handling’: ‘She wrote to length, she wrote to time, she wrote without fuss, she wrote a lot’ – on subjects ranging from Alain-Fournier to Adrian Mole, Stevie Smith to Wild Swans – ‘always

Leo Boix and Andrew McMillan read and talk to celebrate the publication of Boix's long-awaited debut collection in English, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto), a book described by Ilya Kaminsky as of ‘a wide tilt and scope; it sings the doors open.’ Andrew McMillan’s third collection pandemonium is just out from Jonathan Cape, following hot on the heels of the prizewinning physical and playtime. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson's On Freedom (Jonathan Cape) explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.Nelson is in conversation here with Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions (Picador) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In Flâneuse Lauren Elkin celebrated the woman walker in the city, revealing how aimlessly wandering through New York, Tokyo, Venice – but most of all Paris – invigorates the soul and focuses the mind. In her latest book No. 91/92 (Les Fugitives) she joins the commuter crowds on the bus with a love letter to Paris written in iPhone notes. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, her diary queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, as she registers the ordinary makings of a city and its people.She talks about her travels through the city, literature, the mind and the human body with novelist, playwright and essayist Deborah Levy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

W.G. Sebald was one of the most important literary figures of the bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries. Twenty years after his death, we were joined by acclaimed biographer Carole Angier, the author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury), described by Alberto Manguel as ‘an extraordinary achievement, able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions’. She was in conversation with Caroline Moorehead, the biographer of Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and others, whose most recent book is A House in the Mountains (Harper Collins). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.