

London Review Bookshop Podcast
London Review Bookshop
Listen to the latest literary events recorded at the London Review Bookshop, covering fiction, poetry, politics, music and much more.
Find out about our upcoming events here More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crbkshppod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storebkshppod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Find out about our upcoming events here More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crbkshppod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storebkshppod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Episodes
Mentioned books

Sep 17, 2025 • 40min
Richard Scott, Emily Berry & Jane Yeh: That Broke Into Shining Crystals
‘With his electric Soho, Richard Scott has arrived like a lightning bolt in our midst’ said T.S. Eliot Prize judge Sinéad Morrissey on the publication of his first collection in 2018. To celebrate publication of his second, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber), Richard will be reading alongside fellow poets Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Stranger Baby and Unexhausted Time) and Jane Yeh (Discipline, Marabou and Ninjas).
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crbkshppod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storebkshppod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Sep 10, 2025 • 1h 10min
Ariana Reines & Alice Blackhurst: Wave of Blood
Poet and playwright Ariana Reines will be making a rare UK appearance to read from her new collection with Divided Books, Wave of Blood, a lyric essay she has described as an ‘experiment in ethics’ reckoning with the US wars on terror and their repercussions.
Reines was joined in conversation by critic and academic Alice Blackhurst, whose most recent book is Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crbkshppod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storebkshppod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Sep 3, 2025 • 54min
Emily Callaci & Helen Charman: Wages for Housework
In Wages for Housework (Allen Lane) Emily Callaci, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of a movement that shot to prominence in the 1970s, distilling a century of feminist struggle and critique into a single bold slogan. Focusing on five women who helped forge and fight for it – Selma James, Mariarosa Della Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod – Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Callaci was in conversation with Helen Charman, author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Aug 27, 2025 • 1h 2min
Oluwaseun Olayiwola & Camille Ralphs: Strange Beach
In his debut collection Strange Beach – the very first title in Fitzcarraldo’s new poetry series – poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola finds the body to be a porous landscape across which existential dilemmas of gender, sexuality and race are enacted and explored. Poet and novelist Andrew McMillan writes of Olayiwola’s work ‘the tideline of the poetic phrase is constantly shifting, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language, every grain of a word held up to the light to consider its myriad refractions.’
Olayiwola read from Strange Beach, and was joined in conversation about his work by the poet and critic Camille Ralphs.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Aug 20, 2025 • 1h 2min
Sue Tilley & Charlie Porter: On Leigh Bowery
From his arrival in London in 1981 – clutching a suitcase and sewing machine – to his death from AIDS on New Year’s Eve 1994, Leigh Bowery – the man described by Boy George as ‘modern art on legs’ – led an extraordinary life; a life chronicled in the equally extraordinary biography by his closest friend and confidante Sue Tilley, reissued by Thames and Hudson this February.
Tilley was at the shop to discuss Bowery’s life and legacy with Charlie Porter, author of What Artists Wear, and whose debut novel Nova Scotia House was published by Particular Books in March.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Aug 13, 2025 • 45min
Deborah Levy & Adam Thirlwell: The Position of Spoons
In The Position of Spoons novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy invites the reader to share in her interior world, mapping her own life through the lives and works of the artists and writers who have shaped her own practice, from Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego.
Levy, described by Lauren Elkin as ‘one of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction’, talks about it here with Adam Thirlwell.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Aug 6, 2025 • 1h 2min
Matthew Hollis & Norman McBeath: The Seafarer
Matthew Hollis has reworked the classic Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer into a poem desperately relevant for our times: in a society threatened by climate change and the coming-loose of social bonds, Hollis invites us to hear, as the Anglo-Saxons did, the spirit music of land, wind and sea.
Hollis’s text is one half of a collaborative project with the photographer Norman McBeath, who was at the shop with Hollis to present and talk about their work. The discussion was chaired by Sara Hudston of Hazel Press.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Jul 30, 2025 • 57min
Carol Mavor & Lauren Elkin: Serendipity
In Serendipity (Reaktion) Carol Mavor uses Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War, Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes hidden in a drawer, Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra and her own memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate in New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol, to muse upon the serendipitous afterlives of objects. Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester and prolific author of books and articles about art and culture, was in conversation about fragments, remnants and what remains with novelist, essayist and translator Lauren Elkin.

Jul 23, 2025 • 1h 6min
Philip Terry & Marina Warner: Dante’s Purgatorio
In his 2014 Dante’s Inferno poet and provocateur Philip Terry moved the action to Essex University. His Purgatorio (Carcanet) transports us to nearby Mersea Island, where Ted Berrigan leads our author up an artificial mountain to meet with artists Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, as well as Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka Shankar.
Philip Terry was joined in conversation with Marina Warner at the Bookshop.
More from the Bookshop:
Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: https://lrb.me/bkshppod
From the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/pod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Jul 16, 2025 • 1h 2min
Fitzcarraldo at 10: Kate Briggs, Brian Dillon & Helen Charman
Brian Dillon, author of the insightful trilogy on essayism, and Kate Briggs, a talented translator of Roland Barthes and author of This Little Art, join the discussion with expert moderator Helen Charman. They explore the art of literary translation, tackling its challenges and nuances. The conversation dives into the playful use of punctuation and how it shapes voice. They reflect on balancing structured planning with spontaneity in writing, and the deep connection between personal experience and narrative craft, offering a wealth of literary inspiration.