London Review Bookshop Podcast

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.

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 Hosted on Acast. See 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. Hosted on Acast. See 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 Hosted on Acast. See 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. Hosted on Acast. See 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 Hosted on Acast. See 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. Hosted on Acast. See 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.