London Review Bookshop Podcast

In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso)—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on #MeToo, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?Angel is in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather (Picador).Buy the books here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/katherine-angel-and-olivia-laing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Power’s first novel A Lonely Man (Faber) is a powerful, menacing exploration of the nature of truth, fabrication and identity. ‘If you're a fan of existential crises’ writes Jon McGregor, ‘family dramas, Putin-era paranoias, and Bolaño-style multiplicities, and want to see them woven into one taut novel, you're in the right place.’ Chris Power was in conversation about A Lonely Man with the critic Alex Clark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beginning in San Francisco in 1981, the era of punk and nascent gay pride, Rebecca Solnit’s latest book Recollections of My Non-Existence (Granta) is a powerful memoir of growing both as a woman and an artist, drawing on the powers of literature, activism and solidarity in the face of an apparently unbreachable patriarchy. The struggle to find a voice and to find a way to make that voice heard are brilliantly captured and dissected by one of feminism’s, and indeed the world’s, foremost thinkers. Rebecca Solnit was in conversation about her life and work with historian Mary Beard, whose most recent book is Women & Power: A Manifesto. Both of our speakers are regular contributors to the pages of the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Already well-known for her novels – Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner has over the past two decades been writing essays, reviews and reportage as insightful and surprising as her fiction. In The Hard Crowd (Jonathan Cape) she has selected 19 pieces, covering diverse topics: art, literature, music, politics with essays on Marguerite Duras, Jeff Koons, wildcat strikes, a visit to a Palestinian refugee Camp and the music scene of her hometown San Francisco.She talks about her work with art critic and frequent contributor to the LRB Professor Hal Foster.Buy the books here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joshua Cohen, one of Granta magazines ‘Best Young American Writers’ for 2017, was at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel Moving Kings, published by Fitzcarraldo. Described by James Wood in the New Yorker as ‘A Jewish Sopranos… burly with particularities and vibrant with voice… utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy’, Moving Kings interweaves the housing crisis in contemporary New York with the history of conflict in the Middle East. Joshua Cohen was in conversation with Jon Day, lecturer in English at King's College, London and LRB contributor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From this 2018 event: In Municipal Dreams (Verso), John Boughton charts the often surprising story of council housing in Britain, from the slum clearances of the Victorian age through to the Grenfell Tower disaster. It’s a history packed with incident – with utopians, visionaries and charlatans, with visionary planners and corrupt officials – and Boughton combines it with an architectural tour of some of the best remaining examples, as well as some of the more ordinary places that millions of people have come to call home. He's in conversation about his book with Owen Hatherley, architectural historian and author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Holly Pester's debut collection, Comic Timing (Granta), is disorienting, radical and extremely funny; Pester has a background in sound art and performance, having worked with the Womens' Library, the BBC and the Wellcome Collection, and is an unmissable reader of her own work. She read from Comic Timing and was in conversation with Vahni Capildeo, whose most recent collection is Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, 2019), and Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta and author of Kingdomland (Faber, 2019). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having an engineer as a father and an art school education, Paul Spooner became, predictably, a school-teacher, then a lorry driver. A chance meeting with mechanical model-maker Peter Markey in Cornwall led him to discover his true métier – the almost extinct profession of automatist, or maker of automata. Since then he has been relentlessly making mechanical playthings, mostly of wood, some of them not, mostly small, some of them not, all of them intricately engineered, eccentrically beautiful and endlessly fascinating.He is in conversation about his work with Rosemary Hill, architectural historian and contributing editor at the London Review of Books. She first encountered Paul Spooner's work at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden in the 1980s and has admired it ever since. Her books include God's Architect, a biography of A W N Pugin, and Stonehenge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patricia Lockwood was in conversation about her new book, No One Is Talking About This (and a lot else besides) with fellow LRB contributing editor, John Lanchester. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brigid Brophy (1929-95) was a fearlessly original novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism and prison reform. Her many acclaimed novels include Hackenfeller’s Ape, The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball – which Faber reissued at the end of last year – as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. She also wrote about Mozart for the LRB, and contributed 19 other unforgettable pieces in the paper’s first years, on subjects ranging from Michelangelo to Germaine Greer, animal cruelty to structuralism.Eley Williams, who wrote the foreword for the new edition of The Snow Ball, is in conversation with Terry Castle and Bidisha about Brophy the essayist and novelist, Brophy then and now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.