London Review Bookshop Podcast

John Burnside’s new novel, Havergey (Little Toller), is set on a remote island in the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe. From our event in 2017, Burnside reads from the novel and is in conversation with Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso). The event is chaired by Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus blends fact and fiction to give ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family’. The year is 1959, and at Corbin College in New York academic Ruben Blum finds himself playing reluctant host to a visiting Israeli historian, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, who has unexpectedly arrived with his family in tow. The historian is the hawkish Benzion Netanyahu, and the family includes his 10-year-old son Benjamin, future Prime Minister of Israel. The resulting conflict of cultures and world views is comically played out in the format of a very unconventional campus novel. He was in conversation about his work with novelist, essayist and regular contributor to the LRB Colm Tóibín. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talking Politics: History of Ideas, David Runciman’s podcast introductions to the most important thinkers and theories behind modern politics, has been one of the few saving graces of a year of lockdowns, helping to make sense of our predicament through the revelatory ideas of Hobbes and Hayek, Fanon and Fukuyama, Bentham and De Beauvoir.To mark the conclusion of the second series, David was joined by Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger and Bland Fanatics, among other books, for a conversation about those subjects of David’s that Pankaj has also written about extensively – including Gandhi, Rousseau and Nietzsche – alongside an alternative canon of non-Western theorists of politics and crisis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everybody has a body, a source of both pleasure and pain. In her latest book Everybody (Picador) Olivia Laing uses the life and work of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich as an investigative tool to uncover the strange, subtle and sometimes perverted ways we think about the physical object we function within. Fundamentally, this exciting and challenging book is about how we might strive for freedom with, and not despite, our bodies. Olivia Laing was in conversation with Katherine Angel who has, most recently in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, and in several previous books, wrestled with issues of bodily integrity and bodily freedom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Described by Claire Louise Bennett as ‘lithe and ambitious’ and by Toby Litt as ‘a miracle in book form’, Isobel Wohl’s debut Cold New Climate (Weatherglass) is likely to be one of the most talked about novels of 2021. Encompassing the limits and expectations of love, life and family and the devastation and elation each of those can bring, and our fears for a future that is disappearing as we speed towards it, it’s a book that’s vibrantly conscious of the modern world, and slyly conscious of the tradition it’s coming from. Isobel Wohl was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, a fellow New Yorker, and author of Flaneuse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Throughout her career and across her many books Jacqueline Rose has been teasing out the political implications of violence, and in particular the way it concerns and interacts with the social constructions of gender. In her latest passionate, polemical work On Violence and On Violence Against Women (Faber) she confronts the issue head on, taking in trans rights, the sexual harassment of migrant women, the trial of Oscar Pistorius and the writings of Hisham Matar and Han Kang.Rose is in conversation with Jude Kelly, Founder and Director of The WOW Foundation.Buy the book here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/products/on-violence-and-on-violence-against-women-by-jacqueline-rose Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Mort and Dan Richards were at the shop to talk about poetry and mountaineering. Mort read from her latest collection from Chatto and Windus, No Map Could Show Them (a Poetry Book Society recommendation), which recounts in Mort’s inimitable style the exploits of pathbreaking female mountaineers. Afterwards she was in conversation with Dan Richards, whose book Climbing Days (Faber) explores the writing and climbing exploits of his great-great aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley and I.A. Richards. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carrie Brownstein was at the shop to discuss her book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, with Lavinia Greenlaw. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.