London Review Bookshop Podcast

A.L. Kennedy discusses a personal mixtape of early influences (Cummings, Burgess, Pinter, Feiffer), with reference to their appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. The series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Ford discusses John Ashbery, with reference to his appearances at New York’s 92nd Street Y, with the 92Y’s Reading Series producer Bernard Schwartz. The 92Y has been a home to the voices of literature for 80 years, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. The Writers on Recordings series invites contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation features rare archival recordings and is led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center. The series is produced in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd Poet Laureate of the USA. Her last collection, Wade in the Water, was nominated for a Forward Prize; her last-but-one, Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Eternity, her Selected Poems, gathers together the best of her four books. Hilton Als has called her ‘a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, to history.’ Jay Bernard’s eagerly-awaited first collection, Surge, draws a line between the New Cross Fire of 1981 and the fire at Grenfell Tower. Bernard’s pamphlet, The Red and Yellow Nothing, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The two poets read from and discussed their new collections. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Every new baby is its own crisis.’ The ‘mother ship’ of Francesca Segal’s memoir is the neonatal intensive care unit where she was confined for fifty-six days after the premature birth of her twin girls. Mother Ship (Chatto and Windus) is at once a celebration of female friendship, a medical thriller and a love poem to Segal’s daughters, from the acclaimed author of The Innocents and The Awkward Age. Segal was in conversation with Olivia Laing, whose first novel, Crudo, was published last year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelist, journalist and translator Keith Gessen will be at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel A Terrible Country, published by Fitzcarraldo, which investigates Russia’s past and present through the eyes of a Russian-American who moves from New York to Moscow to care for his elderly grandmother. Man Booker Prize winner George Saunders describes A Terrible Country as ‘A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia’. Gessen was in conversation with Vadim Nikitin, Murmansk-born investigator of financial crime in what was once the USSR. Both Gessen and Nikitin are regular contributors to the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sally Rooney breathes new life into fiction. Her novels deal with ordinary life in all its unexpected ways. The Guardian said of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends: ‘It’s rare that a novel elicits such ferocious and unmitigated awe from just about everyone you know, whether male, female, or millennial’. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (published by Faber & Faber last September), was called ‘superb . . . a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness’ by Anne Enright. Olivia Laing has stated that ‘Rooney is the best young novelist – indeed one of the best novelists – I’ve read in years.’ On the occasion of the paperback publication of Normal People, Rooney was in conversation with Kishani Widyaratna, editor at Picador Books and contributing editor at The White Review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962 Algiers became the de facto capital of anti-imperialism, anti-racism and world revolution, and a haven for visionaries and rebels such as Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Jomo Kenyatta and Eldridge Cleaver. Elaine Mokhtefi moved to Algiers during this extraordinary moment of hope, turmoil, dreams and disillusion, and her memoir of that time makes gripping reading. She was in conversation with Adam Shatz, a contributing editor at the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch’s painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo in 2017, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a personal examination of the legacy of one of the world’s most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself. Knausgaard was in conversation with writer and journalist Charlotte Higgins. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of several highly acclaimed novels, described in her memoir In Other Words her passionate romance with the Italian language. She now continues that passionate engagement with the country and its literature as the editor of a new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She was in conversation about Italy, things Italian, and the art of the short story with Chris Power, whose debut collection of stories Mothers was published by Faber last year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One Lark, One Horse is Michael Hofmann’s first new collection of poetry for almost two decades, and more than justifies the wait; Stephen Romer writes that Hofmann has given us ‘a handle on our own helplessness, our fecklessness and unease’, and George Szirtes more succinctly has described his writing as ‘a poetry of nerves’. He read from the new collection, and talked about it with Declan Ryan, whose pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series was published in 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.