London Review Bookshop Podcast

James Butler, a contributing editor at the LRB, Rebekah Howes from the University of Winchester, and former Archbishop Rowan Williams dive deep into Gillian Rose’s influential work. They reflect on her philosophical legacies, focusing on how her ideas challenge conventional wisdom. The conversation explores the everyday struggles of ordinary lives, navigating power dynamics in relationships, and the importance of confronting personal and societal suffering. With insights on love, uncertainty, and the transformative power of philosophy, the discussion inspires profound reflection.

1917: Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.1930: Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.1941: Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.Harriet Baker describes in Rural Hours (Allen Lane) how three very different writers, more often associated with city living, found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. She was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse and translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Oyler, known for her sharp literary criticism, discusses internet gossip, attention economy, and the role of criticism in her book 'No Judgment' with Leo Robson. They delve into themes like revenge, judgment, vulnerability, David Foster Wallace's influence, and nuances of literary criticism.

Three Welsh writers, including novelist Joe Dunthorne and National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa, delve into Wales' literary history and the concept of 'Welshness.' They discuss unique approaches in writing, inspirations behind projects honoring Welsh towns, and the challenges of portraying Welsh culture in novels. The podcast explores the significance of storytelling, relationships, class divides, cross-border experiences between Wales and England, and Welsh literature through translation, highlighting the enrichment of language and identity diversity.

Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua, Pasolini, Pussy Riot and the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. Eberstadt was joined at the Bookshop by critic and novelist Olivia Laing, whose latest book The Garden Against Time (Picador) is forthcoming in May 2024.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://lrb.me/biteyourfriendsbook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes. ‘Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present’, writes Seán Hewitt, ‘this is a history shaken by intimacy – a brave and rigorously humane book.’ Wills was joined in conversation with Alice Spawls, editor of the LRB and co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press).Get the book: https://lrb.me/missingpersonsFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexandra Harris has previously cast her probing critical eye over poetic and artistic responses to English weather (in Weatherland), and English art of the 1930s and 40s (in Romantic Moderns); now, in The Rising Down (Faber & Faber) she turns it on the West Sussex landscape of her childhood, revealing the layers of buried lives beneath a familiar landscape in a work which the Independent has described as ‘scholarship at its life-enhancing best’. Harris was in conversation with essayist and critic Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four Dimensional Human. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frantz Fanon was only 36 when he died in 1961, but his books and ideas – from White Skin, Black Masks to The Wretched of the Earth – have proved lastingly influential. Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is both a biography of Fanon and an in-depth study of his writing.Shatz, the US editor of the London Review of Books and the author of Writers & Missionaries, was joined by Kevin Okoth, author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics.Listen to Adam discuss Fanon with Judith Butler on Close Readings: https://lrb.me/fanonhcGet the book: https://lrb.me/rebelsclinicpodFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At the time of his death in 2017, the architectural critic and historian Gavin Stamp (Private Eye’s ‘Piloti’) had nearly completed his monumental survey of British architecture between the world wars. His wife, the writer and historian Rosemary Hill, has edited the text for publication. Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 (Profile) is a refreshing reassessment of the period which looks beyond modernism to give a broader picture of an age of turbulence and contradiction.Hill was joined in conversation with Rowan Moore, whose most recent book is Property: The Myth that Built the World (Faber).Get Interwar: https://lrb.me/interwarpodFind more events at the London Review Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Revolutionary Acts (Faber), Jason Okundaye meets an elder generation of Black gay men and listens as they share intimate memories and reflect upon their lives. Through their conversations he traces these men's journeys and arrivals to South London through the seventies, eighties and nineties from the present day, seeking to reconcile the Black and gay narratives of Britain. Okundaye was in conversation with Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk and contributor to the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.