London Review Bookshop Podcast

Katharine Norbury's affecting memoir The Fish Ladder (Bloomsbury) deals with grief, recovery and the redemptive power of stories and journeys. Abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent, Norbury was brought up by loving adoptive parents. As an adult, and having recently suffered a miscarriage, she embarked with her nine-year-old daughter on a journey to trace a river from sea to source. The novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri has described her book about that journey as an 'extraordinary exploration of how we use narrative to understand our place in the world'. Katharine Norbury was joined at the shop by novelist, poet and fellow memoirist Blake Morrison for an evening of literary conversation. Blake Morrison's many books include two masterpieces of family literature And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Granta) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (Vintage). His latest title Shingle Street (Chatto) is his first full-length poetry collection for nearly 30 years. Set on and around the Suffolk coast, it handles matters personal, political and ecological with Morrison's characteristic honesty and verbal dexterity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick Cockburn, regular contributor to the LRB and Middle East correspondent for the Independent, is, according to Seymour Hersh, 'Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today'. His latest book The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (Verso) describes the origins of the new rebel state in Iraq and Syria, setting it in the context of the region's turbulent recent history, and reflecting on its possible futures. Cockburn joined us at the Bookshop to discuss his book, and its implications, with Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News international editor and author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Islamic scholar Robert Irwin joined us at the Bookshop in discussion with mythographer Marina Warner about a groundbreaking new translation of Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, and its implications for our understanding of the classical Arabic storytelling tradition. The 18 medieval tales collected here (by Penguin Classics), probably originating in the 9th and 10th centuries, are the earliest examples of Arabic stories known to have survived. A few of the stories were collected and adapted, centuries after their composition, in The Arabian Nights. The remainder have never before appeared in English Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, most recently Summer of Hate, and two books of art and cultural criticism. The New York Observer describes her as 'the art world's favorite novelist,' and her recent monograph, Lost Properties, about conceptual art and economic activism, was published for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is a co-editor of the independent Semiotexte, with Hedi El Kholti and Sylvere Lotringer, and founded the Native Agents imprint that initially published first-person female writing. Torpor, her third novel, will be re-published in a critical edition this winter. She teaches at the European Graduate School, and is presently writing a critical biography of the American writer Kathy Acker. On a rare visit to London, she spoke with Zoe Pilger, author of Eat My Heart Out (Serpent's Tail) about schizophrenic projects, male muses and wilful amateurism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Ellroy’s hardboiled, idiosyncratic explorations of Los Angeles police corruption and midcentury Washington power politics have earned him a worldwide following; his new novel, Perfidia (Cornerstone), is the first in a new trilogy featuring some familiar characters, including the gleefully amoral Dudley Smith. Ellroy joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with the American novelist David Vann, whose most recent book is Goat Mountain (Windmill). Warning: contains strong language. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Writing about place – a sub-genre of travel writing that subverts it by being about staying put, rather than moving – has been enjoying an extraordinary vogue of late. Three of the genre’s finest practitioners joined us at the shop to discuss its significance and future. Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground (Granta) explores the small part of Cornwall to which he has recently transplanted himself; Julian Hoffman, in The Small Heart of Things (Georgia) finds home around the shores of Greece's Prespa lakes, and Ken Worpole in The New English Landscape, a collaboration with the photographer Jason Orton (Field Station), proposes a new paradigm for topographical beauty based on the post-industrial landscape of the Thames estuary. The evening was hosted by Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I was in eighth grade my history teacher wrote on my report card: “She only does what she wants to do.” She thought that was a bad thing, and it’s not.Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear transplanted to 20th-century Iowa. She joined us at the shop to read from her latest novel, Some Luck (Mantle), the first book in a projected trilogy, which returns to rural Iowa in the 1920s. Charlotte Mendelson wrote of the book: ‘So here it is at last, the Great American Novel and, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the great Jane Smiley would be the one who wrote it.’ Jane Smiley spoke in conversation with Alex Clark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our top 1% take 15% of all income. That’s the highest share of anywhere in Europe. Our bottom fifth are the poorest in Europe. In Inequality and the 1% (Verso) Danny Dorling (Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford, or, as Simon Jenkins more pithily put it, 'geographer royal by appointment to the left'), goes in pursuit of the latest research into how the lives and ideas of the richest 1 per cent affect the remaining 99 per cent of us. The findings are shocking. Inequality in the UK is increasing as more and more people are driven towards the poverty line, with profound implications for education, health and life expectancy. Danny Dorling joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, and co-author (with Richard Wilkinson) of the ground-breaking The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 'The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It' (Allen Lane) Owen Jones analyses the people and institutions that govern our lives – government, the media, the banks and the accountancy firms – and exposes usually invisible networks that bind them together. Far from working on our behalf, as they often claim, these institutions are, Owen Jones argues, the biggest threat to our democracy today. Owen joined Paul Myerscough at the Bookshop to present his argument, and to debate its implications. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leading sociologist of art [Sarah Thornton][1] goes behind the scenes with 33 living artists including Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman and Isaac Julien to ask the apparently simple but vexing question, ‘What is an artist?' Thornton joined us at the Bookshop to talk about her new book, *[33 Artists in 3 Acts][2]* (Granta), with the celebrated artist Isaac Julien. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.