London Review Bookshop Podcasts

For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, 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. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and featured rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, New York and Queen Mary University of London.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, 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. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and features rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Gwendoline Riley was at the bookshop to talk about her new novel, First Love, an exploration of marriage as battleground. Anne Enright described her previous novel, Opposed Positions, as ‘more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart’; Stuart Kelly called it ‘a continual joy’. Riley was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin 2012); the discussion was chaired by Joanna Biggs, author of All Day Long (Profile 2015) and editor at the London Review of Books.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Money makes the world go round: but what is it really? And how is it produced? Above all, who controls its production, and in whose interests? Money is never a neutral medium of exchange. Political economist Ann Pettifor and journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan discuss history’s most misunderstood invention: the money system - a system that is dominated by men. While women are largely responsible for managing household budgets, they have on the whole been excluded from managing the nation’s financial system and its budgets. At present the networks that dominate the financial sector are overwhelmingly male, and often shockingly sexist. Their dismissive attitude towards half the population and their enjoyment of an unequal distribution of knowledge are not coincidental. Feminism is uniquely well-placed to ask: how can democracies can reclaim control over money production? Can we subordinate the out-of-control finance sector to the interests of society and the ecosystem? The creation and management of society’s money do

Édouard Louis was born into poverty in northern France, as Eddy Belleguele, in 1992. His autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, newly translated into English as The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker), draws an unsparing portrait of the violence, alcoholism, racism and homophobia of the milieu into which he was born, and quickly became a sensational bestseller both in France and throughout Europe. Louis was at the shop to discuss his work with the novelist Tash Aw.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Grand Hotel Abyss is a majestic group biography exploring who the Frankfurt School were and why they matter today. Combining biography, philosophy and storytelling, Jeffries explores how the Frankfurt thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. In conversation with Sarah Bakewell, the author of the critically acclaimed At the Existentialist Café, portraying the lives and ideas of the existentialists, Jeffries discussed how the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society, and how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

'Never has the story been told so well,' said the New York Review of Books of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason, a history of Western philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. In The Dream of Enlightenment he continues the story with the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Gottlieb was in conversation with Julian Baggini, author of numerous works on philosophy, including The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 Other Thought Experiments and his most recent, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will (Granta), for an evening of conversation about the history of philosophy, and how to write about it for a popular audience.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Roger Hardy worked for more than 20 years as a Middle East analyst with the BBC World Service. In his new book, The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East, he argues that the causes of the region’s troubled present are rooted in the era of Western colonial domination. Hardy discussed his book with Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Hazem Kandil, lecturer in political sociology at Cambridge, and BBC broadcast journalist Robin Lustig.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Icon of radical American Letters Eileen Myles has produced more than 20 volumes of fiction, memoir and poetry over the past three decades, a body of work that led the novelist Dennis Cooper to describe her as 'one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature.' To mark the publication of her novel Chelsea Girls in paperback and a new collection of poetry I Must Be Living Twice (Serpents Tail and Tuskar Rock respectively) Eileen Myles was at the shop to read from and discuss her work with Olivia Laing, author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and most recently The Lonely City.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this podcast, Ruth Padel reads from and discusses her new long poem, 'Tidings', a Christmas tale featuring a little girl, a homeless man and a fox, that takes us on a journey from Australia to London and New York via Rome and Bethlehem, She is in conversation with fellow poet Sarah Howe.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Renowned arabist and regular LRB contributor Robert Irwin was in the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel 'Wonders Will Never Cease' (Dedalus), his return to fiction after a break of 17 years. Set during the Wars of the Roses, the book promises to be a mind-altering blend of fantasy, fact and fiction, encompassing the Swordsman’s Pentacle, the Draug, the Miraculous Cauldron, the Curse of the Roasted Goose, the Talking Head and the Museum of Skulls. In this podcast, listen to Irwin in conversation with Nicholas Lezard, whose weekly ‘Choice’ column in the Saturday Guardian has made him one of Britain’s most influential book reviewers.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The revolutionary Leveller movement grew out of the explosive tumult of the 1640s and the battlefields of the English Civil Wars. They were central figures in those turbulent years which resulted in the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the House of Lords, and brought Britain to the edge of a radical republican government. From the streets of London and the clattering printers’ workshops that stoked the uprising to the rank and file of the New Model Army and the furious Putney debates, at which the Levellers argued with Oliver Cromwell about the fate of English democracy, the Levellers' story demonstrates the revolutionary potential of ordinary people, and provides hope and inspiration for the future. In this podcast listen to historian and activist John Rees discuss his new book 'The Levellers' Revolution' with Diane Purkiss, Professor of English at Keble College, Oxford and author of 'The People’s History of the English Civil War' and 'Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War'.

Listen to Cockburn discuss his latest book 'The Age of Jihad' (Verso) with 'Guardian' journalist Rachel Shabi, author of 'Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands'. Award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn’s chronicles of the collapse of Syria/Iraq and the devastating role of the West have become essential reading for anyone interested in the dominant conflict of our time – the Sunni-Shia war – and in the birth of ISIS. So prescient have his analyses of the region been that last year the judges of the British Journalism Awards advised the UK government to ‘consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead.’  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Poet, essayist, novelist, broadcaster, artist and film-maker John Berger celebrates his 90th birthday this month. To mark the occasion we have declared him our Author of the Month for November. John Berger’s work, across a range of media, has been transforming the way we look at art, life and everything else, from Ways of Seeing in 1972 to the present day. In our latest podcast in collaboration with Verso, Gareth Evans, Tom Overton, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Mike Dibb discuss Berger's art and politics and its continuing relevance.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sheila Rowbotham was one of the leading figures behind the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain and is one of the best-loved feminists of our times. In conversation with Melissa Benn, Rowbotham discussed her latest book 'Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States' and its transatlantic story of six radical pioneers, showing how rebellious ideas were formed and travelled across the Atlantic.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ben Lerner and Andrea Brady in conversation at the London Review Bookshop. Lerner is a novelist, poet and critic, whose most recent collection is No Art, and whose controversial critical essay The Hatred of Poetry began as a piece in the LRB. Brady is a professor, poet and editor at Barque Press, whose most recent book is Mutability: Scripts for Infancy, published by University of Chicago Press.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From the tyranny of exercise to the crisis of policing, via the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), Mark Greif’s Against Everything is an essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism and a vital scrutiny of the contradictions arising between our desires and the excuses we make. In a wide-ranging conversation for the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop, Mark Greif and Brian Dillon discuss modes of critique and cultural forms, and the role of the intellectual in stripping away the veil of everyday life.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the aftermath of the failed military coup, two of Turkey’s most prominent young writers discuss Turkey, its past, present and future. Ece Temelkuran’s 'Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy' is published by Zed Books, and Kaya Genç’s 'Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey' is newly published by I.B. Tauris. The chair for this evening was Daniel Trilling, editor of the New Humanist and author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen to this podcast of poetry 'up close' with 'Prac Crit' founding editor and winner of the T.S Eliot Prize, Sarah Howe. Four recently featured poets – Vahni Capildeo, Mark Waldron, R.A. Villanueva and Maureen McLane – read and discuss their latest work.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen to Sarah Moss reading from and talking about her fifth novel 'The Tidal Zone' (Granta) an exploration of parental love, illness and recovery. She was in conversation with Max Porter, 'Granta' editor and author of 'Grief is a Thing With Feathers' (Faber and Faber), winner of the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.