Explore every episode of the podcast London Review Bookshop Podcast

Deep Into the Sixties (Bloomsbury), the latest instalment in David Kynaston’s ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’ series, covers the short but intense period between Churchill’s death and England’s footballing triumph at the World Cup. As a social historian, Kynaston is unrivalled in his masterful handling of a diverse range of sources, including diaries, newspaper reports and historical archives. He was in conversation with Alison Light, author of Red, Red Robin, A Radical Romance and Common People. You can buy a copy of Deep Into the Sixties from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patricia Lockwood’s literary career began with poetry, and her second poetry collection (the first to make it to the UK) Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, published in 2014, left her many fans desperate for more of her surreal, subversive, zany, deadly serious wit. For more than a decade they’ve had to make do with a brilliant memoir, two brilliant pieces of autofiction and her many superb essays and reviews in the pages of the LRB. Now at last comes Agate Head / Stone Soup, a poetry collection that blends her new-found passion for metalwork with reflections on geological time, internet memes, explorations of organic bodies, and observations of youth. Lockwood was talking to poet and fellow Booker judge, Raymond Antrobus, whose latest book is The Quiet Ear. You can buy a copy of Agate Head / Stone Soup from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Lee’s smoked eel sandwich became a London sensation when it was introduced at Soho’s Quo Vadis, where Lee is chef proprietor and, amongst other things, led Jay Rayner to call him ‘a rare phenomena in the London food world; a chap everyone agrees is a good thing.’ Now his second cookbook Kitchening (4th Estate) continues his exploration of the two most important things in great cooking: simplicity and deliciousness. Jeremy discussed his philosophy of food with one of the country’s leading food writers Bee Wilson, author of, most recently, The Heart-Shaped Tin (4th Estate). You can buy a copy of Kitchening from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In On Difficulty (Faber), her latest book of non-poetry, poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw explores the fascination, terror and opportunity of wrestling with the opaque, the obscure, the complex and the indeterminate. Is poetry really difficult, and do we like it more when it is? Can difficulty provide its own solution? These and other questions are answered by Lavinia Greenlaw in conversation with the artist Mark Wallinger. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Triage (Allen Lane), Claudia Rankine’s new book, is an unclassifiable piece of writing, blending narrative, criticism and lyricism to create something capable of facing ‘the collective devastation of the present’ (in Saidiya Hartman’s words). Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence: we eavesdrop on their conversation, memories and enduring friendship. Rankine was in conversation with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, whose debut collection Quiet (Faber, 2023) won the Rathbones Folio Poetry Prize. You can buy a copy of Triage from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Transitions, the latest title in MACK’s ‘Discourse’ series writers Sita Balani and Jay Bernard, guided by Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘conjuncture’, draw on literature, social theory, and lived experience to offer an urgent account of our fractured present. Their dialogue takes in Britain’s colonial past, the advent of AI and the legacy of extractive capitalism to ask the urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a political culture determined to devalue the Humanities? Their conversation is chaired by Sana Goyal, editor of Wasafiri. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In How to Be Well, journalist and essayist Amy Larocca takes on the behemoth which is the contemporary ‘wellness’ industry, in prose which Joanna Rakoff has described as a ‘magical synthesis of crackerjack reporting, incisive cultural commentary, and, most importantly, elegant, self-reflective memoir’. From active charcoal toothpaste to green juice enemas, Larocca explores the science and history of various controversial treatments, to reckon with the 3.7-trillion dollar industry’s profits and promises. Larocca was in conversation at the Bookshop with journalist and literary critic Gaby Wood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Haitian-American scholar Edna Bonhomme, now based in Berlin, is well placed to unpick what it means to be Black at home and abroad. In Tending to Our Wounds, part memoir, part history, part polemic, she unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism, and charts a breathtaking course between the individual and the collective, between past and future, and between oppression and resistance. She was in conversation with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism for the World, Feminism Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. You can buy a copy of Tending to Our Wounds from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sex in novels is commonplace, but how do poets write about sex--and is it any good? Join Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar for a live recording of the LRB podcast Poetry and the Turning World, with special guests Sophie Robinson (Prairie Oyster) and Oluwaseun Olayiwola (Strange Beach). Poetry and the Turning World is a special short series on the LRB Podcast, looking at the ways in which contemporary poetry deals with our everyday challenges and the wider changes we face globally. Sandeep and Sarah take different themes and explore when and where poetry can be a guiding force for understanding individual and collective experiences. The subjects covered in the series were work, technology, divorce, sex, weather, food and money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Holly Pester’s Cafés (Fitzcarraldo) continues the trajectory which, since her debut Comic Timing, has made her one of the most exciting poets writing. An elegy for lost communal space, and a stylish political intervention, Francesca Wade has described Cafés as embodying ‘a public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester's brilliance builds this cafe up and invites us in to linger’. Pester was in conversation with Luke Roberts, lecturer at King’s College London, co-director of the small press Distance No Object, and author of (most recently) Bad Omens (Book Works). You can buy a copy of Cafés from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, they began to meet regularly, to talk, to eat and to swim. What would it be like, Baume wondered, to write a book in the style of Mollie’s painting? Opening Night is the result. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days. You can buy a copy of Opening Night from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a series of provocative essays encompassing Marilyn Monroe, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats, Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now, seeks to put the femme back into feminism. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. She was in conversation with novelist and poet, Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. You can buy a copy of Femmephilia from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To call Elizabeth Bishop one of the greatest female American poets of the 20th century is to make too many qualifications. Increasingly, critical opinion has converged with Dwight Garner’s assertion that she was perhaps ‘the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century’. To mark the publication of his new book, Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing, Andrew Dickinson was in conversation with the poet and critic Peter McDonald. Poet Mark Ford, actor Juliet Stevenson and writer Lamorna Ash will also read from a selection of Bishop’s work. You can buy a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Colin Grant and WritersMosaic writers have travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather the voices and experiences of immigrants living in Britain. In What We Leave We Carry we meet, amongst others, a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, and a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. Grant was in conversation with the author, broadcaster and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin Maglaque’s first book, Presence, explores the hidden history of the female body through deep archival research: fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries come together to make tangible a vanished past, unfamiliar because of its deliberate suppression. The artist Celia Paul has described Presence as ‘a landmark book’, which makes the female body in the past ‘real as never before’. Maglaque was in conversation with Hannah Dawson, a historian of political thought at King’s College London and the editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. You can buy a copy of Presence from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The kitchen has always been a complex space for women: a place of labour and gendered expectations, as well as a site of nourishment, care and company. But how does this change when you’re alone, not cooking for family or friends, but simply for yourself? In The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo Press) Eli Davies explores what happens when food is uncoupled from domestic duty and romantic relationships and what it means to cook (or not) for yourself and by yourself. Davies was in conversation with Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires and editor at Vittles magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Prize, the Costa, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus) is the eagerly-awaited follow-up: Saba Sams has described it as ‘gruesome and intimate, alive to the rot, funny’. Long read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Howe, poetry editor at Chatto, whose own second collection Foretokens was published last year. You can buy a copy of Sparrow on the Rooftop from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Michael Bracewell’s new novella The Smiths an anonymous narrator recounts the impact of the iconic pop group on his life. Accompanied by the French actress Carole Bouquet he embarks on a picaresque journey from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood, via a park bench in Cavendish Square. Deeply romantic and laced with comedy - not unlike the band themselves – The Smiths is an affectionate celebration of a pivotal episode in popular music history. The author read from his work, and discussed it with the novelist and journalist Leo Robson. You can buy a copy of The Smiths from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot. Dark Night (Penguin Classics) gathers all of John’s poetry, together with a selection of his prose. The book’s translator, poet Martha Sprackland, joined LRB contributing editor James Butler for a discussion of the life and work of John of the Cross, and his abiding influence. You can buy a copy of Dark Night from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Venice, September 1974. A chance meeting between a young English artist and Danilo Donati, production manager for Fellini and Pasolini, leads us into a tale of queer love, political intrigue and brutal murder. Emily Watlington wrote in Art in America ‘In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing's novel feels eerily timely.’ To mark the paperback publication of The Silver Book Olivia Laing was reading from their work, and in conversation with Jack Parlett, author of Flamboyance, Fire Island and The Poetics of Cruising. You can buy a copy of The Silver Book from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power Lauren Elkin uses her own experience of training as a young soprano in the 1990s as a springboard for a powerful investigation of the female voice, from Maria Callas to Beyoncé and beyond. Part manifesto, part cultural history and all full-throated celebration, Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms and hymn of praise. Lauren Elkin was in conversation with writer, academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari. You can buy a copy of Vocal Break from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s new book Said the Dead is part history, part ghost story and part unreliable memoir, exploring the lives, presences and forgotten voices of a derelict Victorian mental asylum in Cork. Ní Ghríofa, whose previous book A Ghost in the Throat won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was in conversation with Rachael Allen, author of the poetry collections Kingdomland and God Complex. You can buy a copy of Said the Dead from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular LRB contributor Daniel Trilling has been researching and writing about the far right in Britain and beyond for more than a decade. His latest book If We Tolerate This (Picador), published ahead of the momentous English local, Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections on May 7, is a short and powerful polemic examining how far right ideas have come to dominate the political agenda, and outlining a strategy for how we might combat them. Pankaj Mishra writes ‘Combining forensic enquiry with moral passion, Daniel Trilling has emerged as one of our most intrepid and resourceful reporters.’ He was in conversation about his work with William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of This Is Not Normal and Nervous States. You can buy a copy of If We Tolerate This from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The great M. John Harrison – ‘The closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ according to the New Statesman – returns to the shop to present his latest novel The End of Everything. In a post-apocalyptic Britain a beachcomber makes his living collecting artefacts washed up on the Channel shore. But when he comes across a strange, shape-shifting creature he realises he must take it inland, before it destroys everything he knows. The author was in conversation with Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites, Our Wives Under the Sea and Salt Slow. You can buy a copy of The End of Everything from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book. You can buy a copy of Ambivalence ⁠from the London Review Bookshop⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Keenan’s Boyhood (White Rabbit) opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, blessed with the power to see into the past and future by a perhaps imaginary angel, leads us on a journey from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, as the novel builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption. ‘A complete triumph’ writes Irvine Welsh. ‘It slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove.’ David Keenan read from Boyhood, and talked about its themes, with LRB contributing editor Andrew O’Hagan. You can buy a copy of Boyhood from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary burning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it. You can buy a copy of The Wonderful World That Almost Was from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Tea’s queer autofictional classic Valencia, which Torrey Peters described as ‘one of the few truly life changing books I've encountered’, is a quarter of a century old; to celebrate, her UK publisher Serpent’s Tail have released a 25-year anniversary special edition, with a new introduction by Maggie Nelson. Tea was in conversation with Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear and Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever. You can buy a copy of Valencia from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While recuperating in hospital in Mexico, Flora meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. Then things take an unexpected turn… Ardijis was reading from The Shadow of the Object and in conversation with Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine, whose most recent book was The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. You can buy a copy of The Shadow of the Object from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To celebrate the publication of their respective new books, So Mayer (Bad Language) and Sarah Schulman (The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity) discussed the radical affinities between their work in exposing the power structures underpinning both the ways in which we communicate, and the language we use to do so. You can buy Bad Language and The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Drabble’s new collection, The Great Good Places, is an omnium gatherum of essays, stories and memoir, drawing on a lifetime’s worth of insight and wisdom. ‘Generous, perceptive, and good-humoured, Margaret Drabble is always a delight to read’, wrote Joan Bakewell; The Great Good Places has all these qualities in evidence. Drabble was in conversation with Tessa Hadley, whose most recent novel is The Party (Vintage). You can buy a copy of The Great Good Places from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Am I, A Deer?, Polly Barton’s debut novel, takes on the vagaries of translation – linguistic translation, self-translation, and reinvention – which she’s previously explored in the much-loved Fifty Sounds, also published by Fitzcarraldo. ‘The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schrödinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the ‘black box’ of the karaoke booth; inside and outside simultaneously, trying to figure out whether she exists and in a state of tingling oscillation’, writes Jen Calleja. ‘Polly Barton is the maestra of controlled dissolution.’ You can buy a copy of What Am I, A Deer? from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an audacious new take on the campus novel Luke Kennard’s protagonist, a penniless out-of-work actor, takes on a job unlike any other. He is hired to sit silently at the back of a lecture hall, concealed within a black bag. Black Bag (John Murray) examines, hilariously, modern masculinity, romance, identity and much else besides. ‘Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining’ writes Anna Metcalfe. ‘Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged. A deeply cathartic read for anyone seeking the funny side of the total decimation of the arts.’ Luke Kennard was in conversation with fellow poet and novelist Will Eaves. You can buy a copy of Black Bag from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Magic and Mechanics, the latest in Scratch Books’ ‘Reverse Engineering’ series, six writers – George Saunders, Claire-Louise Bennett, Mark Haddon, Camilla Grudova, Amber Medland and Colin Barrett – present and disassemble one of their recent short stories. To celebrate its launch, join Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with novelist Ben Pester as they discuss their work, exploring the ways that their backgrounds in theatre have led them to create exhilarating and innovative prose writing. You can buy a copy of Magic & Mechanics from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Analogue Africa, (Verso) essayist and LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding explores the anti-colonial imagination through the works of African artists and film-makers, including Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. ‘In Analogue Africa, [Harding] is writing at the peak of his powers’, writes Adam Shatz, ‘eloquent, perceptive, attentive at once to questions of form and to the moral and political stakes involved in the creation of postcolonial culture.’ Harding was in conversation with Kevin Okoth, author of Red Africa and regular contributor to the LRB. You can buy a copy of Analogue Africa from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a steamy Netflix show called ‘Cheating’ becomes the much-talked-about megahit of the moment, baby-boomer Kate is alarmed to find it contains secrets from her marriage to architect husband Jack that only she should know. John Lanchester, LRB contributing editor and author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital, explores popular culture, the dynamics of marriage and intergenerational conflict in his latest novel Look What You Made Me Do (Faber). Lanchester was in conversation with Hattie Crisell, author of In Writing (Granta). You can buy a copy of Look What You Made Me Do from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbitbox is Wayne Holloway-Smith’s first foray into long-form narrative, but retains the originality, compression and power which characterize his poetry collections (most recently Love Minus Love, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize). Exploring a mother and her young son’s reactions to an all-consuming domestic threat, Joelle Taylor has described how, in Rabbitbox, Holloway-Smith ‘bunches language like a fist, one that unravels into shadow butterflies’. Holloway-Smith was in conversation with the actor Adeel Akhtar. You can buy a copy of Rabbitbox from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artist and film-maker Lauren J. Joseph’s first novel At Certain Points We Touch, described by Olivia Laing as ‘A stone-cold masterpiece’ was hailed as a Debut Novel of the Year by the Observer in 2022. Her second novel takes us from the night-spots of Soho to the febrile Berlin music scene. A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to feel loved, Lean Cat, Savage Cat (Bloomsbury) is an unforgettable novel from one of the most exciting writers at work today. The author was in conversation about her book with Olivia Laing, who describes it as ‘An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration.’ You can buy a copy of Lean Cat, Savage Cat from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isabel Waidner’s latest novel As If (Hamish Hamilton) is an existential farce exploring fading hopes and lost dreams through the medium of two very different, but very similar men. ‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ wrote Jude Cook in the Guardian. Waidner was in conversation with artist and film-maker Sarah Wood. You can buy a copy of As If from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has been a shop favourite ever since we discovered Long Live the Post Horn, a powerful tale about loneliness and the struggle between capitalism and humanity told through the microcosm of the Norwegian postal service. Hjorth is in conversation with Catherine Taylor to discuss Repetition (Verso), her sixth novel to be published in English, translated by her indefatigable champion Charlotte Barslund. As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to re-examine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic and the former deputy director of English PEN. Her first book, The Stirrings, won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir and life-writing. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest novel Your Life Without Me (Canongate) journalist and novelist James Meek investigates the unpredictable links between personal trauma, family dysfunction and political violence. A retired schoolmaster is invited by the police to meet a former pupil accused of plotting to destroy St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘This is his best novel yet, writes Alex Preston, ‘a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth.’ James read from his book, and was in conversation about it with the writer Lara Pawson. You can by a copy of Your Life Without Me from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder. One in four adults are prescribed psychiatric medication. These numbers represent a huge and recent expansion in mental health labelling, but reveal nothing of the experience of those seeking help. In The Unfragile Mind, Gavin draws on conversations with patients, colleagues, and his thirty years of practice to explore the chequered history of psychiatry, the nature of mental health and ill-health, and the problems - including mood disorders, trauma, anxiety and addiction - that he addresses daily. The mind, he argues, is dynamic and adaptive - better addressed not with rigid labels and protocols, but with curiosity, kindness, humility and hope. Francis was in conversation with Philippe Sands. You can buy a copy of The Unfragile Mind from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anouchka Grose, a psychotherapist specialising in climate anxiety, became disillusioned with the apparent futility of activism as it is normally conceived, resolved to look inwards, seeking a way to revolutionise the self in response to polycrisis. The Revolution Will Be Internalised (Indigo) documents that inward journey, encompassing ego-dismantling retreats, animal communication, and tantra. Grose will be in conversation about her work with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Daddy Issues and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. You can buy a copy of The Revolution Will Be Internalised from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Tell Me How You Eat (Hutchinson Heinemann), Amber Husain draws on her own experience of the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders as well as on an omnivorous diet of reading that ranges from Eleanor Marx to the Black Panthers and beyond to ask profound questions about our relationship with food, and what a truly healthy diet might be, both for ourselves and for society as a whole. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days. You can buy a copy of Tell Me How You Eat from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the release of the second print edition of contemporary food and culture magazine Vittles, writers Sheena Patel and Lauren J Joseph will discuss the short stories they contributed to the issue. One of the through lines of Issue 2 – which is themed around the notion of ‘Bad Food’ and celebrates the gross, vulgar and unaesthetic aspects of how we feed ourselves that don’t align with the aspirational bent of typical food media – is an exploration of the inter-relations between food, sex, bodies and desire. Patel and Joseph were in conversation with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue about the relationship between food and the erotic in their writing. You can buy a copy of Vittles, issue 2 from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King (Granta) the narrative switches between two increasingly intermingling timelines, medieval and contemporary, as a modern curator becomes absorbed in the story of a half-forgotten monarch struggling to maintain his rule. Perry is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections Beauty/Beauty and Stone Fruit and was in conversation about her debut novel with fellow poet K Patrick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016 the painter Chantal Joffe approached the writer Olivia Laing to ask if they would sit for a portrait. Out of that meeting emerged a close friendship and collaboration, and out of that collaboration has emerged Painting, Writing, Texting (Mack), an account in words and images of what can happen when two ways of looking at the world converge. Painter and writer were at the shop to talk about art, writing and collaboration, chaired by Emily Labarge (Dog Days). You can buy a copy of Painting, Writing, Texting from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an episode of the LRB podcast Aftershock recorded live at the London Review Bookshop, Daniel Soar and contributors discussed the long aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror, from Iraq and Afghanistan to drone strikes, mass surveillance and the weaponisation of the financial system. What is the legacy of Bush and Cheney’s ‘forever war’ in today’s White House? Joining Daniel Soar were Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published in 1974 Freudianism was seen by most feminists as ineradicably patriarchal and inimical to the women’s movement. Mitchell’s brilliant exegesis, drawing on Lacan and Laing as well as Freud himself, instead sees Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and seeks to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself. To mark a new edition of her seminal work from Verso Mitchell revisits its arguments in conversation with curator, art historian and writer Frances Morris who was, from January 2016 to February 2023, director of the Tate Modern. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the publication of Knife Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois (Yale) its author, curator and art historian Marie-Laure Bernadac was in conversation about the life and work of Louise Bourgeois with the book’s translator, Lauren Elkin. ‘Bernadac's remarkable biography has made the telling of Louis Bourgeois's life into a new art’ (Juliet Mitchell). You can buy a copy of Knife Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois from the London Review Bookshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices