London Review Bookshop Podcasts

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an 'age of riots' as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. In this podcast listen to award-winning poet and theorist Joshua Clover and writer and philosopher Nina Power unpick a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, how can future antagonists be guided in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privac

Curator Gareth Evans and scholar Esther Leslie discussed the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, published in *[The Storyteller][1]* (Verso) in English translation for the first time. The actor Flossie Draper, Walter Benjamin’s great-grand-daughter, gave readings from the book. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore, in an intriguingly different way, many of the themes that are familiar from Benjamin's philosophical work. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of Paul Klee. *The Storyteller* has been translated and edited by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The flaneur – an almost invariably male idler dawdling through city streets with no apparent purpose in mind – is familiar to us from the works of Baudelaire, Benjamin and Edmund White. In a glorious blend of memoir, cultural history and psychogeography, Lauren Elkin investigates the little-considered female equivalent, from George Sand to Agnes Varda and Sophie Calle, leading us through the streets of London, Tokyo, Venice, New York and, of course, Paris. Lauren Elkin, a contributing editor at the White Review, discussed the phenomenon of the flaneuse, and her own walking life with Brian Dillon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast George Monbiot and John Lanchester discuss Monbiot’s latest book 'How Did We Get into this Mess?' (Verso) and assess the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.  One of the most vocal and eloquent critics of the current consensus, Monbiot makes a persuasive case for change in our everyday lives, our politics and economics, the ways we treat each other and the natural world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his latest book White Sands (Canongate) inveterate traveller, novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer investigates, through ten journeys to places as distant from one another as Mexico, Beijing, French Polynesia and LA, the mystery of why we travel. Geoff Dyer's unique blend of humour and intellectual heft was on dazzling display in this evening of conversation with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Psychoanalyst Darian Leader was at the shop to present his latest book 'Hands: What We Do with Them and Why' (Hamish Hamilton), in conversation with the novelist and essayist Tom McCarthy. Hands, in Leader's analysis, both as things in themselves and as metaphors, figures of speech and elements in folklore, are a fundamental constituent of humanity's distinctive nature. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop, Esther Leslie, Marina Warner and Michael Rosen join Gareth Evans to discuss Walter Benjamin's experimentation with form and media, his concept of storytelling and the communicability of experience, and the themes that run throughout Benjamin’s creative and critical writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast, listen to Maggie Nelson in conversation with author Olivia Laing in the bookshop. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gabriel Josipovici came to the bookshop to discuss his new book, Hamlet Fold on Fold, a scene-by-scene examination of Hamlet resisting grand interpretative narratives in preference for focusing on our physical experience of watching, reading and... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast listen to a discussion chaired by Tariq Ali, celebrating the life and work of historian and sociologist Benedict Anderson, who died in December last year shortly after completing his memoir, 'A Life Beyond Boundaries' (Verso). Tariq Ali is in conversation with Laleh Khalili and T.J. Clark. Interdisciplinary and always innovative, Anderson’s many books, most notably 'Imagined Communities', brought about a fundamental shift in the way we think about the history of nationalism, nationhood and globalisation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it mean to be middle class or working class? How does class affect us? Lynsey Hanley and Dawn Foster came to the bookshop to discuss Hanley's latest book, *Respectable* (Allen Lane), which argues that class remains resolutely with us, as strongly as it did fifty years ago, and with it the idea of aspiration, of social mobility, which received wisdom tells us is an unequivocally positive phenomenon, for individuals and for society as a whole. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seymour Hersh has been a towering presence in American journalism for nearly 50 years. In 1970 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his articles exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In 2015 his 10,000 word article 'The Killing of Osama Bin Laden' proved so popular that it crashed the London Review of Books's website. In between, he has written articles on Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel and countless other topics, their common thread being their refusal to take government explanations and denials at face value. Hersh talked about his work with LRB contributing editor Adam Shatz, and in particular about his new book The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (Verso). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard in discussion about her latest book, *[SPQR][1]* (Profile), in our special off-site event at Senate House. Natalie Haynes wrote in the *Observer* of Beard, 'She is never less than a vastly engaging tour guide around some of the best-known parts of the Roman story, debunking its myths with ease.' This podcast is her in conversation with James Davidson, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick University and a regular contributor to the *LRB*. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.