London Review Bookshop Podcast

Edna Bonhomme & Lola Olufemi: Tending to Our Wounds

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,

Sex, Poetry and the Turning World: Sarah Howe, Sandeep Parmar and guests

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

Holly Pester & Luke Roberts: Cafés

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 c

Sara Baume & Emily LaBarge: Opening Night

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 mak

Sophie Lewis & Keiran Goddard: Femmephilia

In a series of provocative essays encompassing Marilyn Monroe, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and

Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles: Andrew Dickinson and Peter McDonald

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 wi

Colin Grant & Michael Rosen: What We Leave We Carry

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.

Erin Maglaque & Hannah Dawson: Presence

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

Eli Davies & Rebecca May Johnson: The Spinster Cookbook

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

Rachel Long & Sarah Howe: Sparrow on the Rooftop

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.

Michael Bracewell & Leo Robson: The Smiths

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 Bouq

Martha Sprackland & James Butler: John of the Cross

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 Hea

Olivia Laing & Jack Parlett: The Silver Book

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

Lauren Elkin & Shahidha Bari: Vocal Break

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 o

Doireann Ní Ghríofa & Rachael Allen: Said the Dead

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 dereli

Daniel Trilling & William Davies: If We Tolerate This

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

M. John Harrison & Julia Armfield: The End of Everything

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 no

Brian Dillon & Olivia Laing: Ambivalence

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 l

David Keenan & Andrew O’Hagan: Boyhood

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

Andrew Durbin & Tash Aw: The Wonderful World That Almost Was

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 r