London Review Bookshop Podcast

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

Michelle Tea: Valencia at 25

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 centu

Chloe Aridjis & Jennifer Higgie: The Shadow of the Object

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 em

Sarah Schulman & So Mayer

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 aff

Margaret Drabble: The Great Good Places

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. ‘Gener

Polly Barton & Chal Ravens: What Am I, A Deer?

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