London Review Bookshop Podcast

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dante’s Purgatorio is as much an allegory of spiritual transformation as it is one of psychological rebirth, personal healing, and self-transcendence. Combining a graceful lyricism with decades of study, D.M. Black’s translation and commentary reveal new dimensions in Dante’s many portraits of people trying to find their way through life and what comes after. This fresh, bilingual edition of Purgatoriowas published on September 14th 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Black is in conversation with writer and translator Robert Chandler and psychoanalyst Giovanna di Ceglie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Clegg and Jess McKinney launch their new Hazel Press poetry collections with reading and conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tariq Ali has been observing and commenting on Afghanistan for more than four decades. He vehemently opposed the Soviet occupation in 1979, and the NATO invasion and subsequent invasion in 2001. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan (Verso) collects together for the first time his most important writings on this troubled country, and contains a new introduction written in the wake of NATO’s ignominious retreat. Ali is in conversation with LRB contributing editor James Meek, who as foreign correspondent for the Guardian witnessed the war in Afghanistan at first hand. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion (Granta) is a one-of-a-kind ‘lyric epic’, weaving memoir, essay and poetics into one of 2021’s most eagerly awaited debut poetry collections. Sy-Quia read from the book and was in discussion with Will Harris, whose own Granta debut RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The event was chaired by Rachael Allen, Granta’s poetry editor, whose most recent collection is Kingdomland (Faber). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hazel Press’s four 2020 titles were all LRB Bookshop bestsellers; we’re proud to be launching the first tranche of their four 2021 titles, one an electrifying collaborative poem, one a unique anthology. Katrina Naomi and Helen Mort were reading from Same But Different, a lockdown collaboration which began as simply an exchange of poems; but like Wang Wei and Pei Di’s Wang River Collaboration, their poems soon started to speak to one another. Belinda Zhawi, Ella Duffy, Maggi Hambling and Georgie Henley read their own and one other poem from O, an anthology about sensuality, masturbation, orgasms, and pleasure, with ourselves and with others; offering a safe space to celebrate our bodies, lust, passion, fun, joy, defiance, tenderness and intimacy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Towards the end of the 19th century Iain Sinclair’s great-grandfather Arthur made an accident-prone and largely disastrous colonial expedition to Peru. In his latest book, accompanied by his daughter, Iain Sinclair abandons his familiar London territory to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, perhaps also hoping to eclipse his shadow. What he finds makes harrowing but essential reading in a story of exploitation, colonialism and environmental devastation. Sinclair was in conversation about his journey with Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of autobiographical novels published in English as My Struggle propelled him to international fame, near universal acclaim and not a little controversy. His latest book The Morning Star (Penguin Press) is both a radical departure from that series, and a return to fiction as we traditionally know it. A group of holidaymakers in southern Norway witness the sudden and mysterious appearance of a new star, with consequences far beyond what they, or anybody else, could have predicted. Knausgaard is in conversation with journalist Jake Kerridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, in Dialogue with a Somnambulist (House Sparrow Press) her stories, essays and personal portraits, collected here for the first time, reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in the long. Chloe talks to the novelist, essayist and critic Lynne Tillman, and Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What could be simpler than a dish of pasta with tomato sauce? According to food historian Massimo Montanari’s latest book A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce (Europa), quite a lot. Montanari was in discussion with food writer Rachel Roddy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Gardner Smith’s roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living against the backdrop of violence of Algerian War-era France, has been out of print for decades, but as one reviewer put it, ‘the issues Smith raises … resonate at least as much now as they did six decades ago.’ The story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn’t find in America, its account of his disillusionment and dawning consciousness of Algeria’s struggle for independence includes one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris Massacre of 1961. Adam Shatz, who wrote the introduction for NYRB’s new edition, discussed The Stone Face’s achievement and contemporary resonances with Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities at UCL and the Holberg Prize-winning author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, The Black Atlantic and Darker Than Blue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival. But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB’s new selection of Fitzgerald’s writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late in life … she was an old hand as a literary journalist.’ It is this Fitzgerald, ‘a reviewer, a writer of introductions, a literary judge, and a speaker on panels and at literary festivals’, who is the subject of this special event to mark the publication of the LRB’s latest Selections volume. Lee is in conversation with Susannah Clapp, who worked on many of her LRB pieces, and has described her as an ideal contributor who needed no ‘handling’: ‘She wrote to length, she wrote to time, she wrote without fuss, she wrote a lot’ – on subjects ranging from Alain-Fournier to Adrian Mole, Stevie Smith to Wild Swans – ‘always with a steady brilliance.’ Introduced by Sam Kinchin-Smith, the LRB's Head of Special Projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leo Boix and Andrew McMillan read and talk to celebrate the publication of Boix's long-awaited debut collection in English, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto), a book described by Ilya Kaminsky as of ‘a wide tilt and scope; it sings the doors open.’ Andrew McMillan’s third collection pandemonium is just out from Jonathan Cape, following hot on the heels of the prizewinning physical and playtime. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson's On Freedom (Jonathan Cape) explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. Nelson is in conversation here with Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions (Picador) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Flâneuse Lauren Elkin celebrated the woman walker in the city, revealing how aimlessly wandering through New York, Tokyo, Venice – but most of all Paris – invigorates the soul and focuses the mind. In her latest book No. 91/92 (Les Fugitives) she joins the commuter crowds on the bus with a love letter to Paris written in iPhone notes. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, her diary queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, as she registers the ordinary makings of a city and its people. She talks about her travels through the city, literature, the mind and the human body with novelist, playwright and essayist Deborah Levy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

W.G. Sebald was one of the most important literary figures of the bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries. Twenty years after his death, we were joined by acclaimed biographer Carole Angier, the author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury), described by Alberto Manguel as ‘an extraordinary achievement, able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions’. She was in conversation with Caroline Moorehead, the biographer of Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and others, whose most recent book is A House in the Mountains (Harper Collins). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker bobs and weaves between humour and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television, and collapses distinctions between the personal and the political, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. Parker read from the collection and talked to Rachel Long, whose Forward nominated debut collection My Darling from the Lions was published by Picador last year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond (Fitzcarraldo), has been a firm bookshop favourite since its release, for its unique, irreverent voice and attention to the parts of experience which go overlooked or unspoken. Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up, is one of our most eagerly-anticipated books of 2021; Bennett was in conversation with Sheila Heti. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Owen Hatherley’s Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso) argues for the city as a socialist project. Hatherley was in conversation with Juliet Jacques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Building on her essay ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2018, Professor of Social and Political Theory Amia Srinivasan explores the political and cultural dimensions of sexual desire, and its frustration. Srinivasan is in discussion with co-editor of the LRB, Alice Spawls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a writer and as a woman Lavinia Greenlaw has spent her life being forced to answer questions that don’t really matter and not being allowed to ask or answer the ones that really do. In her powerful new book Some Answers without Questions (Faber) she sets out to redress the balance. Greenlaw is in conversation with Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In twelve witty and insightful essays novelist, memoirist and all-round thinker Jeanette Winterson explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity. Drawing on mythology, religion, art, history and gender theory as well as on science, Winterson’s take on the future of our species is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Winterson was in conversation with Victoria Turk, features Editor at Wired magazine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With their first two novels Isabel Waidner has established themself as one of the most disruptive, vital and boundary-pushing fiction writers at work in the UK today. Their latest novel Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula Press), a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies, takes this work to the next level.In celebration of its publication Isabel is in conversation with another of the UK's most innovative fiction writers, Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch (Dialogue Books). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years turned everything we think we know about money, debt and society on its head, and has, in the ten years since it was first published, become a modern classic. A new hardback edition, with introduction by distinguished economist Thomas Piketty, is published this year by Melville House. To mark the tenth anniversary of this groundbreaking international bestseller, Grace Blakeley, Owen Jones, Gillian Tett and Yanis Varoufakis came together to discuss Debt and explore the lasting implications that Graeber's arguments have for society, past, present and future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s more to being bald than having no hair. Philosopher Simon Critchley and musician Brian Eno discuss the various dimensions of hairlessness in connection with Simon’s new book Bald. In typical Critchley mode though, this collection of essays spills far beyond the question of hair, or the lack of it, to take in Aristophanes, Hamlet, the mysteries of Eleusis and the joys and pains of being a Liverpool fan. As well as being one of the most influential living musicians, Eno has written several books, including the recently republished A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber). Buy the book from us here: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/bald-35-philosophical-short-cuts-critchley-simon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world - from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry - are hysterically rehearsed. A Primer for Cadavers, his startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. He was in conversation with Brian Dillon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet and critic Jack Underwood’s latest book Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly (Little, Brown) combines meditations on literature with astrophysics, quantum mechanics and the art of parenting. Most of all though it is a lyrical essay in praise of uncertainty and the pleasures (and pains) of uncertain living. He was in conversation with fellow poet Raymond Antrobus whose first collection The Perseverance was published by Penned in the Margins and whose second All the Names Given is forthcoming from Picador. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deborah Levy completes her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy – the first two volumes, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, won the Prix Femina Etranger in 2020 – with Real Estate, (Hamish Hamilton), a profound meditation on the things, both physical and psychological, that a woman might own. Levy herself writes ‘It was as if the search for Home was the point, but if I acquired it and the chase was over, there would be no more branches to put in the fire.’ She was in conversation about her work with Shahidha Bari, academic, critic, radio presenter and Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scholar, musician, activist, raconteur and polemicist, Edward Said was one of the most celebrated and controversial intellectuals of the last century. Drawing extensively on interviews and archival research, professor Timothy Brennan provides the first full account of the many faceted life and mind of a uniquely inspiring and talented individual. Timothy Brennan discusses Places of Mind (Bloomsbury) with LRB contributor Michael Wood. Buy the books here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Burnside’s new novel, Havergey (Little Toller), is set on a remote island in the aftermath of an ecological catastrophe. From our event in 2017, Burnside reads from the novel and is in conversation with Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso). The event is chaired by Gareth Evans, curator of film at the Whitechapel Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus blends fact and fiction to give ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family’. The year is 1959, and at Corbin College in New York academic Ruben Blum finds himself playing reluctant host to a visiting Israeli historian, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, who has unexpectedly arrived with his family in tow. The historian is the hawkish Benzion Netanyahu, and the family includes his 10-year-old son Benjamin, future Prime Minister of Israel. The resulting conflict of cultures and world views is comically played out in the format of a very unconventional campus novel. He was in conversation about his work with novelist, essayist and regular contributor to the LRB Colm Tóibín. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talking Politics: History of Ideas, David Runciman’s podcast introductions to the most important thinkers and theories behind modern politics, has been one of the few saving graces of a year of lockdowns, helping to make sense of our predicament through the revelatory ideas of Hobbes and Hayek, Fanon and Fukuyama, Bentham and De Beauvoir. To mark the conclusion of the second series, David was joined by Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger and Bland Fanatics, among other books, for a conversation about those subjects of David’s that Pankaj has also written about extensively – including Gandhi, Rousseau and Nietzsche – alongside an alternative canon of non-Western theorists of politics and crisis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everybody has a body, a source of both pleasure and pain. In her latest book Everybody (Picador) Olivia Laing uses the life and work of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich as an investigative tool to uncover the strange, subtle and sometimes perverted ways we think about the physical object we function within. Fundamentally, this exciting and challenging book is about how we might strive for freedom with, and not despite, our bodies. Olivia Laing was in conversation with Katherine Angel who has, most recently in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, and in several previous books, wrestled with issues of bodily integrity and bodily freedom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Described by Claire Louise Bennett as ‘lithe and ambitious’ and by Toby Litt as ‘a miracle in book form’, Isobel Wohl’s debut Cold New Climate (Weatherglass) is likely to be one of the most talked about novels of 2021. Encompassing the limits and expectations of love, life and family and the devastation and elation each of those can bring, and our fears for a future that is disappearing as we speed towards it, it’s a book that’s vibrantly conscious of the modern world, and slyly conscious of the tradition it’s coming from. Isobel Wohl was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, a fellow New Yorker, and author of Flaneuse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Throughout her career and across her many books Jacqueline Rose has been teasing out the political implications of violence, and in particular the way it concerns and interacts with the social constructions of gender. In her latest passionate, polemical work On Violence and On Violence Against Women (Faber) she confronts the issue head on, taking in trans rights, the sexual harassment of migrant women, the trial of Oscar Pistorius and the writings of Hisham Matar and Han Kang. Rose is in conversation with Jude Kelly, Founder and Director of The WOW Foundation. Buy the book here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/products/on-violence-and-on-violence-against-women-by-jacqueline-rose Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Mort and Dan Richards were at the shop to talk about poetry and mountaineering. Mort read from her latest collection from Chatto and Windus, No Map Could Show Them (a Poetry Book Society recommendation), which recounts in Mort’s inimitable style the exploits of pathbreaking female mountaineers. Afterwards she was in conversation with Dan Richards, whose book Climbing Days (Faber) explores the writing and climbing exploits of his great-great aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley and I.A. Richards. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carrie Brownstein was at the shop to discuss her book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, with Lavinia Greenlaw. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso)—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on #MeToo, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? Angel is in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of Funny Weather (Picador). Buy the books here: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/katherine-angel-and-olivia-laing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Power’s first novel A Lonely Man (Faber) is a powerful, menacing exploration of the nature of truth, fabrication and identity. ‘If you're a fan of existential crises’ writes Jon McGregor, ‘family dramas, Putin-era paranoias, and Bolaño-style multiplicities, and want to see them woven into one taut novel, you're in the right place.’ Chris Power was in conversation about A Lonely Man with the critic Alex Clark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beginning in San Francisco in 1981, the era of punk and nascent gay pride, Rebecca Solnit’s latest book Recollections of My Non-Existence (Granta) is a powerful memoir of growing both as a woman and an artist, drawing on the powers of literature, activism and solidarity in the face of an apparently unbreachable patriarchy. The struggle to find a voice and to find a way to make that voice heard are brilliantly captured and dissected by one of feminism’s, and indeed the world’s, foremost thinkers. Rebecca Solnit was in conversation about her life and work with historian Mary Beard, whose most recent book is Women & Power: A Manifesto. Both of our speakers are regular contributors to the pages of the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Already well-known for her novels – Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner has over the past two decades been writing essays, reviews and reportage as insightful and surprising as her fiction. In The Hard Crowd (Jonathan Cape) she has selected 19 pieces, covering diverse topics: art, literature, music, politics with essays on Marguerite Duras, Jeff Koons, wildcat strikes, a visit to a Palestinian refugee Camp and the music scene of her hometown San Francisco. She talks about her work with art critic and frequent contributor to the LRB Professor Hal Foster. Buy the books here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joshua Cohen, one of Granta magazines ‘Best Young American Writers’ for 2017, was at the shop to read from and talk about his latest novel Moving Kings, published by Fitzcarraldo. Described by James Wood in the New Yorker as ‘A Jewish Sopranos… burly with particularities and vibrant with voice… utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy’, Moving Kings interweaves the housing crisis in contemporary New York with the history of conflict in the Middle East. Joshua Cohen was in conversation with Jon Day, lecturer in English at King's College, London and LRB contributor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From this 2018 event: In Municipal Dreams (Verso), John Boughton charts the often surprising story of council housing in Britain, from the slum clearances of the Victorian age through to the Grenfell Tower disaster. It’s a history packed with incident – with utopians, visionaries and charlatans, with visionary planners and corrupt officials – and Boughton combines it with an architectural tour of some of the best remaining examples, as well as some of the more ordinary places that millions of people have come to call home. He's in conversation about his book with Owen Hatherley, architectural historian and author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Holly Pester's debut collection, Comic Timing (Granta), is disorienting, radical and extremely funny; Pester has a background in sound art and performance, having worked with the Womens' Library, the BBC and the Wellcome Collection, and is an unmissable reader of her own work. She read from Comic Timing and was in conversation with Vahni Capildeo, whose most recent collection is Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, 2019), and Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta and author of Kingdomland (Faber, 2019). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having an engineer as a father and an art school education, Paul Spooner became, predictably, a school-teacher, then a lorry driver. A chance meeting with mechanical model-maker Peter Markey in Cornwall led him to discover his true métier – the almost extinct profession of automatist, or maker of automata. Since then he has been relentlessly making mechanical playthings, mostly of wood, some of them not, mostly small, some of them not, all of them intricately engineered, eccentrically beautiful and endlessly fascinating. He is in conversation about his work with Rosemary Hill, architectural historian and contributing editor at the London Review of Books. She first encountered Paul Spooner's work at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden in the 1980s and has admired it ever since. Her books include God's Architect, a biography of A W N Pugin, and Stonehenge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patricia Lockwood was in conversation about her new book, No One Is Talking About This (and a lot else besides) with fellow LRB contributing editor, John Lanchester. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brigid Brophy (1929-95) was a fearlessly original novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism and prison reform. Her many acclaimed novels include Hackenfeller’s Ape, The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball – which Faber reissued at the end of last year – as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. She also wrote about Mozart for the LRB, and contributed 19 other unforgettable pieces in the paper’s first years, on subjects ranging from Michelangelo to Germaine Greer, animal cruelty to structuralism. Eley Williams, who wrote the foreword for the new edition of The Snow Ball, is in conversation with Terry Castle and Bidisha about Brophy the essayist and novelist, Brophy then and now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Oyler was talking abou her first novel, Fake Accounts, with the writer Olivia Sudjic, who has described it as 'Savage and shrewd, destined to go viral. If the world does end soon I'll be glad that I read it'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

André Aciman talked to Brian Dillon about his latest book, Homo Irrealis (Faber and Faber), a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as Freud, W.G.Sebald, the films of Eric Rohmer and the cityscapes of Alexandria and St Petersburg. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In The Lark Ascending (Faber) Richard King, author of Original Rockers and How Soon is Now?, explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature. From the far west of Wales to the Thames Estuary and the Suffolk shoreline, taking in Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Dylan Thomas, Gavin Bryars, Greenham Common and the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, The Lark Ascending listens to the land and the music that emerged from it, to chart a new and surprising course through a familiar landscape. King was in conversation with Luke Turner, editor of the influential online music publication The Quietus and author of the memoir Out of the Woods. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.