London Review Bookshop Podcasts

In Against Memoir (And Other Stories), Michelle Tea takes us through the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Via a series of essays, addresses and fragments she reclaims Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorcycle gang HAGS and introduces us to activists at a trans protest camp. Tea was in conversation with writer Juliet Jacques.

Denise Riley’s devastating long poem ‘A Part Song’, written in response to the death of her son, was first published in the LRB in 2012 and later became the kernel of her acclaimed collection Say Something Back (Picador). The poem’s prose counterpart Time Lived, Without Its Flow was initially published in a small edition by Capsule Press but has now been made more readily available in a new edition, also from Picador. Riley was in conversation about her essay with the writer Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny and with the poet Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby.

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’. It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo) focuses on black artists, including James Brown, Charlie Parker and Prince, who were at the forefront of innovation and the white artists that followed, adapting their sounds for the mainstream. Described by Iain Sinclair as ‘a laureate for marginal places’ Penman began his career in 1970s at the NME and has since gone on to write for publications such as Sight & Sound, Uncut and the London Review of Books. Penman was in conversation with writer and editor Jennifer Hodgson.

An evening of readings to celebrate the first birthday of Rough Trade Editions. André Naffis-Sahely read from his Americana-themed The Other Side of Nowhere; he was joined by Martha Sprackland, Will Burns, Joe Dunthorne and Charlotte Newman, whose pamphlets (Milk Tooth, Germ Songs, All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone and Counter Reform, respectively) contain some of the liveliest poetry being published today.

Nell Zink, born in Virginia in 1964 and now resident in Germany, is one of the most remarkable novelists of her, and indeed any generation. Her exuberant creations, always inflected with political, social and ecological concern, have won worldwide acclaim for their recklessness, their inventiveness and their sheer stylistic brilliance. She read from the latest of them, *[Doxology][1]* (4th Estate), a tale that begins with the iconic tragedy of 11 September 2001 and spins out from it into America’s past and potential futures, she discussed it with Alex Clark of the Guardian. [1]: /on-our-shelves/book/9780008323486/doxology

In twelve inimitable, eccentric, hilarious, disturbing and powerful novels, Nicola Barker has established herself as one of the most inventive and powerful voices in contemporary British fiction. To mark the publication of the thirteenth, I Am Sovereign (William Heinemann), Barker was in conversation about experiment, fiction, contemporaneity and a great deal else besides with the novelist and short story writer Ali Smith.

‘A writer is only as interesting as what she pays attention to.’ Deborah Levy is the author of many plays, novels, short stories and essay collections. Inventive, experimental and compulsively readable, her work has won many awards, accolades and prizes. Her latest novel The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton) plays with time and memory in a gripping exploration of the weight of history and the disastrous consequences of trying to ignore it. ‘There’s no one touching the brilliance of Deborah Levy’s prose today’ writes Lee Rourke. Levy was in conversation with Shahidha Bari, academic, critic and author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (Jonathan Cape).

At the New School in New York, where Simon Critchley teaches, ‘Critchley on Tragedy’ is one of the most consistently oversubscribed courses. Now, in Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (Profile) he explains, in often surprising ways, why Greek Tragedies remain so compellingly relevant to modern times, in the way they confront us with things about ourselves we don’t want to believe, but are nevertheless true. Critchley was in conversation with Shahidha Bari, Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary, University of London.

Afterglow: Eileen Myles

Romy Hall, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel *[The Mars Room][1]* (Cape), is beginning two consecutive life sentences plus six months at a women’s correctional facility. Cut off from everything she knows and loves – The Mars Room, a San Francisco strip club where she once earned a living, her seven-year-old son Jackson now in the care of her estranged mother – Romy begins a terrifying new life, detailed with humour and precision by Kushner. George Saunders writes ‘Kushner is a young master. I honestly don't know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way.’ She read from her latest novel, and was in conversation about it with the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell. [1]: /on-our-shelves/book/9781910702673/mars-room

Melissa Benn and Ed Miliband: Life Lessons

John Berger – A Writer of Our Time: Joshua Sperling and Leo Hollis

Peter Pomerantsev & Devorah Baum: The Politics of Feeling

Katherine Angel’s Daddy Issues engages with what Lauren Elkin has called ‘that forgotten figure in feminism’s critique of patriarchy: the father’, examining the place of fathers in contemporary culture and asking how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, Angel argues, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook. Angel was in conversation with Sarah Moss, whose sixth novel Ghost Wall was longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2019.

An American Marriage: Tayari Jones and Cathy Rentzenbrink