London Review Bookshop Podcasts

In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In his new book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (Penguin) Slavoj Zizek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realisation of Marx's prediction that 'all that is solid melts into air.' With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? Zizek was in conversation with William Davies, author of Nervous States (Jonathan Cape).

What is the meaning of time? Is there such a thing as the present? How can we reconcile our intuitions on the subject with the scientific overturnings of the 20th century? Who better to examine these questions than Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, Reality is Not What It Seems, and most recently, The Order of Time (Allen Lane). Dubbed ‘the poet of modern physics’ by John Banville, Rovelli's work combines expert knowledge with charm, wisdom and consolation. Carlo Rovelli was in conversation with Pedro Ferreira, author of The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity (Abacus).

For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a narrow derision of religion in the name of an often very vaguely understood 'science'. In *Seven Types of Atheism* (Allen Lane) John Gray describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'. Gray was in conversation with author and essayist Adam Phillips.

Out of My Head tells the highly personal and often surprisingly funny story of Tim Parks' quest to discover more about consciousness. It seems not a day goes by without a discussion on whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether the mind is unique to humans or spread out across the universe. Out of My Head aims to explore these ideas via metaphysical considerations and laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand and invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. Parks was in conversation with Laurence Scott, author of The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality (Heinemann).

Hilton Als was at the shop to discuss his second book of essays White Girls (Penguin) with writer and journalist Bridget Minamore. In thirteen astonishing portraits New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als limns the vital subjects of race, sexuality and gender under the general heading of ‘White Girls’, a heading that is for him expansive enough to include Flannery O’Connor, Eminem, Truman Capote and Malcolm X. Reminiscent of James Baldwin at his best and most wicked, Hilton Als leaves no precious stone unturned nor any sacred cow unscathed in his mission to inform, enlighten and entertain. Read, listen, enjoy and learn.

In ‘Trans-Europe Express’, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it. Hatherley was at the Bookshop in conversation with Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’ (Granta) and ‘Respectable: The Experience of Class’ (Penguin).

The refugee crisis that hit the headlines in 2015 and 2016 has largely gone out of the news. Yet refugees continue to risk their lives on a daily basis in the attempt to reach Europe. Most of those who make it face extraordinary difficulties getting their claims for asylum accepted. This is one of the most serious humanitarian disasters to unfold in Europe in recent decades; yet the EU and its members have largely focused on deterring migrants. What can we learn from the refugees’ stories? And where do we stand, as Europeans whose governments seek to dissuade would-be refugees from leaving their homelands? Teresa Thornhill, author of Hara Hotel (Verso), and Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance (Picador), were joined in conversation by Marchu Girma of Women for Refugee Women and journalist Ziad Ghandour.

Four of poetry's liveliest new voices – A.K. Blakemore, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Amy Key and Zaffar Kunial – joined us for an evening of readings hosted by Martha Sprackland of Offord Road Books.

Novelist, essayist and playwright Deborah Levy was at the shop to read from and talk about her latest book The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), the second part in her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy that began with Things I Don’t Want to Know. An exhilarating feminist manifesto for change, The Cost of Living is Levy’s conversation with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and reveals a writer at the height of her powers. She was in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, whose first novel Crudo was published by Picador in June.

Over six winter days in upstate New York the Querry family, its members variously afflicted by painful divorce, bereavement and depression, wrestle with life’s fundamental questions. Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that can be learned, or a lucky accident of birth? Is reflection helpful to happiness or an obstacle to it? Profoundly moving and quietly humorous, Wood’s second novel is, as Rebecca Adams wrote in the Financial Times, ‘stubbornly true to life.’ Wood read from Upstate (Cape), and discussed it with the audience.

Sophie Mackintosh’s powerful dystopian debut novel The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton) comes with some dazzling endorsements. ‘Eerie, electric, beautiful’, Daisy Johnson writes, ‘It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book’. Katherine Angel, with whom Sophie was in conversation at the Bookshop, described it as 'immensely assured, calmly devastating.’ Sophie Mackintosh was the 2016 winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in Granta and TANK magazines. Katherine Angel’s Unmastered was published by Penguin in 2012.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? Crudo, the first novel from Olivia Laing, author of three critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. Laing was in conversation with Ali Smith.

Sociologist Didier Eribon and novelist Édouard Louis were both born into conservative working-class families in provincial France. Oppressed both intellectually and sexually by racism and homophobia, they each escaped to academic life at the Sorbonne, where Eribon was for a while Louis’s tutor. Of Eribon’s ‘Returning to Reims’, first published in 2009 and now reissued by Allen Lane, Édouard Louis has written that it ‘marked a turning point in my writing life.’ Louis’s first book ‘The End of Eddy’ was published in English to huge acclaim by Harvill Secker in 2017, and his second, ‘History of Violence’ (also Harvill Secker) coincides with the reissue of Eribon’s classic memoir. The two authors read from their books and discussed their lives and works with festival moderator and curator Steven Gale.

Joanna Walsh’s latest book Break.up (Tuskar Rock), a feminist revisionist travelogue, and romance for the digital age, explores the spaces between lovers, between thinking and doing, between fiction and memoir, as well as ‘the sheer fragility of experience and feeling’ (Colm Tóibín). Lara Feigel’s Free Woman (Bloomsbury), ‘the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read’ according to Deborah Levy, is a memoir in which Feigel experiments with sexual, intellectual and political freedom while reading and pursuing Doris Lessing. Walsh and Feigel read from their books, and talked about what writing can, can’t, should and shouldn’t do. The evening was chaired by Jennifer Hodgson, writer, critic and editor of Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories).

Sheila Heti’s latest novel Motherhood (Harvill Secker) confronts, in the characteristic fiction cum essay style which she pioneered in How Should a Person Be? one of the fundamental dilemmas of early womanhood – to have children or not. She read from her work and discussed it with Sally Rooney, bestselling author of Conversations with Friends (Faber).