In Spring, the third instalment of her seasonal quartet, Ali Smith continues her unique investigation into our country’s past present and future, uniting Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times and a woman trapped in modern times by means of an extended riff on Shakespeare’s least read and most troubling play Pericles. The second book in the series Winter was described by Stephanie Merritt as ‘luminously beautiful.’ She read from its sequel, and discussed it with author and critic Erica Wagner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We hosted the shortlisted authors for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 in an evening of readings at the London Review Bookshop. Rewarding the most exciting and interesting literature published by small presses in the UK and Ireland, the Republic of Consciousness Prize has previously been awarded to John Keene (Counternarratives, Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Eley Williams (Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press). This year’s shortlist of six is: Daša Drndić for Doppelgänger, (Istros), Will Eaves for Murmur (CB Editions), Wendy Erskine for Sweet Home (Stinging Fly), Anthony Joseph for Kitch (Peepal Tree), Chris McCabe for Dedalus (Henningham Family Press) and Alex Pheby for Lucia (Galley Beggar). Sadly, Daša Drndić died last year, but was represented at the readings by her publisher and translator. See the full shortlist here. The readings were introduced by the prize’s founder, Neil Griffiths. The Republic of Consciousness Prize was set up in 2017, and is given yearly to a book published by a small press in the UK & Ireland. It is the only prize that awards money to both the publisher and the author of the winning title. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tessa Hadley's new novel Late in the Day (Jonathan Cape) addresses loss, friendship and lives unmoored. Hilary Mantel says, ‘The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest novel from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who ‘recruits admirers with every book’.' Hadley was in conversation with Alex Clark of the Guardian. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining (Verso), novelist, journalist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB James Meek anatomises the fractured body of our nation as it approaches one of the most momentous junctures in its post-war history. In a series of frontline reports and interviews from every corner of the island, he talks to remainers, leavers, undecideds and don’t-cares. He was in conversation about his discoveries with Chris Bickerton, Reader in Modern European Politics at the University of Cambridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chloe Aridjis’s third novel Sea Monsters (Chatto), set in Mexico in the late 1980s, describes the elopement of Mexico City schoolgirl with a boy she barely knows, in search of freedom, independence and rather more oddly, a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped from a Soviet travelling circus. Aridjis was at the shop to read from and talk about her new book, described by Garth Greenwell as ‘mesmerizing, revelatory … a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world.’ Aridjis was in conversation with Juliet Jacques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Édouard Louis, one of France’s most acclaimed young writers, shot to international fame with his first novel, the semi-autobiographical End of Eddy. His latest book Who Killed My Father (Harvill Secker) revisits many of the same locations and subjects — poverty, homophobia and social exclusion — in non-fictional essay form, and is a powerful polemic exploring the bonds, often persistent even when apparently sundered, between parent and child. He discussed his work with Kerry Hudson, a novelist and journalist whose own work, notably in her first novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma and in her forthcoming non-fiction work Lowborn, also investigates with wit and candour the outer and inner lives of the often neglected working class. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up to her award-winning 2014 debut Bright Travellers, is one of the most hotly-anticipated poetry collections of 2019. Its harrowing central sequence is a retelling of Greek myth, depicting Zeus as a serial rapist; other poems, including the Forward-shortlisted ‘Ruins’, engage with depression, female sexuality and early motherhood. Fiona was in conversation with Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under (Jonathan Cape), shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Things fall apart when empires crumble. Rediscovery of past glories is attempted again and again, until eventually those living in what was once the heart of the empire become reconciled with their fate. Many of the British are not yet reconciled. A major cause of Brexit was a stoked-up fear of immigrants, but Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (Biteback Publishing) argues that at its heart the rhetoric of Brexit was the playing out of older school curricula that had been dominated by empire. Brexit was led by people, almost all men, who mostly had fond memories of something that never was as great as they believed it to be. Co-authors Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson were in conversation. The conversation was chaired by writer and researcher Maya Goodfellow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First published by Irish independent Tramp Press, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self became a phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller. Now picked up on this side of the water by Hamish Hamilton, Pine’s debut collection of autobiographical essays is a poignant, radically honest and fiercely intelligent account of the pains and joys of living as a woman in the 21st Century. She was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall, is a Kafkaesque nightmare whose richly-imagined world is very different from our own and yet all too familiar. Like 2012’s Capital (recently made into a TV series starring Toby Jones), Lanchester speaks to our contemporary preoccupations with an unnerving exactness. Keith Miller, reviewing Capital, noted that, ‘like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people; the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions’. Lanchester was in conversation with Daniel Soar, editor at the LRB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the disintegration of the most significant relationship of his life, the demons Luke Turner has been battling since childhood are quick to return - depression and guilt surrounding his identity as a bisexual man, experiences of sexual abuse, and the religious upbringing that was the cause of so much confusion. It is among the trees of London's Epping Forest where he seeks refuge. But once a place of comfort, it now seems full of unexpected, elusive threats that trigger twisted reactions. Turner was in conversation with Olivia Laing (*Crudo*; *The Lonely City*). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Garfield – 'The schoolteacher who made the time fly, a one-man Blue Peter team for intelligent adults, a great British explainer’, according to the Observer – is never less, and usually much more, than entertaining. He was at the shop to talk about his latest book In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World, published by Canongate, and was in conversation with Andy Miller, presenter of Backlisted podcast and author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Man Booker International-shortlisted novelist Mathias Enard, 'the most brazenly lapel-grabbing French author since Michel Houellebecq', returns with Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (tr. Charlotte Mandell), his fourth novel to appear in English after Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass. In 1506, Michelangelo – a young but already renowned sculptor – is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople. Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a thrilling novella about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another. Enard was in conversation with Elif Shafak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. In Everyday Madness (4th Estate) Appignanesi explores her own and society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives. Appignanesi was in conversation with Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman (Bloomsbury). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Time Bomb Danny Dorling presents the evidence that in 2018 the growth in UK income inequality may have finally peaked. Inequality began growing in the 1970s and the damaging repercussions may continue long after the peak is passed. There will be speculation and a little futurology. Danny was in conversation with Faiza Shaheen, director of the think tank CLASS and former Head of Inequality and Sustainable Development at Save the Children UK. Faiza recently explained that the rich, like viruses, also develop resistance, in their case to redistributive taxes. They use their wealth and power to carve out tax loopholes and lower tax rates. Their fortunes balloon. Inequality grows. In which case why should inequality peak now? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Does the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin prevent it from genuinely understanding Russia? In Russia Without Putin (Verso), LRB contributor and Russophile Tony Wood argues that the core features of Putinism—a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society—are integral to the system set in place after the fall of Communism, a legacy of Yeltsinism rather than a resurgence of Soviet authoritarianism. Tony Wood was in conversation with James Meek, LRB Contributing Editor and author of Private Island (Verso). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Like Björk and FKA Twigs, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together.’ The Guardian As a musician and artist, Jenny Hval is renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery, and in her debut novel, Paradise Rot (Verso) she presents a hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire, where the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. ‘As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician,’ says Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, ‘Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder.’ Hval was in conversation with Laura Snapes, deputy music editor at the Guardian. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is it about the particularities of painting that has allowed artists to explore, in a variety of ways and with a sometimes surprising degree of freedom, the vexed relations between the mundane and the celestial? In his latest book Heaven on Earth (Thames and Hudson) art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. Professor Clark will be in conversation with LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Living With Buildings (Profile), Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions – through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way. Walking is Sinclair's defensive magic against illness and, as he moves, he observes his surroundings: stacked tower blocks and behemoth estates; halogen-lit glasshouse offices and humming hospitals; the blackened hull of a Spitalfields church and the floating mass of Le Corbusier's radiant city. Sinclair was in conversation with Patrick Wright, Professor of Literature and Visual & Material Culture, Kings College London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Democracy Hacked, Martin Moore examines how our own fragile political systems are being gamed by authoritarian states, shadowy hackers and unaccountable social media firms. Is our democracy more vulnerable than we realise? Can these sinister think-fluencers be reined in, and what can we do to restabilise and secure our political sphere? Martin Moore was in conversation with David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge and author of, most recently, How Democracy Ends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Marcus is one of contemporary American fiction’s most masterful writers. His new book of short stories, Notes from the Fog (Granta), is an emotional handbook to the baffling times we live in; a cabinet of brain-rearranging stories which are both horrifyingly strange and deeply touching. From parent/child relationships thrown off kilter to scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Marcus is the a chronicler of the present uncanny and the peculiar future. He was in discussion with Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marina Warner’s new collection of essays, Forms of Enchantment (Thames and Hudson), collects her writing on art from 1988 to the present, including pieces on (among others) Louise Bourgeois, Joan Jonas and Paula Rego. She brings to artists and artworks the same anthropological and mythological approach which informs her previous books, including Stranger Magic, From Beast to Blonde and Monuments and Maidens, arguing that the social position filled by art and aesthetics is increasingly best understood in terms of magic. Warner was in conversation with Eleanor Birne, author and contributor to the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Powers, one of America’s greatest novelists, often compared to Pynchon and Roth, read from and talked about his twelfth novel ‘The Overstory’ (Heinemann). Powers has always been remarkable for the seriousness with which he takes science and nature and their intersections with literature, and in ‘The Overstory’, which stretches in time and place from antebellum New York to the Pacific North West timber wars in the late 20th century, he provides us with an arboreal equivalent to Moby Dick, and a book that will permanently change – and for the better – the way you view the world around you. Powers was in conversation with the novelist Benjamin Markovits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the most acclaimed Polish writers of her generation, Olga Tokarczuk has won multiple prizes, most recently the Man Booker International for her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, and published, for the first time in English, by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Tokarczuk was in conversation with Man Booker shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy. This event was part of the Poland Market Focus programme at the London Book Fair, supported by the British Council. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hera Lindsay Bird’s debut poetry collection, the eponymous Hera Lindsay Bird (Penguin), became a cult bestseller in her native New Zealand, and led Carol Ann Duffy to describe her as ‘without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance’ – Duffy’s own selection from Bird’s work Pamper Me to Hell and Back has just been published by Smith Doorstop. Jack Underwood, senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, is the author of Happiness (Faber) and co-editor of the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1986, having just been diagnosed with HIV, the artist, film-maker and writer Derek Jarman decided to create a garden at his home on the bleak, beautiful coast at Dungeness. Modern Nature, his journal of a year in that garden, and a moving account of coming to terms with his own (and everything else’s) mortality, was first published in 1991, and now appears in a new edition from Vintage Classics. In her introduction Olivia Laing describes it as ‘the most beautiful and furious book of all time’. To celebrate the life and work of this unique and uniquely talented artist, almost a quarter century after his death, we were joined by Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, Philip Hoare, whose book Leviathan won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006, and film-maker Sarah Wood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hilary Wainwright, co-editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow of the Transnational Institute, has been a significant figure on the left of the Labour Movement since the heyday of the GLC. Her latest book A New Politics from the Left (Polity) reflects on the recent reinvigoration of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and presents a grass-roots up vision of the future that is both profoundly radical and entirely practical. She was in conversation about her book, and the future of the left in Britain, with journalist, activist and author Melissa Benn, and Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate (OR Books). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Journalist Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark when he interviewed her at her Tuscan home in 1990. It marked the beginning of a long and close friendship. In Appointment in Arezzo (Polygon) Taylor gives a warm and humorous account of that friendship, as well as reflecting on Spark's early life and on her complicated relationships with her Jewish roots, her native Scotland and with her son Robin. He was in conversation about his book, and about the life and work of Muriel Spark, with fellow enthusiast the novelist Ali Smith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘I think to be a mother for five minutes is to know that the world is unjust, and that our hearts are impure.’ In her latest book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Faber) Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, regular LRB contributor and prominent cultural and literary theorist, investigates the question of what we ask of mothers, and what we hold them responsible for, often against all sense of reason. Drawing on literature, newspaper reports and psychoanalysis, Rose uncovers how our expectations of what mothers can and should do are damaging both to women, and the world. She was in conversation about her ideas with Devorah Baum, lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and author of Feeling Jewish and The Jewish Joke. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Terry Eagleton’s more than 40 books have explored, in consistently invigorating ways, the many and surprising intersections and confluences of literature, culture, ideology and belief. His latest book Radical Sacrifice (Yale) draws on the Bible, the Aeneid, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Henry James in a brilliant meditation on the concept of sacrifice, fundamentally reconfiguring it as a radical force within modern life and thought. Professor Eagleton was in conversation about his latest work with Daniel Soar, senior editor at the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin) has been attracting ecstatic reviews and endorsements. The poet Fanny Howe writes ‘The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love, is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection’. Kaveh Akbar was joined in reading and conversation by Richard Scott, whose debut collection Soho (Faber) paints an uncompromising portrait of love and shame in contemporary London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Timothy Morton was at the shop to discuss his latest work, Being Ecological (Pelican), which argues for a radically different approach to global warming. Rather than continually anticipating an extinction that is already upon us, being ecological and re-joining the biosphere can be liberating: if humans give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we can refocus on pleasure. The evening was chaired by Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelists Tessa Hadley and Ariana Harwicz discuss the dark art of fiction writing with critic Catherine Taylor. Ariana Harwicz is one of the leading lights of contemporary Argentinian literature, and *Die, My Love*, a gripping thriller set in France, is the first of her books to appear in English. This event marked the launch of Charco Press, a new publisher of outstanding contemporary Latin American literature appearing in English translation for the first time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.