Fleur Adcock’s sly, laconic poems have been delighting audiences since her 1964 debut The Eye of the Hurricane. Her Collected Poems draws together the work of sixty years; as Fiona Sampson writes, ‘Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut.’ Adcock was joined in c…

Holly Pester discusses her debut novel, The Lodgers, with Nathalie Olah. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Here is a wasteland / of parched aesthetics / patched up with modern tubes’ – Rachael Allen’s long-awaited second collection, God Complex, is a long narrative poem describing the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of environmental degradation and toxicity. In this episode, she reads from the collection and was joined in conversation wi…

Lara Pawson discusses her new book Spent Light with Jennifer Hodgson. Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Muldoon reads from and talks about his collection Howdie-Skelp. Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves’, wrote Adam Phillips in a 2022 LRB piece, ‘On Giving Up’. Now developed and expanded into a book of the same title, Phillips illuminates bo…

Lavinia Greenlaw’s new book The Vast Extent is a collection of ‘exploded essays’, about light and image, sight and the unseen, covering wide territories with the scientific precision and ease of access which characterises her poetry. She was joined by Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. Find mo…

Seán Hewitt’s new poetry collection Rapture’s Road follows hard on the heels of Tongues of Fire – the winner of the 2021 Laurel Prize – and the bestselling memoir All Down Darkness Wide. Like its predecessors, the collection confronts dark and difficult subject matter in startlingly beautiful lyric language, ‘exquisitely calm’ in the words of Max P…

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, published in 2017, the first into English by a woman, was hailed as a ‘revelation’ by the New York Times and a ‘cultural landmark’ by the Guardian. With her translation of the Iliad, ten years in the making, she has given us a complete Homer for a new generation. Emily Wilson, professor of classical studie…

Mary Jean Chan reads from their new collection, Bright Fear, and discuss it with Andrew McMillan. Chan’s debut, Fleche, won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019. Bright Fear extends and develops that collection’s themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy, while remaining deeply attuned to moments of tenderness, beauty and grace…

Who would you invite to a dinner party? In The Dinner Table, a delicious collection of great food writing from past and present, talented writer-chefs Kate Young and Ella Risbridger will introduce you to Samuel Pepys on the glories of parmesan, Shirley Jackson on washing up, Katherine Mansfield on party food, Nigella Lawson on mayonnaise, Michelle …

Part script, part novel, part manual, Sorcerer (Prototype) is the latest unclassifiable book written in collaboration between the artist and writer Ed Atkins and the poet and critic Steven Zultanski – a gentle, contemplative work about the pleasures of conversation, being with others, and being alone. ‘Unlike many narratives, Sorcerer does not put …

In Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, continues the radical exploration of how the personal and the political interact. As Baroness Helena Kennedy KC writes, ‘Both memoir and manifesto, this wonderful book charts a persona…

In Someone Else's Empire Tom Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, dispels the potent myth of Britain as a global player punching above its weight on the world stage, arguing instead that its foreign policy has for a long time been in thrall to the wishes and interests of the United States. He talks about his book with writer, filmmaker, pub…

Mathias Enard’s latest novel, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild takes us to the marshlands of South West France in a Rabelaisian celebration of life, love and death. Juan Gabriel Vasquez writes of him ‘Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful styli…

In her most personal book to date, Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso) McKenzie Wark writes with her characteristic acuity about gender transition, communism, history, art, memory and the journey of discovering who one really wants to be.Wark talks about that journey with Lauren John Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch. Hosted on Acast. …

‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ wrote Jude Cook in the Guardian, praising Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold. Waidner reads from their latest novel Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, and talks about it with academic, performer and activist Diarmuid Hester, whose forthcoming book Nothing Ever Just Disa…

Poet and editor of Bad Betty Press Amy Acre reads from and talks about her debut collection Mothersong (Bloomsbury). Poignant and powerful, her work explores motherhood, grief, trauma, recovery and what it means to be a female artist. She's in conversation with Joelle Taylor, author of the prize-winning poetry collection C+nto (Telegram), who has w…

Historical fiction is having a moment, and at the forefront are two of 2023’s most hotly anticipated novels: Zadie Smith’s The Fraud and Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future. Smith and Thirlwell discussed their approaches to fiction and the ways in which prose can ‘sandblast the dust off history’, as Polly Stenham writes about The Future Future. Buy …

In Shattered Nation, Oxford Professor of Geography Danny Dorling meticulously documents how Britain over the last 40 years has been transformed by incompetence, avarice and short-termism from one of the world’s leading economies, with widely admired public services, into Europe’s most unequal society, afflicted by staggering levels of deprivation a…

Kehinde Andrews continues the work he began in The New Age of Empire with The Psychosis of Whiteness (Allen Lane), a wry and piercing guide to retaining sanity in a racist world, which Ron Ramdin has described as ‘a remarkable and enriching work which shines a light on many dark places’. He discussed the book with journalist and writer Afua Hirsch,…

Terrance Hayes and Nick Laird read from and talk about their recent books So to Speak (Penguin) and Up Late (Faber). Hayes, describing Laird, praises his ‘truth-telling that’s political, existential and above all, emotional’; Laird writing about Hayes notes that his invention ‘allows his poetry to house almost anything, from the political to the se…

Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London was first published in 1964 and now appears, 40 years after his death, in a new edition from Notting Hill with an introduction by Travis Elborough, ‘one of Britain’s finest pop culture historians’ according to the Guardian. Elborough was joined by architectural historian Gillian Darley and architect Charles Ho…

Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk) has collaborated with musician and writer Sin Blaché to write a dazzling science fiction debut. Author Paraic O’Donnell describes Prophet (Jonathan Cape) as ‘a hyperkinetic headrush of a novel that proves its organic bona fides by getting you drunk with ideas before casually and cataclysmically breaking your heart.’ …

Caret continues the adventures of the irrepressible John Cromer, begun in Pilcrow (2008) and continued in Cedilla (2011) – part of Adam Mars-Jones’ ‘semi-infinite’ novel series, praised by one reviewer as ‘a genuine, almost miraculous oddity’. Mars-Jones was in conversation with the journalist and critic Leo Robson. Buy Caret: lrb.me/caretpod More …