London Review Bookshop Podcast

Holly Pester’s Cafés (Fitzcarraldo) continues the trajectory which, since her debut Comic Timing, has made her one of the most exciting poets writing. An elegy for lost communal space, and a stylish political intervention, Francesca Wade has described Cafés as embodying ‘a public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester's brilliance builds this cafe up and invites us in to linger’. Pester was in conversation with Luke Roberts, lecturer at King’s College London, co-director of the small press Distance No Object, and author of (most recently) Bad Omens (Book Works).

You can buy a copy of Cafés from the London Review Bookshop.
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Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, they began to meet regularly, to talk, to eat and to swim. What would it be like, Baume wondered, to write a book in the style of Mollie’s painting? Opening Night is the result. She was in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days.

You can buy a copy of Opening Night from the London Review Bookshop.
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In a series of provocative essays encompassing Marilyn Monroe, the myth of Apollo and Daphne, octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats, Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now, seeks to put the femme back into feminism. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. She was in conversation with novelist and poet, Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.

You can buy a copy of Femmephilia from the London Review Bookshop.
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To call Elizabeth Bishop one of the greatest female American poets of the 20th century is to make too many qualifications. Increasingly, critical opinion has converged with Dwight Garner’s assertion that she was perhaps ‘the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century’. To mark the publication of his new book, Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing, Andrew Dickinson was in conversation with the poet and critic Peter McDonald. Poet Mark Ford, actor Juliet Stevenson and writer Lamorna Ash will also read from a selection of Bishop’s work.

You can buy a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Styles of Writing from the London Review Bookshop.
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Historian Colin Grant and WritersMosaic writers have travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather the voices and experiences of immigrants living in Britain. In What We Leave We Carry we meet, amongst others, a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, and a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. Grant was in conversation with the author, broadcaster and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen.
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