London Review Bookshop Podcast

In Poor Artists (Particular Books) Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente (AKA The White Pube), explore the bizarre world of contemporary art through their protagonist Quest Talukdar. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Blending storytelling with dialogue from anonymised interviews with artists and art workers – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a few ghosts, a Venice Biennale fraudster and a communist messiah – Poor Artists is a unique portrayal of the emotional, existential and financial experience of artists today. Joining them in conversation was Olivia Sudjic (Asylum Road, Sympathy).

The Third Realm is the next instalment of the series Karl Ove Knausgaard began with The Morning Star and continued in The Wolves of Eternity; like its two precursors, it is a breathtaking exploration of ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, ‘re-enchanting the cosmos with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it’ (in the words of The Guardian).Knausgaard read from The Third Realm and was joined in conversation about its mysteries and complexities by Helen Charman, author of Mother State.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is’, writes Andrew O’Hagan of Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today’s headlines.’ Castor, whose 2010 book She-Wolves was adapted for television by the BBC, discussed Richard and Henry with Mary Wellesley, author of Hidden Hands: Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers and co-presenter of the medieval strand of the LRB’s Close Readings​ podcast series.

In Black Meme (Verso) Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.Russell was joined in conversation with artist and writer Rene Matić.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

In his memoir Sonic Life (Faber), Thurston Moore recounts a life that has been defined by music. Following a childhood rock ’n’ roll epiphany in the early 1960s, his infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave led him to move to New York City, where he immersed himself in the underground music and art scenes. In 1981 he co-founded the band Sonic Youth, who changed the sound of modern rock music in a thirty-year career of constant experimentation. Throughout the book we encounter a constellation of musicians and artists who inspired him, including The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.Moore talks with poet Jack Underwood (A Year in the New Life, Happiness).

Described by Mick Herron as ‘seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall’, Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake (Cape) reaffirms her position as one of America’s most exciting and accomplished writers of fiction. In a reimagining of the spy novel for an age of ecological crisis, Kushner leads us to a remote Neanderthal cave in rural France where the enigmatic Bruno Lacombe leads his followers in a radical project to reject and undermine the modern world. ‘I've never read anything like it’, writes Brett Easton Ellis. Rachel Kushner was joined in conversation by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet Creation Lake: https://lrb.me/creationlakepod