London Review Bookshop Podcast

Holly Pester discusses her debut novel, The Lodgers, with Nathalie Olah.

‘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 with the poet Lucy Mercer, whose first collection is Emblem (Prototype, 2022).Buy God Complex: lrb.me/godcomplexpodFind more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod

Lara Pawson discusses her new book Spent Light with Jennifer Hodgson.Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/

Paul Muldoon reads from and talks about his collection Howdie-Skelp.Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events

‘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 both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive? Phillips was joined in conversation by Dame Hermione Lee.Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspodBuy On Giving Up: lrb.me/givinguppod

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 more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspodGet The Vast Extent: lrb.me/thevastextentpod

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 Porter. Hewitt read from the collection and was in conversation with Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth, whose long-awaited new novel Enlightenment is coming out in May.

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 studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is a regular contributor to the LRB and the host of one of our Close Readings series of podcasts, Among the Ancients. Wilson was joined in conversation by Edith Hall, professor at Durham University and the author of many acclaimed books on Ancient Greek culture and its influence on modernity. The event was chaired by Wilson’s Close Readings co-host, Thomas Jones, and passages from Wilson’s Iliad were read by acclaimed actors Juliet Stevenson and Tobias Menzies.Buy the book: lrb.me/wilsoniliadFind more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspodSubscribe to Close Readings:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

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.Andrew McMillan’s most recent collection is pandemonium (Cape, 2021); a novel, Pity, is forthcoming in 2024. Together with Chan, he edited the landmark anthology 100 Queer Poems(Penguin).