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London Review Bookshop Podcast
Joshua Cohen and Colm Tóibín: The Netanyahus
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Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus blends fact and fiction to give ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family’. The year is 1959, and at Corbin College in New York academic Ruben Blum finds himself playing reluctant host to a visiting Israeli historian, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, who has unexpectedly arrived with his family in tow. The historian is the hawkish Benzion Netanyahu, and the family includes his 10-year-old son Benjamin, future Prime Minister of Israel. The resulting conflict of cultures and world views is comically played out in the format of a very unconventional campus novel. He was in conversation about his work with novelist, essayist and regular contributor to the LRB Colm Tóibín.
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Saraid de Silva & Nina Mingya Powles: Amma
51:08In her debut novel Amma (Weatherglass), a multi-generational saga set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and London, Saraid de Silva explores memory, trauma and displacement. She was in conversation with Nina Mingya Powles, author of Tiny Moons and Small Bodies of Water.Siblings: Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris & Nisha Ramayya
01:07:34Siblings (Monitor Books) is a unique round-table discussion / poetry collection, convened by Will Harris, between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya. The four poets explore real and imaginary siblings, writing communities, and the wayward directions of the lyric mode – writing as makers and friends about the possibilities that poetry enables now. All four poets convened at the Bookshop for discussion and readings.Get the book: https://lrb.me/siblingsbookFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodLove’s Work: James Butler, Rebekah Howes & Rowan Williams
01:07:17When Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work was published shortly before the author’s death in 1995, Marina Warner wrote in the LRB: ‘This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on mysteries and passion.’To mark the publication of a new edition (Penguin Modern Classics) with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, we host a discussion of Rose’s ‘masterpiece of the autobiographer’s art’ (Edward Said) and its legacy, featuring LRB contributing editor James Butler, Rebekah Howes of the University of Winchester and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.Harriet Baker & Lauren Elkin: Rural Hours
52:341917: Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.1930: Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.1941: Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.Harriet Baker describes in Rural Hours (Allen Lane) how three very different writers, more often associated with city living, found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. She was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse and translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables.Lauren Oyler & Leo Robson: No Judgement
53:46Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection of non-fiction; a series of interlinked essays connecting internet gossip, the attention economy, and the role of criticism.Oyler is in conversation with journalist and cultural commentator Leo Robson.Joe Dunthorne, Hanan Issa & Manon Steffan Ros: Wales in Words
56:55Three of Wales' best contemporary writers in an early St David's Day celebration of Wales in words. Novelist Joe Dunthorne, National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa and Carnegie prize-winning novelist and playwright Manon Steffan Ros explore the country's literary history, share its less-known treasures, and discuss the meaning of 'Welshness' today, in a one-off conversation with readings. The event was curated by Hay Festival as part of Wales Week in London.Fernanda Eberstadt & Olivia Laing: Bite Your Friends
57:58Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua, Pasolini, Pussy Riot and the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. Eberstadt was joined at the Bookshop by critic and novelist Olivia Laing, whose latest book The Garden Against Time (Picador) is forthcoming in May 2024.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://lrb.me/biteyourfriendsbookClair Wills & Alice Spawls: Missing Persons, or My Grandmother's Secrets
01:06:25When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes. ‘Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present’, writes Seán Hewitt, ‘this is a history shaken by intimacy – a brave and rigorously humane book.’ Wills was joined in conversation with Alice Spawls, editor of the LRB and co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press).Get the book: https://lrb.me/missingpersonsFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodAlexandra Harris & Laurence Scott: The Rising Down
53:45Alexandra Harris has previously cast her probing critical eye over poetic and artistic responses to English weather (in Weatherland), and English art of the 1930s and 40s (in Romantic Moderns); now, in The Rising Down (Faber & Faber) she turns it on the West Sussex landscape of her childhood, revealing the layers of buried lives beneath a familiar landscape in a work which the Independent has described as ‘scholarship at its life-enhancing best’. Harris was in conversation with essayist and critic Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four Dimensional Human.