London Review Bookshop Podcast

Owen Hatherley, writer and architectural historian, and Holly Smith, architectural historian and author of Up in the Air, explore Britain’s multi-storey council housing. They challenge high-rise clichés. They trace Ronan Point, Park Hill and mass slum clearance. They discuss tenant activism, co‑op experiments, maintenance challenges and who lives in high‑rises today.

Anne Enright, Booker Prize–winning novelist and essayist, discusses her essay collection Attention. She ranges from Dublin family silences to literary readings of Joyce, Munro and Morrison. Conversations touch on authorship, bodies and reproductive language, memory and house clearance. Short, sharp reflections on voice, attention and how life shapes writing.

In Remedies (Hazel Press) playwright, poet, novelist, biographer, historian and much else besides Julia Blackburn meditates on the images, amulets and incantations that have been used to cure illnesses from ancient times to the present day, offering a set of poetic keys to unlock the mysterious, subtle space between mind and body. Blackburn was in conversation with the folklorist Sarah Clegg, author of The Dead of Winter and Woman’s Lore.

Chiara Barzini, writer and filmmaker who investigates the Los Angeles Aqueduct, explores water, film and ecological limits. She weaves travel writing, memoir and cultural history. They discuss Los Angeles’s stolen water, ruined Californian landscapes, engineering hubris and how dreams and romanticism meet ecological endings.

ena Khalaf Tuffaha was born in Seattle but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and her poetry reflects on her Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage and on her experience as a first-generation American immigrant. In Something About Living (the87press), winner of the National Book Award in 2024, her poems interweave the history of Palestinian suffering and resistance with the challenges of living in a world full of violence and the gentle pleasures we embrace in order to survive that violence. Tuffaha will be reading from her work, and discussing it with writer, bookseller and film curator So Mayer, whose most recent book is Bad Language.

Lynne Tillman, an American novelist and cultural critic known for experimental, aphoristic prose, reads from and discusses Thrilled to Death. Conversation touches on her precise, aphoristic sentences, choices in ordering stories, crank narrators and resisting show-don't-tell, feminism and tough female portrayals, psychoanalysis and dreams, and art influences like Warhol.

In his latest novel Death and the Gardener Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s leading writer of fiction and winner of the International Booker Prize (forTime Shelter), reflects on the subject of loss in a tale about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia. Gospodinov will be presenting his work in conversation with writer and critic Chris Power. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Sarah Perry, novelist turned memoirist, reflects on caring for and witnessing the death of her father-in-law David. She reads the memoir’s opening and discusses writing during illness, shifting perspectives to inhabit another mind, and the ethics of truth versus invention. Conversation touches on intimate care, changing forms of love in dying, and how memory and family notes shaped the book.

In her second novel Will There Ever Be Another You (Bloomsbury), LRB contributing editor Patricia Lockwood, one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, conducts a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times, centring on the life of a young woman whose internal disarray echoes that of the world at large. Lockwood was in conversation with writer and poet Joe Dunthorne, whose books include O Positive, Submarine and Children of Radium.

Sarah Howe, T. S. Eliot Prize–winning poet and editor, reflects on language, lineage and form. She reads pieces about her mother’s laundry, losing Cantonese and learning Mandarin. Conversations move between specular/palindrome poems, genetic motifs from Crick research, and the tension between lyric intimacy and epic histories. Playful, elegiac and formally inventive.