To mark the publication of a new edition of Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, the hosted a discussion of Rose’s masterpiece and its legacy, featuring James Butler, Rebekah Howes and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
Lauren 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.
Fernanda 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.
When 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. Wills was joined in conversation with Alice Spawls, editor of the LRB and co-editor of After Sex.
Frantz Fanon was only 36 when he died in 1961, but his books and ideas – from White Skin, Black Masks to The Wretched of the Earth – have proved lastingly influential. Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is both a biography of Fanon and an in-depth study of his writing. He was in conversation at the Bookshop by Kevin Okoth, author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics.
Laleh Khalili’s new book The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack) draws on her own experiences to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea. She was joined in conversation with LRB contributing editor James Butler.
Fleur Adcock’s sly, laconic poems have been delighting audiences since her 1964 debut The Eye of the Hurricane. Her Collected Poems draws together the work of sixty years; as Fiona Sampson writes, ‘Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut.’ Adcock was joined in conversation at the Bookshop with her publisher, Neil Astley, and read from her Collected Poems.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In The Plague, Jacqueline Rose uses the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the writings of Simone Weil to investigate how we might learn to live with death when it intrudes more closely than we might like on our lived experience.
Maureen McLane reads from her work and talks to Will Harris, who also reads from his new collection Brother Poem (Granta).
In Revolutionary Spring, a series of brilliant set-pieces, pre-eminent European historian Christopher Clark brings back to our attention the extraordinary events of the Spring of 1848. From Paris to Vienna to Budapest to Berlin to Rome to Palermo, a whole continent was embroiled in struggle, hope, revolutionary fervour and ultimately reaction.
Nicole Flattery discusses her mordantly funny debit novel, Nothing Special, with Claire-Louise Bennett.
Clare Bucknell argues in The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture that the selective way in which poetry has been presented over the past three centuries tells a fascinating story about the democratisation of literature, class, gender, politics and nationalism.
Building on her essay ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’, first published in the LRB in 2018, The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan explores the political and cultural dimensions of sexual desire, and its frustration.
Srinivasan was in discussion with co-editor of the LRB, Alice Spawls.
Jacqueline Rose discusses her book On Violence and On Violence Against Women with Jude Kelly.