Bookshop Events & Films

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson’s first book of original material in eight years, a collection of writings, as she puts it, ‘about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word “idea”, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs.’ Fragments of several of the above appeared first in the pages of the LRB, as Anne’s work has for many years. A lecture, a reading, a conversation, a performance: this is a celebration of Wrong Norma as uncategorisable as the book.

Tom Crewe talks about his debut novel, The New Life, which presents a fictionalised account of the lives and loves of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, and their collaboration on a revolutionary work that set out to transform our understanding of sexual ethics.

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed and The Idiot, talks to Merve Emre about her latest novel Either/Or.

Hilary Mantel talks to David Runciman and Helen Thompson from our partner podcast, Talking Politics, as part of our series of events on 'The Power Behind the Throne'.

Jeanette Winterson talks to Victoria Turk about her new book of essays, 12 Bytes, which explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity.

To mark the conclusion of his History of Ideas podcast series, David Runciman talks to Pankaj Mishra about Gandhi, Rousseau and Nietzsche, as well as an alternative canon of non-Western theorists of politics and crisis.

Rebecca Solnit discusses her new memoir with Mary Beard.

Patricia Lockwood talks to John Lanchester about her debut novel No One is Talking About This.

Lauren Oyler talks to Olivia Sudjic about her debut novel, Fake Accounts.

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. He talks about Lawrence and non-fiction with historian and biographer Frances Wilson.

John Lanchester discusses his chilling collection of short stories, which explores the uncanniness of modern life through demonic phones, haunted selfie-sticks and other technology gone horribly wrong.

Andrew O’Hagan discusses his new novel, Mayflies, with Edmund Gordon.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about their latest book, The Death of Vivek Oji, with Louisa Joyner, their editor at Faber.

Anne Enright talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her latest novel, Actress, and other works.

Julia Ebner discusses her experiences going undercover in various extremist groups, including White Supremacists, German Neo-Nazis and ‘Trad Wives’, as described in her new book, Going Dark.