1917: 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,…

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. Oyler is in conversa…

Three 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 …

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 tyr…

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. ‘Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present’, writes Seán Hewitt, ‘this is a history shaken by int…

Alexandra 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 …

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. Shatz, the US editor of the London Review of Books and the author of Writers & Miss…

At the time of his death in 2017, the architectural critic and historian Gavin Stamp (Private Eye’s ‘Piloti’) had nearly completed his monumental survey of British architecture between the world wars. His wife, the writer and historian Rosemary Hill, has edited the text for publication. Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 (Profile) is a refres…

In Revolutionary Acts (Faber), Jason Okundaye meets an elder generation of Black gay men and listens as they share intimate memories and reflect upon their lives. Through their conversations he traces these men's journeys and arrivals to South London through the seventies, eighties and nineties from the present day, seeking to reconcile the Black a…

Within the British music scene, recent years have borne witness to underground genres emerging from the inner cities, going on to become some of the most popular music in the nation. In Where We Come From, journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom travels the country to explore the dawn, boom and subsequent blossoming of UK rap and grime. Taking us from the hea…

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, detailing (in the words of Steve Edwards) ‘the labouring bodies – hands, legs, and eyes; flesh and soul; suffering and solidarity – that make the worl…

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 c…

Holly Pester discusses her debut novel, The Lodgers, with Nathalie Olah. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘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 wi…

Lara Pawson discusses her new book Spent Light with Jennifer Hodgson. Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Muldoon reads from and talks about his collection Howdie-Skelp. Find out more about London Review Bookshop events: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘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 bo…

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 mo…

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 P…

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 studie…

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…

Who would you invite to a dinner party? In The Dinner Table, a delicious collection of great food writing from past and present, talented writer-chefs Kate Young and Ella Risbridger will introduce you to Samuel Pepys on the glories of parmesan, Shirley Jackson on washing up, Katherine Mansfield on party food, Nigella Lawson on mayonnaise, Michelle …

Part script, part novel, part manual, Sorcerer (Prototype) is the latest unclassifiable book written in collaboration between the artist and writer Ed Atkins and the poet and critic Steven Zultanski – a gentle, contemplative work about the pleasures of conversation, being with others, and being alone. ‘Unlike many narratives, Sorcerer does not put …

In Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, continues the radical exploration of how the personal and the political interact. As Baroness Helena Kennedy KC writes, ‘Both memoir and manifesto, this wonderful book charts a persona…

In Someone Else's Empire Tom Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, dispels the potent myth of Britain as a global player punching above its weight on the world stage, arguing instead that its foreign policy has for a long time been in thrall to the wishes and interests of the United States. He talks about his book with writer, filmmaker, pub…