Show Notes
In The Once and Future Riot (Cape) cartoonist Joe Sacco turns to the communal riots that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 2013. With works such as Palestine, Safe Area Goradze, The Fixer, War Junkie and Footnotes in Gaza Sacco single-handedly invented the genre of graphic reportage, and remains its leading exponent. He was at the shop to talk about his work on the frontline of global conflict, and the role that imagery can play in raising awareness. Sacco was in conversation with writer and editor Skye Arundhati Thomas whose book Palestine is Everywhere has just been co-published by Silver Press and TBA21. Their earlier books include Pleasure Gardens, co-written with Izabella Scott, and Remember the Details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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In On Difficulty (Faber), her latest book of non-poetry, poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw explores the fascination, terror and opportunity of wrestling with the opaque, the obscure, the complex and the indeterminate. Is poetry really difficult, and do we like it more when it is? Can difficulty provide its own solution? These and other questions are answered by Lavinia Greenlaw in conversation with the artist Mark Wallinger.
Triage (Allen Lane), Claudia Rankine’s new book, is an unclassifiable piece of writing, blending narrative, criticism and lyricism to create something capable of facing ‘the collective devastation of the present’ (in Saidiya Hartman’s words). Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence: we eavesdrop on their conversation, memories and enduring friendship. Rankine was in conversation with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, whose debut collection Quiet (Faber, 2023) won the Rathbones Folio Poetry Prize.
In Transitions, the latest title in MACK’s ‘Discourse’ series writers Sita Balani and Jay Bernard, guided by Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘conjuncture’, draw on literature, social theory, and lived experience to offer an urgent account of our fractured present. Their dialogue takes in Britain’s colonial past, the advent of AI and the legacy of extractive capitalism to ask the urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a political culture determined to devalue the Humanities? Their conversation is chaired by Sana Goyal, editor of Wasafiri.
In How to Be Well, journalist and essayist Amy Larocca takes on the behemoth which is the contemporary ‘wellness’ industry, in prose which Joanna Rakoff has described as a ‘magical synthesis of crackerjack reporting, incisive cultural commentary, and, most importantly, elegant, self-reflective memoir’. From active charcoal toothpaste to green juice enemas, Larocca explores the science and history of various controversial treatments, to reckon with the 3.7-trillion dollar industry’s profits and promises.
Haitian-American scholar Edna Bonhomme, now based in Berlin, is well placed to unpick what it means to be Black at home and abroad. In Tending to Our Wounds, part memoir, part history, part polemic, she unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism, and charts a breathtaking course between the individual and the collective, between past and future, and between oppression and resistance. She was in conversation with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism for the World, Feminism Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.