Show Notes
Artist and film-maker Lauren J. Joseph’s first novel At Certain Points We Touch, described by Olivia Laing as ‘A stone-cold masterpiece’ was hailed as a Debut Novel of the Year by the Observer in 2022. Her second novel takes us from the night-spots of Soho to the febrile Berlin music scene. A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to feel loved, Lean Cat, Savage Cat (Bloomsbury) is an unforgettable novel from one of the most exciting writers at work today. The author was in conversation about her book with Olivia Laing, who describes it as ‘An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration.’
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More from London Review Bookshop Podcast
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.