London Review Bookshop Podcast

Poets Ella Frears and Will Burns were at the shop to read from and talk about their new collections. Ella’s Goodlord, from Rough Trade Books, takes the form of a long, lyrical email to an estate agent, interrogating our obsession with ‘property’ with Frears’ characteristic humour and sharpness, while Will’s Natural Bur

In her latest semi-autobiographical novel Playboy (Tuskar Rock, translated by Holly James), leading French writer Constance Debré describes how a woman, at the age of 43, abandons her apartment, her marriage and her successful legal career to lead a new life as an out lesbian and a writer. In a series of short, sharp v

Throughout its history feminism has had a troubled relationship with policing, torn between seeking its protection and attacking its ingrained sexist bias. In Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? (Verso) Leah Cowan cuts a trenchant path through the debate, reminding us of the vibrant and creative alternatives envision

In her debut novel Scaffolding (Chatto) Lauren Elkin – ‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’, according to Deborah Levy – presents two couples occupying the same Paris apartment, five decades apart. Lauren Elkin’s previous works include Art Monsters, a landmark study of women artists, Flâneuse and a translation of Simon

The Federal Theatre Project, established as part of the New Deal in 1935 to provide employment opportunities for theatre professionals affected by the Great Depression, became the cornerstone of American radical drama, both on stage and on radio, throughout the late 1930s. Its staunchly political stance on labour and r

Anne Serre’s latest novel to appear in English, brilliantly translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson, was written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s younger sister, and recounts the tortured relationship between an unnamed narrator and his close childhood friend Fanny, a young woman suffering from profo