London Review Bookshop Podcast

To mark its fifth anniversary, the online food and culture publication Vittles has produced its first print issue – an engaging mix of newly commissioned articles and a selection of some of the best essays it has published in the past five years. Ever since its founding, Vittles has sought to disrupt mainstream ideas of what food writing looks like. In keeping with this ethos, this event will feature readings and discussions with three contributors to Vittles Issue 1 – Robin Craig, Amy Key and Waithera Sebatindira – themed around what it means to write about food as a non-food writer. Craig, Key and Sebatindira were in conversation with Vittles editor Odhran O’Donoghue.

To celebrate the Penguin Classics reissue of bell hooks’s Art on My Mind, Zarina Muhammad & Lola Olufemi discuss her work. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: [email protected]

If the first quarter of the 21st Century has been rich in one thing, it is anxiety. Pandemics, asteroids, climate change, global instability, the cost of living, tsunamis, migration – the list of things to be worried about seems to grow longer every day. We should thank our lucky stars then for Oxford Professor of Geography Danny Dorling. In ⁠The Next Crisis⁠ (Verso), he delves into the data with characteristic diligence and level-headedness to discover what we’re worried about, what we shouldn’t be worried about, what we should be worried about and what we should do about it. Dorling was joined by writer and philosopher Arianne Shahvisi. More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod Get in touch: [email protected]

In Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury) Lamorna Ash, author of the coming-of-age memoir cum anthropological study of the Cornish fishing industry Dark, Salt, Clear, visits Evangelical youth festivals, Quaker meetings, a silent Jesuit retreat along the Welsh coastline and a monastic community in the Inner Hebrides to investigate, through interviews and personal reflections, what drives young people in the twenty-first century to embrace Christianity. Poet Seán Hewitt writes ‘Humane, curious and unexpectedly moving, Lamorna Ash’s book is as much an account of the human condition as it is an investigation of faith. Quietly radical in its empathy, this is a book I have waited years and years to read, without even knowing it.’ Lamorna Ash was in conversation with James Butler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

In On Breathing (Peninsula Press) Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York and part-time faculty member at The New School for Social Research, draws on psychoanalytic theory to reflect on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during covid and a new mother to explore how the experience of air and breathing serves to undermine the pervasive myth of the individual, and to underline how dependent we are on invisible systems, and on each other. In this recording, Webster is breathing the same air as Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered, Daddy Issues and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again.