London Review of Books

Adam Shatz talks to Mike Davis about some of the underlying and long-term political shifts at play in next week’s US elections. They discuss both traditional and emerging swing voters, the obstacles to majority rule, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett as the latest move in an ongoing civil war within the Catholic Church in the United States, the critical failure of the left to...

Helen and David talk about four years of Trump. Is it possible to give a balanced picture of Trump's presidency? Have the last four years followed a pattern or has it just been chaos? Plus discussion of whether 2020 marks the beginning of the 'short' twenty-first century and what that means for Trump's place in it.

Alex Abramovich talks to Thomas Jones about the history of country from Jimmie Rodgers to Lil Nas X, by way of Dolly Parton (and Eddie Van Halen), and the problems with the labels that get applied to American vernacular music.

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Image shows Arnold Shultz with guitar.

John Lanchester, novelist, memoirist, essayist and contributing editor to the LRB, discusses his chilling collection of short fiction, Reality and Other Stories (Faber), which explores the unsettling nature of modern life through demonic mobile phones, haunted self-sticks, and other technology gone horribly wrong.Lanchester is in conversation with the LRB’s head of special projects Sam...

To mark the publication of the latest LRB Collection of essays, about sport, Benjamin Markovits talks to David Runciman, on loan from Talking Politics, about Michael Jordan, home advantage, how basketball has tackled racial inequality, the difference between writing about sport in fiction and non-fiction, and why it turns out that players really are sometimes hot and sometimes not.

In the latest episode of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, in whose poems the personal becomes not only political, but epic.

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Image: Adrienne Rich in 1966 (Bettmann)

Andrew O’Hagan talks to Edmund Gordon about his new book, Mayflies, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship.Buy Mayflies from us hereFind all Andrew O’Hagan’s LRB pieces here

Adam Shatz talks to Paul Gilroy about his intellectual background and the recent anti-racist protests in the UK and US.

They discuss Gilroy’s experience growing up in North London in the 1950s and 1960s, the influence of African-American culture on his understanding of racial ordering, the role of Turner’s painting The Slave Ship in the history of the ‘Black...