In Serendipity (Reaktion) Carol Mavor uses Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War, Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes hidden in a drawer, Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra and her own memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate in New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol, to muse upon the serendipitous afterlives of objects. Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester and prolific author of books and articles about art and culture, was in conversation about fragments, remnants and what remains with novelist, essayist and translator Lauren Elkin.
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Philip Terry & Marina Warner: Dante’s Purgatorio
In his 2014 Dante’s Inferno poet and provocateur Philip Terry moved the action to Essex University. His Purgatorio (Carcanet) transports us to nearby Mersea Island, where Ted Berrigan leads our author up an artificial mountain to meet with artists Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, as well as Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka Shankar.
Philip Terry was joined in conversation with Marina Warner at the Bookshop.
Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
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Fitzcarraldo at 10: Kate Briggs, Brian Dillon & Helen Charman
It’s hard to believe that Fitzcarraldo Editions has only existed for ten years; during that short time, they have published a remarkable selection of books (gathering four Nobel Prizes between them), and their iconic blue and white covers have become a mainstay of the bookshop. To celebrate their first decade, Fitzcarraldo are publishing some of their best-loved titles in hardback, limited edition form.
Brian Dillon and Kate Briggs will be at the shop to discuss their books in this series: Dillon’s Essayism (a gathering together of his loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking), and Briggs’ This Little Art, a fresh, fierce and timely meditation on literary translation. The conversation will be chaired by Helen Charman, whose political history of motherhood, Mother State, came out earlier this year from Penguin.
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Tariq Ali & Oliver Eagleton: You Can’t Please All
In You Can’t Please All (Verso), a sort of sequel to his seminal 1987 memoir Street-fighting Years, Tariq Ali continues the story of a life lived flamboyantly and magnificently on the Left. Pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn are combined with reflections on his work as a novelist, playwright and film-maker, and as an activist in the War on the War on Terror. Ali was in conversation about his life and work with Oliver Eagleton, associate editor of New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project.
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Simon Critchley & James Butler: On Mysticism
From Jesus Christ to Krautrock via Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot, Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism (Profile) brilliantly displays the author’s playful, eclectic erudition in an evocation of the phenomenon he defines, after Evelyn Underhill, as ‘experience in its most intense form.’
Critchley was in conversation about mysticism East and West with the LRB’s James Butler.
Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod
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