Verso Podcast

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness gathers for the first time the fiction of Walter Benjamin, edited and translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold of dreamworlds, celebrate the ludic, and delve into fortune-telling. Taken together, the novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection illuminate the themes that defined Benjamin’s work. In the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop, Esther Leslie, Marina Warner and Michael Rosen join Gareth Evans to discuss his experimentation with form and the themes that run throughout Benjamin’s creative and critical writing, his concepts of storytelling, pedagogy, and the communicability of experience. To read the editors' introduction to The Storyteller & to WIN FREE BOOKS, visit the Verso blog: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2675-walter-benjamin-the-storyteller-the-verso-podcast-in-collaboration-with-

Originally published in 1967, Valerie Solanas' incendiary SCUM Manifesto called for a Society for Cutting Up Men and declared war on capitalism and patriarchy. Today, the controversial tract has a complex relationship with contemporary landscapes of feminism and gender politics. Juliet Jacques and Ray Filar join Sophie Mayer to discuss the treatise from critical and contemporary perspectives. Taking a historical view on its problematic elements, they discuss the violence and gender essentialism of the text, as well as Solanas' visions of work and automation and why the text still thrills today. Juliet Jacques is the author of Trans: A Memoir and a phd student in Creative and Critical Writing at University of Sussex. Ray Filar is a writer, editor and performance artist. They tweet @RayFilar. Sophie Mayer is author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema, poet and a member of queer feminist curators Club des Femmes. She tweets @tr0ublemayer. SCUM Manifesto voice: Sam McBean, academic and feminist

In 2011, an elite group of US Navy Seals stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden. The news did much to boost President Obama's first term and played a major part in his re-election victory the following year. Four years on, Seymour Hersh published a controversial series of essays in the London Review of Books, arguing that the story of that night, was incomplete, or worse, a lie. How realistic is it that Pakistani authorities didn't know bin Laden was living in a compound next to a military academy or have any knowledge of the US military operation? In his book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh presents an electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin Laden. In this podcast he discusses the case with his editor at the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen.

Dan Hancox talks to Amina Gichinga and Linda Bellos about what it means to live in London and how, given the various challenges the city faces, it can be changed for the better. Dan is the author of The Village Against The World, and ebooks including Kettled Youth and Fight Back! Dan tweets at @danhancox. Linda Bellos is an activist and former leader of Lambeth Borough Council 1986-88 and chair of the Greater London Council's Women's Committee. She was the second black woman to become leader of a British local authority. She tweets @BellosLinda Amina Gichinga is a musician and a City & East London Assembly candidate for Take Back the City. Amina tweets at @Aminaminky

This focus panel on race and racism was recorded at Foyles, Charing Cross Rd, 23rd March 2016 at the second in the Our London event series in collaboration with Compass and co-hosted by Novara Media. One of the greatest aspects of living in London is its diversity, but at the same time the city is striated by racial politics. In London, as throughout the UK, people from BAME groups have been historically much more likely to be in poverty than white British people, as well as suffer from housing deprivation, homelessness and inferior access to healthcare and education. Meanwhile, racist violence is on the rise, with state racisms against ‘Muslimness’, an institutionally racist police and the ‘extreme centre’ of the British political elite enforcing tensions between race, class and nation in a context of increasing immigration and numerous global crises. In response to all of this, Novara Media, Verso and Compass will be co-hosting a panel that focuses on living in London and some of the intersecting oppress

Kate Evans joins writer and editor Sophie Mayer to examine the radical origins of International Women's Day, Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary life and work in the international socialist movement, and her enduring legacy. This March, the London Review Bookshop is celebrating women graphic novelists in honour of Women's History Month. As part of their spotlight on Kate Evans, the creator of the cult hit Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, we present the inaugural Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop and a giveaway competition where you can win a limited edition Rosa Luxemburg tote bags containing a copy of Red Rosa, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. To win a goody bag, you must listen to the podcast to answer the questions here: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2534-the-verso-podcast-red-rosa-in-collaboration-with-the-london-review-bookshop

What happened to the future? Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy explode the distortions of history that obscure our present and future in their new respective books The Ministry of Nostalgia and Last Futures. Excavating the lost archeology of the present day, Douglas Murphy’s Last Futures is a fascinating, mind-bending cultural history of the last avant-garde. Through a cast of architects, dreamers, thinkers, hippies and designers, Murphy diagnoses the source of our current situation and steers us towards powerful alternative futures. In a sharp, witty polemic, Owen Hatherley skewers the contemporary nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed. Why, in an age of austerity, have we adopted the gospel of luxurious poverty, from ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters to the ‘artisinal’? The Ministry of Nostalgia reaches across a depleted cultural landscape to demand more for our society—after all, Hatherley argues, why should we have to 'Keep Calm and Carry On'? Chaired by Shumi Bose, architectural wr