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Fiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy
18 december 2025 · 16 min
Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books and author of ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel’. Together they assess existing canons and definitions, redefine and rediscover categories and exceptions, and consider the pleasures and uses of the fantastic. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Read more in the LRB:
Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/colin-burrow/fiction-and-the-age-of-lies
Marina Warner on fairytale:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/marina-warner/that-which-is-spoken
Jonathan Lethem on Stanisław Lem and Science Fiction:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jonathan-lethem/my-year-of-reading-lemmishly
A.D. Nuttall on the rhetoric of the fantastic:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/a.d.-nuttall/really-fantastic
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf
8 december 2025 · 19 min
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1
Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2
John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3
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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy
1 december 2025 · 14 min
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Lees meer
Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading and listening from the LRB:
Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy
James Wood on Hardy’s life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures
Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts
Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.
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Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London
29 november 2025 · 17 min
We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: Lees meer
‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests
‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith
‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill and guests
Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones
Episodes will appear on Monday every week, with a new episode from each series appearing every four weeks. Episodes from our bonus series, ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, will come out every couple of months, either as extra episodes or live events: look out for announcements!
If you're not already a subscriber, sign up for just £4.99/month or £49.99/year to listen to these series plus all our past series in full:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/crintro2026apple
Spotify and other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/crintro2026sc
Here are the works covered in each series:
‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests
Flaubert, 'Madame Bovary'
Dostoevsky, 'Notes from Underground'
Stories by Anton Chekhov
Tolstoy, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'
Kafka, 'Metamorphosis'
Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway'
Rhys, 'Voyage in the Dark'
Bellow, 'Seize The Day'
Nabokov, 'Pnin'
Spark, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'
Sharma, 'Family Life'
Stories by Lydia Davis
Riley, 'My Phantoms'
‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith
Carson, 'Silent Spring'
Schlanger, 'The Light Eaters'
Czerski, 'The Blue Machine'
Lovelock, 'Gaia'
Macfarlane, 'Is a River Alive?'
Kimmerer, 'Braiding Sweetgrass'
Raboteau, 'Lessons for Survival'
Moore and Roberts, 'The Rise of Ecofascism'
Riofrancos, 'Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism'
And more TBD
‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’
Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’
Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’
Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’
Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient…
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Love and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon
24 november 2025 · 18 min
Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined this allusive, rhetorical style with a poignant realism to recreate his subjects. They then turn to the more self-reflexive, oblique elegies of Paul Muldoon, who has reinvented the form in richly-patterned, playful poems such as ‘The Soap Pig’ and ‘Incantata’. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
More in the LRB:
Thom Gunn's 'Lament': https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn1
Colm Tóibín on Gunn: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn2
Michael Nott: Thom Gunn in New York: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn3
Markl Ford on Muldoon: https://lrb.me/ldep12muldoon1
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Fiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
17 november 2025 · 14 min
When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese translations. The huge and loyal readership among children and older readers that she built during her lifetime has only grown since her death, as has recognition of her work as ‘serious’ literature. Chafing against her confinement in genre fiction, she liberated sci-fi, fantasy and YA literature from the condescension to which they had long been subjected. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetime by the Library of America. Lees meer
For the final regular episode of Fiction and the Fantastic (though there will be one more special episode) Marina and Chloe read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘The Dispossessed’: works of exceptional imaginative power and intellectual range, passionate idealism and keen-eyed observation. Is Le Guin’s status in both literary and ‘genre’ canons a testament to the force and clear-sightedness of her radical – even prophetic – political vision? And what does it mean for the fantastic if we accept her self-characterisation as a ‘realist of a larger reality’?
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading and listening from the LRB:
Colin Burrow on Ursula K. Le Guin:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/colin-burrow/it-s-not-jung-s-it-s-mine
A collection of writing on science fiction from the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/collections/in-hyperspace
Amia Srinivasan on Le Guin’s experiments with pronouns:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita
Colin Burrow discusses Le Guin with Thomas Jones on the LRB Podcast:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podc…
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch
10 november 2025 · 14 min
Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water’ ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch’s lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing’ and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre’s distinction between authenticity and sincerity. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1
James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2
Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3
Audiobooks from the LRB
Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
3 november 2025 · 17 min
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward adventure story becomes a vivid exploration of friendship, the body, and social and political division. Lees meer
In this episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell is joined by Stevenson fans Andrew O’Hagan and Tom Crewe. They explore Stevenson’s startlingly modern handling of perspective and pacing, his approach to the art of fiction, and the value of being ‘betwixt and between’.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
Andrew O’Hagan on Stevenson’s life:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/andrew-o-hagan/in-his-hot-head
...his circle:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth
...and his home in Edinburgh:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/andrew-o-hagan/diary
P.N. Furbank on R.L.S.’s letters:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n16/p.n.-furbank/what-sort-of-man
Matthew Bevis on Treasure Island:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten
Next episode: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler
27 oktober 2025 · 15 min
When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Arnold's 'Thyrsis': https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis
Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats
More in the LRB:
Seamus Perry on Auden: https://lrb.me/ldep11auden
Stefan Collini on Arnold: https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold
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Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter
20 oktober 2025 · 15 min
J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and science fiction in particular, both of them are haunted by the visions of Swift, Shelley, Kafka and Borges. Lees meer
Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ’The Passion of New Eve‘, considered together here along with Ballard’s short story ’The Drowned Giant‘, are vivid, fearless, still shocking novels of ideas – if ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ can be described as a novel at all. Marina and Chloe discuss that question as they consider Ballard’s catalogue of contemporary violence and pop culture transgression. Then they turn to Carter’s own gleeful transgressions, born out of the ferment of 1970s cultural theory, which she explores and interrogates with inimitable style. But do the excesses of these works still speak to the present, and does their lack of restraint risk collapsing the whole category of the fantastic?
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Susannah Clapp on Angela Carter:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n05/susannah-clapp/diary
Edmund Gordon on J.G. Ballard:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/edmund-gordon/his-galactic-centrifuge
Watch ‘If God is a snail...’, a film about Carter’s food writing for the LRB:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxqr5O2JFvE
Listen to Edmund Gordon discuss Ballard on the LRB Podcast:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/on-j.g.-ballard
Next episode: Ursula …
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
13 oktober 2025 · 16 min
Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: https://lrb.me/cip11camus1
Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': https://lrb.me/cip11camus3
Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: https://lrb.me/cip11camus2
Audiobooks from the LRB
Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
6 oktober 2025 · 58 min
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way. Lees meer
Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/travel26pod
Further reading in the LRB:
Colm Toíbín on Henry James:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble
Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show
James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson.
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller
29 september 2025 · 16 min
Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape. Lees meer
Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
22 september 2025 · 17 min
Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Lees meer
Before her family consign her to an old-age facility, nonagenarian Marian Leatherby is gifted a hearing trumpet with almost magical capabilities. Her institutionalisation leads to much eavesdropping, a Grail quest, descent into the underworld and an apocalyptic ice age.
Joyous, disturbing and subversive, The Hearing Trumpet is full of themes and images that populate Carrington’s artwork and other writing. Both Marina and Chloe knew Leonora Carrington, and in this episode they reflect on the ways her personality inflected her work. Their reading of The Hearing Trumpet reveals her humour, her visionary imagination and her attention to the boundaries between inner and outer realities.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Chloe Aridjis: A Leonora Carrington A to Z
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/april/a-leonora-carrington-a-to-z
Alice Spawls: On Leonora Carrington
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/alice-spawls/at-tate-liverpool
Edmund Gordon: Save the feet for later
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n21/edmund-gordon/save-the-feet-for-later
Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve.
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir
15 september 2025 · 16 min
At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, along with the opportunity it creates for continual self-definition. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss these arguments and Beauvoir’s warnings against trying to evade the responsibilities imposed upon us by this ambiguity. They also look at the ways in which Beauvoir developed these ideas in The Second Sex and her novels, and her remarkable readings of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Joanna Biggs: https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir1
Toril Moi: https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir2
Elaine Showalter: https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir3
Audiobooks from the LRB
Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
8 september 2025 · 17 min
Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue. Lees meer
At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
John Sutherland: Trollopiad
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad
Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James.
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy
1 september 2025 · 14 min
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13. Lees meer
Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read the poems:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm
Further reading and listening from the LRB:
On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare
Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts
Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly
Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy
Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
25 augustus 2025 · 14 min
Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation. Lees meer
Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief
Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me
Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned
Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo
Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre
18 augustus 2025 · 16 min
What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an action of consciousness as it tries to rearrange the world to suit itself, or as he puts it at the end of his book: a sudden fall of consciousness into magic. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss why Sartre’s rejection of the idea of the subconscious is not as much a departure from Freud’s theories as he thought they were, and the ways in which his attempt to establish a ‘phenomenological psychology’ manifested in other works, including Nausea, Being and Nothingness and The Words. Lees meer
Note: Readers should use the translation by Philip Mairet. The earlier one by Bernard Frechtman, as Jonathan explains in the episode, contains numerous (often amusing) errors.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Jonathan Rée on 'Being and Nothingness': https://lrb.me/cipsartre1
Sissela Bok on Sartre's life: https://lrb.me/cipsartre2
Edwards Said's encounter with Sartre: https://lrb.me/cipsartre3
Audiobooks from the LRB
Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre':
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
11 augustus 2025 · 18 min
'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope
Further reading in the LRB:
John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1
David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2
Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3
LRB Audiobooks
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Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
4 augustus 2025 · 15 min
Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Poems discussed in this episode:
William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont
Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell
Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song
Anne Carson, Nox
https://ww…
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
28 juli 2025 · 33 min
Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year
without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation
myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror
and trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. Lees meerIn their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Read more in the LRB:
Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters:
https://lrb.me/ffshelley1
Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein:
https://lrb.me/ffshelley2
Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth:
https://lrb.me/ffshelley3
Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life:
https://lrb.me/ffshelley4
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksff
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger
21 juli 2025 · 16 min
What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world we experience is one of dynamic movement between revelation and concealment, where the essential nature of a thing lies in its ‘thinging’, and the ‘jug’s jug character consists in the poured gift of the jug’s pouring out’. In this episode Jonathan and James work through Heidegger’s ideas about both ‘things’ and time, and consider the purpose of his poetic style. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Richard Rorty: Heidegger's Worlds
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/richard-rorty/diary
J.P. Stern: Heil Heidegger
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n08/j.p.-stern/heil-heidegger
James Miller: Arendt and Heidegger
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/james-miller/thinking-without-a-banister
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
14 juli 2025 · 18 min
The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Lees meer
Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: https://lrb.me/naeliot1
Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: https://lrb.me/naeliot2
Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: https://lrb.me/naeliot3
Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: https://lrb.me/naeliot4
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
7 juli 2025 · 13 min
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Poems discussed in this episode:
Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night
Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57
Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’
https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/
W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death
Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war
Further reading in the LRB:
Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters:
https://lrb.me/ldwar1
Jonathan Bate on war poetry:
https://lrb.me/ldwar2
Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB:
https://lrb.me/ldwar3
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
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Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
2 juli 2025 · 33 min
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this episode, Marina and Adam look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Liam McIlvanney on James Hogg:
https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov1
Michael Wood on Bulgakov:
https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov2
LRB Audiobooks
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James
23 juni 2025 · 18 min
Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of science’ and the kind of atheism ‘that goes around thumping its chest offering its biceps to be felt’. In this episode Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at the intellectual environment William James was working in, and against, in the second half of the 19th century, and its parallels in the ‘new atheism’ of today. They also discuss the extraordinary upbringing William (and his novelist brother Henry) received and the advice he offered to anyone contemplating suicide in his essay ‘Is life worth living?’ Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Helen Thaventhiran: William James's Prescriptions
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/helen-thaventhiran/no-dose-for-it-at-the-chemist
Michael Wood: William James and modernism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n18/michael-wood/understanding-forwards
Richard Poirier: Williams James's pragmatism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n19/richard-poirier/copying-the-coyote
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
16 juni 2025 · 19 min
‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, published in 1854, and described by Ruskin as the greatest long poem of the 19th century. It tells the story of an aspiring poet, Aurora, born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, who loses both her parents as a child and moves to England and the care of her aunt. From there she pursues her poetic ambitions to London, Paris, Italy and back to England while negotiating a traumatic love triangle between the vicious Lady Waldemar, the impoverished seamstress Marian, and the austere social-reformer Romney. In this episode, Clare is joined by Stefanie Markovits and Seamus Perry to discuss the wide range of innovations Barrett Browning deploys to fulfil her commitment to immediacy and narrative drive in the poem, and the ways in which she uses her characters to explore the extent of her own emancipatory politics. Lees meer
Read the poem: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56621/pg56621-images.html
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
John Bayley: https://lrb.me/nabrowning1
Ruth Yeazell: https://lrb.me/nabrowning2
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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Love and Death: ‘In Memoriam’ by Tennyson
9 juni 2025 · 13 min
Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the possibilities of elegy more extensively than any English poem before it, not least in its innovative, incantatory rhyme scheme, intended to numb the pain of grief. From its repeated dramatisations of the experience of private loss, 'In Memoriam' opens out to reflect on the intellectual turmoil running through Victorian society amid monumental advances in scientific thought. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the unique emotional power of Tennyson’s style, and why his great elegy came to represent what mourning, and poetry, should be in the public imagination of his time. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read more in the LRB:
Frank Kermode:
https://lrb.me/ldtenn1
Seamus Perry:
https://lrb.me/ldtenn2
LRB Audiobooks
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Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
3 juni 2025 · 16 min
‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years apart but drew on the period of the Napoleonic wars: Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen). Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) is a complex sequence of tales within tales, written from the point of view of the early 19th century but describing events in Spain in the 18th century. It’s a powerful commentary on the preoccupations of the Enlightenment and the repression of historical guilt. In Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Dinesen confronts some of the most unsettling aspect of sexual guilt and desire with psychological astuteness. Adam and Marina discuss the ways in which, in both works, the gothic was able to explore areas of human experience that other genres struggled to accommodate. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/crscfflrbpod
Read more in the LRB:
On Potocki:
https://lrb.me/ffpotocki1
On 'Out of Africa':
https://lrb.me/ffpotocki2
On Dinesen's letters:
https://lrb.me/ffpotocki3
LRB Audiobooks
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche
26 mei 2025 · 30 min
For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection with three other essays – on Wagner, David Strauss and the use of history – that has come to be titled Untimely Meditations. In this episode Jonathan and James consider the essays together and their powerful attack on the ethos of the age, railing against the greed and power of the state, fake art, overweening science, the triviality of universities and, perhaps above all, the deification of success. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
David Hoy on Nietzsche's life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n01/david-hoy/different-stories
J.P. Stern on 'Unmodern Observations' (or 'Untimely Meditations'):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n16/j.p.-stern/impatience
Jenny Diski on Elisabeth Nietzsche:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasn-t-him-it-was-her
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
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Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
19 mei 2025 · 26 min
In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters. Lees meer
Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n19/dinah-birch/the-unwritten-fiction-of-dead-brothers
Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/rosemarie-bodenheimer/secret-keeping
John Bayley: Mrs G
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/john-bayley/mrs-g
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Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more
12 mei 2025 · 15 min
Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne’s laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift’s breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read more in the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose on Plath:
https://lrb.me/ldself1
David Runciman on Larkin and his father:
https://lrb.me/ldself2
John Bayley on Larkin
https://lrb.me/ldself3
Matthew Bevis on Hardy:
https://lrb.me/ldself4
LRB Audiobooks
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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka
5 mei 2025 · 17 min
In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to push the boundaries of what literature could explore, with reference to stories including ‘The Judgment’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Report to the Academy’. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hofmann): Unknown Laws
https://lrb.me/ffkafka1
Rivka Galchen: What Kind of Funny is He?
https://lrb.me/ffkafka2
Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka?
https://lrb.me/ffkafka3
J.P. Stern: Bad Faith
https://lrb.me/ffkafka4
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley
28 april 2025 · 15 min
T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode, Jonathan and James look at Bradley’s polemic against John Stuart Mill, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, and other essays in Ethical Studies, which challenge the idea of morality as a product of calm reasoning arrived at by mature, rational minds. For Bradley, morality is a characteristic of communities, determined by people’s differing needs at various stages in their lives, and the universal need for self-realisation can only be achieved through those communities. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Frank Kermode on Eliot and Bradley:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n17/frank-kermode/feast-of-st-thomas
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
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Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
21 april 2025 · 34 min
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
John Sutherland on Thackeray: https://lrb.me/nathackeray1
Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness': https://lrb.me/nathackeray2
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
14 april 2025 · 13 min
The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Further reading in the LRB:
Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You
https://lrb.me/ldpoets1
Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell
https://lrb.me/ldpoets2
Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland
https://lrb.me/ldpoets3
Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose
https://lrb.me/ldpoets4
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
7 april 2025 · 16 min
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular. Lees meer
Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask
https://lrb.me/ffcarroll1
Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet
https://lrb.me/ffcarroll2
Marina Warner: Doubly Damned
https://lrb.me/ffcarroll3
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill
31 maart 2025 · 15 min
Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this experience and the breakdown that ensued in his 20s, and the boldness of his life and thought from his views on socialism and the rights of women to his unwavering devotion to his wife, Harriet Taylor, the co-author of 'On Liberty' and other works. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Sissela Bok on Mill's 'Autobiography':
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n06/sissela-bok/his-father-s-children
Alasdair MacIntyre: Mill's Forgotten Victory
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n20/alasdair-macintyre/john-stuart-mill-s-forgotten-victory
Panbkaj Mishra: Bland Fanatics
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
24 maart 2025 · 27 min
When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1
John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2
Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3
Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4
Buy this book from the London Review Bookshop: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
Audiobooks from the LRB:
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Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
17 maart 2025 · 16 min
Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Further reading in the LRB:
John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre
https://lrb.me/ldgray1
Tony Harrison: ‘V.’
https://lrb.me/ldgray2
Read the texts online:
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc
LRB Audiobooks
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
10 maart 2025 · 1 uur 4 min
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling. Lees meer
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/travel26pod
Further reading in the LRB:
Salman Rushdie: Calvino
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino1
James Butler: Infinite Artichoke
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino2
Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism
https://lrb.me/ffcalvino3
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 maart 2025 · 16 min
Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read 'Circles' here:
https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/circles/
Read more in the LRB:
Tony Tanner on the life of Emerson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/tony-tanner/arctic-habits
Colin Burrow on the American canon:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/colin-burrow/the-magic-bloomschtick
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
24 februari 2025 · 37 min
Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
Thomas Keymer on Peacock
https://lrb.me/napeacock1
Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act
https://lrb.me/napeacock2
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop
17 februari 2025 · 14 min
This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read the poems here:
Ben Jonson: On My First Son
https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld
Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet
https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld
Geoffrey Hill: September Song
https://lrb.me/hillcrld
Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia
https://lrb.me/bishopcrld
Read more in the LRB:
Blair Worden on Ben Jonson
https://lrb.me/ldch1
Blair Worden on puritanism
https://lrb.me/ldch2
Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:
https://lrb.me/ldch3
Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop
https://lrb.me/ldch4
LRB Audiobooks
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
10 februari 2025 · 16 min
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Terry Eagleton: A Spot of Firm Government
https://lrb.me/ffswift1
Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children
https://lrb.me/ffswift2
Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly
https://lrb.me/ffswift3
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach
3 februari 2025 · 11 min
In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doctrine, from sexual relations to the Trinity, and consider why Feuerbach would never have described himself as an atheist. They also look at George Eliot’s remarkable translation of the work, published only thirteen years after the original, which not only ensured Feuerbach’s influence in the Anglophone world but invented a new philosophical vocabulary in English for German thought. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
James Wood: What next?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n08/james-wood/what-s-next
Terry Eagleton: George Eliot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
28 januari 2025 · 33 min
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. Lees meer
In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing
https://lrb.me/naausten1
Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts
https://lrb.me/naausten2
W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness
https://lrb.me/naausten3
Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.
Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'
20 januari 2025 · 13 min
Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable, pre-Christian form to honour his friend. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read more in the LRB:
Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'):
https://lrb.me/ldmilton1
Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism):
https://lrb.me/ldmilton2
Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton):
https://lrb.me/ldmilton3
LRB Audiobooks
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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’
13 januari 2025 · 15 min
The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Marina Warner: Travelling Text
https://lrb.me/ffnights1
Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness
https://lrb.me/ffnights2
William Gass: A Book at Bedtime
https://lrb.me/ffnights3
Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsff
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices