Close Readings (subscription)

London Review of Books
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Close Readings is a multi-series podcast from the London Review of Books exploring different periods of literature through selections of key works. A new episode will appear every month from each of our Close Readings series running this year. This feed is identical to the 'free' version of Close Readings, which contains free extracts for non-subscribers. Subscribers can listen to all the full episodes in both feeds: https://podcasts.apple.com/ug/podcast/close-readings/id1669485143 RUNNING IN 2026: 'Who's afraid of realism?' with James Wood and guests 'Narrative Poems' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'London Revisited' with Rosemary Hill and guests 'Nature in Crisis' with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith 'The Man Behind the Curtain' with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones ALSO INCLUDED IN YOUR CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: 'Conversations in Philosophy' with Jonathan Rée and James Wood 'Fiction and the Fantastic' with Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis 'Love and Death' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'Novel Approaches' with Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and other guests 'Among the Ancients' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones 'Medieval Beginnings' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley 'The Long and Short' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Modern-ish Poets: Series 1' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Among the Ancients II' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones 'On Satire' with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell 'Human Conditions' with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards 'Political Poems' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Medieval LOLs' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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  1. 3 days ago · Subscribers Only

    Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Afternoon Raag’ by Amit Chaudhuri

    A common feature of realist writing since the 19th century has been what Viktor Shklovsky called ‘defamiliarisation’. For Shklovsky, the classic example of this could be found in War and Peace, when Natasha goes to the opera and is bemused by the site of people shouting in front of painted cardboard. In Afternoon Raag (1993) which describes the experiences of a young Bengali man coming to England to study literature, Amit Chaudhuri uses the aesthetics of defamiliarisation to depict a foreigner’s attempt to understand a strange country. As in Nabokov, this approach can often seem to take the novel a long way from the realist tradition of Flaubert. But in this episode, James Wood looks at the ways in which Chaudhuri’s book spans the full spectrum of realist style available to writers in the late 20th century, from a delight in mundane detail to a transfiguration of the mundane through different formalist techniques. Further reading in the LRB: Amit Chaudhuri: St Cyril Road, Bombay: https://lrb.me/realismep1201 Jonathan Coe on Afternoon Raag: https://lrb.me/realismep1202

    Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Afternoon Raag’ by Amit Chaudhuri

  2. 2 Nov · Subscribers Only

    London Revisited: The Age of ‘Improvement’

    When Fanny Burney’s Evelina arrives in London for the first time, despite being disappointed by the state of the paths in St James’s Park, she marvels at being able to obtain a full suite of linen in less than a day, measured and cut by teams of men who seem to know more about women’s underwear than she does. In the second half of the 18th century, London became the centre of a new pastime, ‘shopping’, aided by streetlights, pavements and an openness that amazed foreign visitors. This is the era of ‘improvement’, with new institutions from the Royal Academy to the British Museum encouraging public learning and new building legislation bringing regularity (or monotony) to the landscape. For this episode Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary, to look at the features of London’s so-called Georgian golden age, and the ways in which this apparently harmonious world was disturbed by the shock of the American Revolutionary War. Reading by Fiona Sheehan. Read more in the LRB: John Mullan on Fanny Burney: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep1101⁠ Andrew O’Hagan on Boswell and Johnson: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep1102⁠ Mary Beard on John Soane: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep1103⁠

    London Revisited: The Age of ‘Improvement’

  3. 26 Oct · Subscribers Only

    Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson

    In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try something different, a narrative poem based on an old yarn about a man who goes missing at sea for more than ten years. Enoch Arden, sold 17,000 copies on its first day of publication. Well into the 20th century it attracted stage and silent film adaptations as well as a musical setting by Strauss, and provided a template for countless stories of long-lost characters returning home. The decision Enoch makes at the end of the poem, when he finds his wife and children living happily with another man, was widely debated at the time, but Tennyson is careful not to pass judgment on his characters. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Tennyson maintains this moral ambivalence through realist touches and a mastery of half-formed emotion, and discuss the effects of the poem’s intricate patterning and biblical resonances. Read more on Tennyson in the LRB by: Seamus Perry: https://lrb.me/npep1101 Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/npep1102 Danny Karlin: https://lrb.me/npep1103

    Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson

  4. 23 Oct · Subscribers Only

    The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce

    Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. Read more in the LRB: Tom McCarthy: Ulysses and its Wake: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce01 Colm Tóibín on Joyce’s errors: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce02 Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce03

    The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce

  5. 19 Oct · Subscribers Only

    Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos

    Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things. Meehan and Peter discuss Latin America’s long history of resource nationalism and compare the process of lithium extraction through brine evaporation with the far more destructive practices of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paradoxes inherent in ‘green capitalism’ are brought into sharper focus by Riofrancos’s exploration of these extractive frontiers, but are her solutions – smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and fewer cars – a serious proposal or pie in the sky? Further reading in the LRB: Laleh Khalili: Who owns the arctic? https://lrb.me/nicep1101 Adam Tooze: What energy transition? https://lrb.me/nicep1102

    Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos

  6. 12 Oct · Subscribers Only

    Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad

    What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished. In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition. Read more in the LRB: Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101 David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103 Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102

    Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad

  7. 4 Oct · Subscribers Only

    London Revisited: The Monster

    In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair. London had become a ‘great and monstrous thing’ according to Daniel Defoe. However, if you were lucky enough to survive childhood, and gin, and have a bit of money, it was an increasingly pleasant monster, offering strolls through grand squares and pleasure gardens, and shops displaying a dizzying variety of goods from all over the world alongside cheap copies of a new literary form: the novel. To discuss London’s emergence as a brutal city of consumption and cultural innovation, Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, a professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Read more in the LRB: Clare Bucknell on Samuel Richardson: https://lrb.me/lrep1001 John Mullan on Pamela: https://lrb.me/lrep1002 Rosemary Hill on Hogarth: https://lrb.me/lrep1003 Tom Paulin on Daniel Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep1004 Claude Rawson on Henry Fieldings: https://lrb.me/lrep1005

    London Revisited: The Monster

  8. 27 Sept · Subscribers Only

    Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough

    In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure. Read more in the LRB: Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001 Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002 Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003

    Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
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About

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast from the London Review of Books exploring different periods of literature through selections of key works. A new episode will appear every month from each of our Close Readings series running this year. This feed is identical to the 'free' version of Close Readings, which contains free extracts for non-subscribers. Subscribers can listen to all the full episodes in both feeds: https://podcasts.apple.com/ug/podcast/close-readings/id1669485143 RUNNING IN 2026: 'Who's afraid of realism?' with James Wood and guests 'Narrative Poems' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'London Revisited' with Rosemary Hill and guests 'Nature in Crisis' with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith 'The Man Behind the Curtain' with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones ALSO INCLUDED IN YOUR CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: 'Conversations in Philosophy' with Jonathan Rée and James Wood 'Fiction and the Fantastic' with Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis 'Love and Death' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'Novel Approaches' with Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and other guests 'Among the Ancients' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones 'Medieval Beginnings' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley 'The Long and Short' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Modern-ish Poets: Series 1' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Among the Ancients II' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones 'On Satire' with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell 'Human Conditions' with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards 'Political Poems' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry 'Medieval LOLs' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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