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London Review of Books
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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription 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 FOUR NEW SERIES STARTING IN 2026! To be announced soon... RUNNING IN 2025: '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 ALSO INCLUDED IN YOUR CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: '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

  1. HACE 1 DÍA • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Who's afraid of realism?: 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

    Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’. In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar. This is part one of Wood’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger. He uses Geoffrey Wall's translation, published by Penguin Classics. Read more in the LRB: Julian Barnes: Flaubert at Two Hundred https://lrb.me/realismep101 Two Letters from Flaubert to Colet: https://lrb.me/realismep102 Tim Parks on Flaubert's life: https://lrb.me/realismep103

    1 h y 5 min

  2. HACE 6 DÍAS • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes

    In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece. This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen 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: Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n03/karl-miller/andante-capriccioso Michael Wood: Crazy Don https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n15/michael-wood/crazy-don Gabriel Josipovici on Cervantes’ life: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n05/gabriel-josipovici/the-hard-life-and-poor-best-of-cervantes Robin Chapman: Cervantics https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n16/robin-chapman/cervantics

    1 h y 3 min

  3. 29/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Novel Approaches: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing

    George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace. In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’. Further reading from the LRB: Frank Kermode on George Gissing: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/frank-kermode/squalor⁠ Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Gissing’s life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/rosemarie-bodenheimer/give-us-a-break⁠ Jane Miller on Gissing’s letters: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/jane-miller/gissing-may-damage-your-health⁠ Ian Hamilton on a new ‘New Grub Street’: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/ian-hamilton/diary⁠ Patricia Beer on Gissing’s women: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/patricia-beer/new-women⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiogifts⁠

    1 h y 11 min

  4. 24/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Novel Approaches: 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

    Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this bonus episode from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.

    1 h y 7 min

  5. 22/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Love and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah

    Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah. Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'. Find tickets to Seamus's LRB Winter Lecture in London here: https://lrb.me/perrywlpod Further reading in the LRB: Freya Johnston on Samuel Johnson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/freya-johnston/i-m-coming-my-tetsie! Patricia Beer on Hopkins: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n11/patricia-beer/what-he-meant-by-happiness

    56 min

  6. 16/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Fiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy

    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. We apologise that the audio quality in this recording is poor in some places. 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

    57 min

  7. 08/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

    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. 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

    1 h y 27 min

  8. 01/12/2025 • SÓLO PARA PERSONAS CON SUSCRIPCIÓN

    Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy

    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. 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. 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.

    1 h y 17 min
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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription 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 FOUR NEW SERIES STARTING IN 2026! To be announced soon... RUNNING IN 2025: '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 ALSO INCLUDED IN YOUR CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: '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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