Close Readings (subscription)

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 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

US$4.99/mo or US$49.99/yr after trial

  1. 2 DAYS AGO • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir

    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. 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

    1h 15m

  2. 7 SEPT • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

    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. 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. 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

    1h 18m

  3. 31 AUG • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy

    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’. 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. 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

    1h 2m

  4. 24 AUG • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

    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. 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. 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.

    59 min

  5. 17 AUG • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

    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. 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. 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

    1h 15m

  6. 10 AUG • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

    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. 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 Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

    1h 23m

  7. 3 AUG • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

    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. 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://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson Nex episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.

    59 min

  8. 27 JUL • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

    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. In 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. 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

    1h 21m
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About

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 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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