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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year:

‘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 Mariner’

Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’

Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ 

Browning, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’

Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’

Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’

H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’

Seth, ‘The Golden Gate’

Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’

‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill

Each episode will cover a period of London’s history and begin with a piece of writing. The first episode, on Roman London, will start with an extract from Dio Cassius’s account of the Roman conquest from his Roman History.

‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones

Cervantes, 'Don Quixote'

Shelley, 'Frankenstein'

Eliot, 'Middlemarch'

Joyce, 'Ulysses'

Ellison, 'Invisible Man'

Pynchon, 'Gravity’s Rainbow'

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’.

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: [email protected]

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.

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-podcast/magical-authority

Next episode: A taxonomy of fantastic literature with Marina, Adam Thirlwell and Edwin Frank.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’.

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

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.

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 K. Le Guin.