Christopher Ricks speaks with Giles Harvey about Posthumous Keats, Stanley Plumly's recent biography of John Keats, and about the poet's death and the idealized image that emerged during his "immediate afterlife.

Andrew Delbanco, director of American Studies at Columbia University, speaks with Michael Shae about the financial crisis facing American higher education.

Playwright David Hare reads his monologue Wall, an exploration of the impact—on both Israelis and Palestinians—of the barrier built to divide Israel from the West Bank.

Novelist Tim Parks speaks with Andrew Palmer about Geoffrey Brock's new English translation of Carlo Collodi's children's classic Pinocchio, and the book's origins in the political and cultural tumult of 1880s Italy.

Economist and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow speaks with Hugh Eakin about the causes of the current crisis, the importance of credit in the functioning of the world financial system, and how new regulation might prevent future disasters.

Historian Orlando Figes speaks with Sasha Weiss about his latest book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia; the recent prosecutor's office raid on the Memorial Society, a human rights organization working to preserve memories and documentary evidence of Stalin's repression; and the dangers posed by resurgent Stalinism to the accurate telling of Russian history.

Drawing on his long personal relationship with the Dalai Lama, Pico Iyer speaks with Hugh Eakin about the Tibetan leader's stark new view of the Chinese regime and the future of Tibet.

John Ashbery reads sixteen of his own selections from among the more than forty poems he has published in the Review since the 1970s, and comments on a few of his most obscure film and literary references. © 2009 John Ashbery. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. Used with gracious permission of John Ashbery.

Poet and critic Dan Chiasson speaks with Giles Harvey about John Ashbery's life and work, and reflects on the demanding pleasures of reading Ashbery's poetry.

Jonathan Raban speaks with Charles Petersen about Kelly Reichardt's film Wendy and Lucy and the stories of Jon Raymond, and about how these works illuminate—and are illuminated by—the socioeconomic realities of the Pacific Northwest.