1. EachPod
EachPod
Close Readings - Podcast

Close Readings

 London Review of Books

Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series.

How To Subscribe

In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes.

Or for other podcast apps, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings


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 THE 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: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Education Books Arts Courses
Update frequency
every 6 days
Average duration
19 minutes
Episodes
165
Years Active
2022 - 2025
Share to:
Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

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 Victori…

00:16:22  |   Sun 07 Sep 2025
Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy

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 co…
00:13:28  |   Sun 31 Aug 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

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…
00:13:10  |   Sun 24 Aug 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

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…

00:13:16  |   Sun 24 Aug 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

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 b…
00:15:22  |   Sun 17 Aug 2025
Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

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…
00:17:27  |   Mon 11 Aug 2025
Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

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…
00:13:47  |   Sun 03 Aug 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

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 fictio…
00:32:30  |   Mon 28 Jul 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the …
00:15:31  |   Mon 21 Jul 2025
Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the …
00:16:49  |   Mon 14 Jul 2025
Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more

Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred…
00:12:09  |   Mon 07 Jul 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg

Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in diffe…
00:32:13  |   Wed 02 Jul 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally del…
00:17:29  |   Mon 23 Jun 2025
Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digr…
00:17:55  |   Mon 16 Jun 2025
Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson

Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her ha…
00:12:28  |   Mon 09 Jun 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen

Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen

‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.…
00:15:05  |   Tue 03 Jun 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is r…
00:29:41  |   Mon 26 May 2025
Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romanc…
00:25:04  |   Mon 19 May 2025
Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more

Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial w…
00:14:05  |   Mon 12 May 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka

Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary i…
00:16:06  |   Sun 04 May 2025
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are the property of London Review of Books. This content is not affiliated with or endorsed by eachpod.com.