Close Readings Live: Fiction and the Fantastic

Close Readings is the podcast subscription from the London Review of Books, in which longstanding contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. In one of this year’s series, the writer and mythographer Marina Warner traversed the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin, in conversation with Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis.

But over twelve episodes, the tapestry Marina and her interlocutors wove was inevitably patchy in places and completely blank in others; the implicit canon of the fantastic could only ever be a partial one. This event, the first of its kind attempted (but perhaps it will become a Close Readings/Swedenborg tradition) is an attempt to fill in all the gaps, live! Marina, Adam and special guest Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books and author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel will assemble a complete taxonomy of the genre over 75 minutes, or fail heroically, either way completing the series in the process. The recording will be released as the thirteenth episode of the podcast at the end of the year.

PROFESSOR DAME MARINA WARNER is an award winning novelist, short story writer, cultural historian and mythographer known for her work on fairy tales, mythology, and the Arabian Nights, and who has held positions at Birkbeck, University of London and All Souls College, Oxford. Her extensive bibliography includes novels like The Lost Father and non-fiction works such as No Go the Bogeyman, which explore themes of folklore, gender and culture.

ADAM THIRLWELL was born in London in 1978. He is the author of four novels, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of its Best of Young British Novelists.

EDWIN FRANK is the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of the NYRB Classics series. Born in Boulder, Colorado, and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University, he has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Lannan Fellow and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

BANNER IMAGE: Leonora Carrington. Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019

BODY IMAGE: Leonora Carrington, Dogs of the Sleeper, courtesy of Viktor Wynd.