LRB Winter Lectures | Adam Shatz: Another Country

‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and itself, is a violent attempt to resolve what Baldwin called the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity. But there are other possible Americas, some, like Baldwin's, described from voluntary exile. What can they offer at the present moment?

Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His Close Readings podcast series for the LRB, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards.

This year’s other Winter Lectures:

Friday 12 December 2025: Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
Friday 30 January 2026: Seamus Perry on ‘pluralism and the modern poet’ at Conway Hall, listing to follow.

Now in their fifteenth year, the annual ‘London Review of Books’ Winter Lectures have been the occasion for many of the paper’s most widely discussed interventions of recent years, from Judith Butler on who owns Kafka to Hilary Mantel on royal bodies, Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange to Mary Beard on women in power, Meehan Crist on childbearing in the age of climate crisis to Pankaj Mishra on the Shoah after Gaza. A reading list of past lectures can be found on the LRB website here.