Free Daily Podcast Summary
Close Readings: Daily Summaries Delivered
by London Review of Books
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast 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. RUNNING IN 2026 '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 ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: '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 '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
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 6 days ago19 min
Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try something different, a narrative poem based on an old yarn about a man who goes missing at sea for more than ten years. Enoch Arden, sold 17,000 copies on its first day of publication. Well into the 20th century it attracted stage and silent film adaptations as well as a musical setting by Strauss, and provided a template for countless stories of long-lost characters returning home. The decision Enoch makes at the end of the poem, when he finds his wife and children living happily with another man, was widely debated at the time, but Tennyson is careful not to pass judgment on his characters. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Tennyson maintains this moral ambivalence through realist touches and a mastery of half-formed emotion, and discuss the effects of the poem’s intricate patterning and biblical resonances. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more on Tennyson in the LRB by: Seamus Perry: https://lrb.me/npep1101 Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/npep1102 Danny Karlin: https://lrb.me/npep1103 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 1 weeks ago52 min
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. 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/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Read more in the LRB: Tom McCarthy: Ulysses and its Wake: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce01 Colm Tóibín on Joyce’s errors: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce02 Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce03 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 2 weeks ago23 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things. Meehan and Peter discuss Latin America’s long history of resource nationalism and compare the process of lithium extraction through brine evaporation with the far more destructive practices of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paradoxes inherent in ‘green capitalism’ are brought into sharper focus by Riofrancos’s exploration of these extractive frontiers, but are her solutions – smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and fewer cars – a serious proposal or pie in the sky? 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Further reading in the LRB: Laleh Khalili: Who owns the arctic? https://lrb.me/nicep1101 Adam Tooze: What energy transition? https://lrb.me/nicep1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 3 weeks ago24 min
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished. In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101 David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103 Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 4 weeks ago26 min
London Revisited: The Monster
In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair. London had become a ‘great and monstrous thing’ according to Daniel Defoe. However, if you were lucky enough to survive childhood, and gin, and have a bit of money, it was an increasingly pleasant monster, offering strolls through grand squares and pleasure gardens, and shops displaying a dizzying variety of goods from all over the world alongside cheap copies of a new literary form: the novel. To discuss London’s emergence as a brutal city of consumption and cultural innovation, Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, a professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Read more in the LRB: Clare Bucknell on Samuel Richardson: https://lrb.me/lrep1001 John Mullan on Pamela: https://lrb.me/lrep1002 Rosemary Hill on Hogarth: https://lrb.me/lrep1003 Tom Paulin on Daniel Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep1004 Claude Rawson on Henry Fieldings: https://lrb.me/lrep1005 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 30, 202613 min
Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyages’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001 Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002 Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 23, 202615 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism. They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’. 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Read more in the LRB: Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? https://lrb.me/nicep1001 Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural https://lrb.me/nicep404 Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: https://lrb.me/c6350c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 20, 202615 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism. They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’. 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Read more in the LRB: Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? https://lrb.me/nicep1001 Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural https://lrb.me/nicep404 Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: https://lrb.me/c6350c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Get Close Readings summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
The Literary Life Podcast
Three readers discuss classic literature, reading practices, and the role of stories in intellectual and spiritual life.
The History of Literature
A deep dive into world literature, exploring great works from ancient epics to modern classics.
A Good Read
BBC Radio 4
The Currently Reading Podcast
Two hosts discuss their current reads and offer genre-spanning, spoiler-free book reviews to help listeners choose what to read next.
The Book Review
Top authors and critics discuss the week’s most notable books and literary news with The New York Times Book Review.
Reading Glasses
Two authors share practical tips and humorous advice for improving your reading habits and solving common book lover problems.
The New Society | culture from the New Statesman
A weekly exploration of culture, life, and society through interviews and reviews, examining how cultural forces shape the world we live in.
Books and Authors
BBC Radio 4
Prose Society with Eli Rallo
A weekly podcast blending literary analysis and pop culture conversation for fans of classic novels and reality TV alike.
Fortunately... with Fi and Jane
Broadcasters Jane Garvey and Fi Glover interview media figures who share candid, off-the-record stories from their careers.
Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Discusses new books by Cambridge University Press authors through author interviews.
Hardcore Literature
Deep explorations of classic literature, poetry, and epic works from Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy, and beyond.
About Close Readings
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast 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. RUNNING IN 2026 '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 ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: '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 '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
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from Close Readings in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's Close Readings daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Close Readings as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Close Readings podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Close Readings product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by London Review of Books.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts, any in the catalog. Basic raises that to 15, Pro to 40 and Max to 100. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Close Readings release new episodes?
Close Readings publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Close Readings cover?
Close Readings covers topics including Education, Arts, Books, Courses. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Close Readings summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.