Fiction and the Fantastic – Details, episodes & analysis

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 fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation. Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief⁠ Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me⁠ Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned⁠ Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo⁠ Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

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 fiction, horror and trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters: https://lrb.me/ffshelley1 Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: https://lrb.me/ffshelley2 Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley3 Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life: https://lrb.me/ffshelley4 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

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 different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this episode, Marina and Adam look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Liam McIlvanney on James Hogg: https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov1 Michael Wood on Bulgakov: https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov2 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

‘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.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years apart but drew on the period of the Napoleonic wars: Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen). Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) is a complex sequence of tales within tales, written from the point of view of the early 19th century but describing events in Spain in the 18th century. It’s a powerful commentary on the preoccupations of the Enlightenment and the repression of historical guilt. In Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Dinesen confronts some of the most unsettling aspect of sexual guilt and desire with psychological astuteness. Adam and Marina discuss the ways in which, in both works, the gothic was able to explore areas of human experience that other genres struggled to accommodate. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crscfflrbpod⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: On Potocki: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffpotocki1 On 'Out of Africa': https://lrb.me/ffpotocki2 On Dinesen's letters: https://lrb.me/ffpotocki3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

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 imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to push the boundaries of what literature could explore, with reference to stories including ‘The Judgment’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Report to the Academy’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hofmann): Unknown Laws https://lrb.me/ffkafka1 Rivka Galchen: What Kind of Funny is He? https://lrb.me/ffkafka2 Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka? https://lrb.me/ffkafka3 J.P. Stern: Bad Faith https://lrb.me/ffkafka4 LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular. Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask https://lrb.me/ffcarroll1 Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet https://lrb.me/ffcarroll2 Marina Warner: Doubly Damned https://lrb.me/ffcarroll3 Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Salman Rushdie: Calvino https://lrb.me/ffcalvino1 James Butler: Infinite Artichoke⁠⁠ https://lrb.me/ffcalvino2 Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism https://lrb.me/ffcalvino3 Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Terry Eagleton: A Spot of Firm Government https://lrb.me/ffswift1 Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children https://lrb.me/ffswift2 Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly https://lrb.me/ffswift3 Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff

The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Marina Warner: Travelling Text https://lrb.me/ffnights1 Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness https://lrb.me/ffnights2 William Gass: A Book at Bedtime https://lrb.me/ffnights3 Get the book: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/sealenightsff⁠⁠ Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff

Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living. Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.