The LRB Podcast

Latest episodes

• Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book

  October 24, 2026 · 54 min

  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…

• How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson

  October 22, 2026 · 53 min

  Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden…

• Who were the English?

  October 14, 2026 · 33 min

  For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was…

• On Politics: What is political writing?

  October 8, 2026 · 57 min

  In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly…

• Fascism in a time of AI

  October 6, 2026 · 54 min

  Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as…

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