Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
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.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
All content for Fiction and the Fantastic is the property of London Review of Books and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
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.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Fiction and the Fantastic
Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
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.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
