James Lasdun's road trip to America's courts

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration hearings in Chicago to jury trials in Deadwood to felony proceedings in Louisiana. On this episode of the LRB podcast, James joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ‘swerving tales’ he witnessed on his trip, and whether the ‘brazenly bad-faith goings-on at the Justice Department’ are showing up in local courts. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	The first ever stage adaptation of Barbara Pim's novel Quartet in Autumn will be showing at the Arcola Theatre in Dahlston from the 7th of May to the 13th of June.
0:11.4	With a script by Samantha Harvey who won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, Quartet in Autumn is, as Penelope Fitzgerald wrote of the book in the LRB, a deeply touching story
0:22.5	of aging, friendship and the poetry of everyday life. Book now at our cola theatre.com. Tickets start
0:30.4	from £12.00. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm
0:53.3	joined by the novelist and poet James
0:55.3	Lazzden to talk about a recent road trip that he took through the United States last October,
1:00.6	from one courthouse and one trial or hearing to another, from Chicago to Deadwood to El Paso
1:05.8	to New Orleans, a trip that he wrote up in a recent issue of the LRB.
1:10.7	James Ladsden's new book, The Family Man, about the Murdoch Murders in South Carolina,
1:15.3	is about to be published, and we talked about it a bit the last time he was on this podcast in November 2025.
1:21.7	I can highly recommend that discussion.
1:24.8	Hello, James, and thank you so much for joining me again.
1:28.4	Hello, thanks so much for having me. So I tried to plot your route more or less on Google Maps just now,
1:35.7	and Google seems to think it's an 80-hour 5,300-mile round trip. Is that more or less what it was?
1:43.9	How long were you on the road for?
1:45.8	I was on the road for a month and I actually clocked up 10,000 miles on the odometer. But, you know,
1:51.8	there was a lot of coming and going and a lot of sort of, yeah, some crisscrossing. I went west
1:58.8	through Chicago and I went all the way into Wyoming, but that's as far west as I went.
2:03.8	I didn't get such California.
2:06.6	And I dropped down through Colorado and New Mexico into Texas and then headed east across Texas and to New Orleans and then kind of made my way back up north to New York. I began in
2:20.4	New York, by the way, with one final stop in North Carolina. And it was leaving out California
2:28.0	and the West Coast, well, and the East Coast, I know you began and ended in New York because
	...

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