The Wykeham's Culture Desk - June 2026

Welcome to the Wykeham’s Culture Desk. In this new series – released once a month – we recommend one book, one poem, one podcast, and one exhibition or event for our culturally curious readers.

Our selections draw from both contemporary and classic works, alongside exhibitions and podcasts that can be enjoyed today. We want to share the things we believe are worth reading, seeing, hearing and thinking about each month. We hope you enjoy them!

Selected Stories, Alice Munro

This selection of Alice Munro’s short stories (1996), set in her native Canada, explores the flickers and emotional fault lines at the heart of the human condition. Her characters are apparently ordinary, but vividly realised. They are often on the cusp of change or crisis. One story follows a fourteen year old girl who works on a poultry farm gutting turkeys to make money in the lead-up to Christmas: a coming-of-age story littered with decapitated bodies. Another explores an assumed double suicide in a small town, and the communitarian aftermath when a murderer is identified. 

Her characters manage to be familiar to us without becoming 'types'. We recognise their joy and pain. They remind you of the weirdness of relating to the world; how our thoughts act as a gloss in place of the havoc-wreaked subconscious. She admits to the irreducibility of the human psyche, but relentlessly pursues the truths that lie within it. This often comes at the expense of happy endings, forgiveness or exoneration. But her characters persevere regardless. 

Munro shows us the depths that murmur beneath the everyday. The stories are brave, honest and affecting. With each one, you understand a little more of what it is to be human. In 2013 Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

And Then After, Rudy Fransisco

A meditation on conflict and its salvageable potential, this poem sows both personal and universal hope. (Or asks the reader to believe hope is possible after the fact). It is one of the simple, striking poems in Fransisco's 2017 collection, Helium. Despite being a spoken-word text, when read its broken stanzas appeal to the reader to mend the wreckage. Learning seems to be the operative solution. He begins: 

'Our last conversation
ended with yelling.'

And concludes:

'From this I learned:
the explosion
is not how the story
has to end.'

The auxiliary verb phrase nudges inevitability into crisis. But the following vignette reminds us that we are dealing with wreckage and not clean slates:

'I heard there’s a woman in Palestine
who makes flower pots
out of used teargas grenades.'

Does he suggest that some flowers can only grow in soil wracked with pain? 

The poem teeters on the brink of nature: flower pots are a strangely contrived, yet as a reader it reminded me of natural cycles of regeneration in which destruction or disturbance can lead to the renewal of soil (think, for example, of bushfires). But extremity can quickly reverse the equilibrium.

Whatever is being hinted at, the poem permits us to believe that hope belongs to those who learn, not only from their own mistakes, but from the indefatigable resourcefulness of the human spirit.

James Lasdun’s Road Trip To America’s Courts, The London Review of Books

James Lasdun is a novelist and a poet. In October 2025, he drove across America (a feat in itself) with the intention of attending numerous civil and criminal trials. He subsequently wrote an article for the London Review of Books (April 2026) and, on the publication's podcast, reflects on the revealing encounters and situations he witnessed. The piece clearly frames the current climate in the US. In one early paragraph in the article Lasdun states: 

'A dozen adults and children, all Hispanic, turned to me with looks of terror, and it dawned on me that, with my shaved head and pale skin, I must look like some ICE body snatcher. Mortified, I slid onto one of the wooden benches and tried to make myself invisible.'

One of his great skills is to invoke the changing scenery as he travelled, moving through communities defined, in part, by the landscapes they inhabit. This lends a sense of embeddedness to the plight of the individuals on trial.

Lasdun drove through the depths of the American heartland for the purposes of the trip, sometimes going for hours along empty roads with no signposts or passing cars. Asking locals what he might do if he broke down they responded: 'Wait and hope.' Towards the end of the podcast, he reflects on the nature of his dual citizenship. 'I could go elsewhere, unlike most people here.'  Wait and hope: the reality of so many in America at this moment. 

Lasdun considers the forces that shape the lives of those on trial: poverty, prejudice, misunderstandings, misjudgements, and the often troubling intricacies of the American justice system. An unsettling, eye-opening and, at times, ominous account.

In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World, Ashmolean Museum

An elegantly curated journey through the history of the blooms that punctuate our everyday. From the earliest global explorers to science, trade, medicine, and domestic culture, this is a vivid retelling of the processes of exchange, consumption and exploration that make plants such a formative part of the societies in which we live. Featuring a rich array of paintings, drawings, artefacts, and curiosities, it reminds us of what is at stake as the natural world is degraded. The legacy of colonial exploitation looms large, and the exhibition does not shy away from acknowledging how economic interests might fuel the erasure of land-based collective and cultural memory. Surprising, beautiful and chilling.

BY FREYA MORRIS