Malcolm Harris joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to discuss Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. A native of Northern California, Malcolm attended Palo Alto High School and that High School experience is a jumping off point of sorts — and a dark one — for the book that Malcolm joins us to discuss.

Malcolm's hefty tome, a history of California told through a Marxist lens, opens with a grim reflection on the spate of suicides that darkened his high school years. Teens who took their lives on the train tracks over which Leland Stanford built Palo Alto and much of the booming Western economy that has made the Bay Area and California in general such a dominant pole of global wealth, innovation, and the allure of good, easy living.

It's that darker side to this history that Malcolm brings into focus throughout PALO ALTO, a history of Silicon Valley that traces the region's celebrated ideologies, technologies, and policies to its roots in Anglo settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the ravages of an extractive system that builds glittering new worlds and opportunities for a few, too often at the expense of everyone else up to and including the earth itself. Malcolm explores how the histories of big tech, the military industrial complex, and Stanford University converge in the story of Palo Alto, braided together in a way that at once builds the world we have today at the cost of a potentially better one.

Also, Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still With You, returns to recommend three books: The Return by Hisham Matar, Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, and A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo.

Eric Newman is joined by LARB Film Editor Annie Berke and film critic Kyle Turner for a special 2023 Oscars Preview episode. Ahead of this weekend's award show, the trio chats about general trends from the past year in movies and in the film industry more broadly and offers a few predictions for which stars and flicks they think will take home the night's biggest prizes. Eric, Annie, and Kyle also dish on their faves and flops from the year in film, including The Fabelmans, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tár, The Whale, Don't Worry Darling, M3GAN, and much more.

Kate Wolf is joined by writer and critic Emmanuel Iduma to discuss his new memoir, I Am Still With You: A Reckoning With Silence, Inheritance, and History. The book follows Iduma’s return to his native Nigeria after many years of living abroad. It recounts his travels through the southern portion of the country in search of information about one of his uncles—the man for whom he was named but never met. The elder Emmanuel disappeared after fighting in Nigeria’s Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, a conflict that lasted from 1967 to 1970, and came on the heels of Nigeria’s independence from British Rule. Though it touched the lives of a significant amount of the population, and killed over a million Igbo people, the war is still shrouded in mystery within the country, and like Iduma’s uncle, the fates of many of its casualties remain unknown. In I Am Still With You, Iduma meets the lacunae of his uncle’s life head on, in turn confronting other painful absences within his family with a thoughtful introspection, using history, literature, the archive, and vivid encounters from everyday life to make a path across the abyss.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak to Laura Poitras about her latest documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, recently nominated for an Academy Award. The film explores the efforts of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin and a group of activists to compel arts institutions to refuse donations from the Sackler pharmaceutical family and remove their names from the walls of the many exhibits and museums they fund in recognition of the damage their highly lucrative opioid OxyContin has wreaked in communities across America.
Blending an intimate and revealing look at Goldin's with footage of the group's actions against the Sacklers, this moving documentary offers a powerful account of art, activism, and the struggle to be heard above the clamor of wealth and the cultural and political power it concentrates.
Also, Ann Goldstein, translator of Alba de Cespedes' Forbidden Notebook, returns to recommend The Cazalet Chronicles, a five book series, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the celebrated translator Ann Goldstein, whose most recent translated work is a novel called Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. Ann Goldstein is a former editor at the New Yorker, where she worked from 1974 to 2017. She began translating Italian literature in the ’90s and in 2005 she translated Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. She went on to translate Ferrante’s entire Neapolitan trilogy, starting with My Brilliant Friend. Goldstein’s latest translation, Forbidden Notebook, is a novel written by the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. First published in Italy in the 1950s, the novel centers around a woman who buys a notebook on a whim, and begins to furtively write in it, hiding it and herself from her husband and her children. Through the notebook, she begins to learn more about her desire, her guilt, and the sacrifices she has made for her family, her past, and her future.

Also, Maggie Millner, author of Couplets, returns to recommend The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme by Cat Fitzpatrick.

Maggie Millner joins Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf to discuss her debut book, Couplets, a love story in verse, written in alternating chapters of couplets and prose poems. It’s about a woman whose life is good: she has a loving partner, caring friends, organic vegetables, plenty of tote bags. Everything changes when she meets a woman at a bar and falls deeply in love, beginning an intense, consuming affair. What follows is an exploration of selfhood — a body and heart turned inside out. Millner writes about the ways in which we discover ourselves, the power other people have over us, about being both subject and object. Couplets is about relationships, queerness, sex and desire, as well as the very act of writing all of that down and turning it into poetry.
Also, De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of Decent People, returns to recommend What Napolean Could Not Do by DK Nnuro.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by author De'Shawn Charles Winslow to speak about his novel, Decent People. The book is set in the fictional small town of West Mills, North Carolina, and takes place in 1976, when West Mill is still segregated. It focuses on a crime: the calculated murder of three siblings in their home. Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon have been found dead, and there are plenty of people to suspect of having wanted to kill them, including their half-brother Lymp, whose fiancé Jo is determined to prove his innocence; Eunice, an acquaintance from church whose teenage son Marian has wronged; Savannah, who was close friends with Marva and shared a drug habit with her; and Savannah’s father, Ted, who served as the landlord of the siblings’ pediatric practice in town. Alternating perspectives between many of these characters, the novel untangles the tightly knit and interrelated stories of people in a community who know each other intimately—sometimes too intimately for comfort—and considers the ways in which the need for privacy and autonomy can corrode into secrecy, even conspiracy, as well as the harmful effects of racism and homophobia across decades.
Also, Kathryn Ma, author of The Chinese Groove, returns to recommend Gish Jen's short story collection Thank You, Mr. Nixon.

Kathryn Ma joins Eric Newman to discuss her most recent novel, The Chinese Groove, which follows protagonist Xi Liu Zheng, who goes by Shelley, as he leaves his home in China's Yunnan province to make his future with the help of a rich uncle in San Francisco. But Shelly's journey is a comedy of errors in which nothing is as he expected. Yet, with indefatigable optimism, compassion, and determination, Shelly works to change his fortune and repair fractured family bonds. At once a harrowing immigrant tale and a humorous romp through cultural misunderstandings, The Chinese Groove explores the everyday negotiations of romance and family ties, as well as the power of belief that helps us make our way through the world without breaking.
Also, Curtis White, author of Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse, returns to recommend two classic authobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, and The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton.

Curtis White joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his latest essay collection, Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse. The book offers an incisive critique of the Westernization of Buddhism, from its adoption by tech companies like Amazon and Google into a practice of corporate mindfulness that aids with productivity in the workplace; to its embrace by New Atheists, such as Stephen Batchelor, who argue for Buddhism without beliefs; to its reduction to being solely a matter of neuroscience. White emphasizes the more unruly, unmaterialistic aspects of the dharma—defamiliarization, passion, and metaphysical consciousness— all of which he argues share a deep connection to the work of Western artists, musicians, and poets. Writing with a fiery skepticism about techno-capitalism as the only solution to solving the world’s crises, White advocates for Buddhism’s place as a form of resistance and a way to think against the status quo.
Also, Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, returns to recommend V.S. Naipaul's A Million Mutinies Now.

Award-winning journalist Anand Giridharadas joins Eric Newman and LARB’s new Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara to talk about his latest book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. The Persuaders –– this month’s LARB Book Club selection –– offers an inside account of how activists, politicians, educators, and other Left leaders are working to manifest change in a divided America. It is a fabulous study, full of interesting testimonials from hundreds of hours of interviews with Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza, Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders’ campaign workers, and many more. The Persuaders goes deep on what helps change hearts and minds as our fragile nation struggles to find common ground.

Also, Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, returns to recommend Patricia Likes to Cuddle by Samantha Allen.

(To sign up for the LARB Book Club membership, visit www.shop.lareviewofbooks.org/join)

In an encore presentation, Adam Phillips joins Kate Wolf to discuss his two latest books, both published this year, On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better. The series looks at the very human impulse toward transformation, from religious and political conversion, and the conversion to family life from which one must ultimately emerge, to the aims and practices of psychoanalysis, along with more quotidian ideas of self-betterment. As always in his work, Phillips attends in these books to the aspects of ourselves that can be hardest to bear, and that can lead us to desire more rigid structures — intellectual or otherwise — or desire to be someone else, while also quietly petitioning for a more complex and thoughtful mode of change in which, as Socrates encouraged his pupils, we learn only to be ourselves. How might we get better, Phillips wonders, at talking about what it is to get better?

Also, Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide, returns to recommend Josep Pla’s The Grey Notebook.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Sabrina Imbler, a Brooklyn-based writer and science journalist, about their debut essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.  Part creature feature part memoir, each essay explores the life of a unique sea animal as a means of illuminating key experiences from Sabrina's own life story. Across essays the life of a Chinese sturgeon is a catalyst for understanding a grandmother, a whale necropsy for understanding a dying romance, or a bloom of slippery slopes who help us understand the ephemeral joys of queer gathering.
Across the collection they ask us to think about how our lives mirror those of the animals around us, especially the ones who so often escape our gaze, just like the darker facets of our own personalities and histories.
Also, the writer and curator Jordan Stein, author of Riptales, returns to recommend Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker by Jason McBride.

We made it to the end of the year... and our favorite episode! Kate, Medaya, and Eric share their favorite books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, music, and more in this look back at the year that was 2022.

A LARB Radio double header on two mavericks of independent cinema. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Joyce Chopra to discuss her new memoir, Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond. The book traces Chopra's earliest inspirations as a young girl growing up near Coney Island to the projects that launched her storied career across TV news, documentaries and feature films, including the feminist classics Joyce at 34 and Smooth Talk. The memoir also engages larger questions about how women combatted sexism in the entertainment industry before the #MeToo movement and in its wake. Chopra's story offers a path for women in film and beyond to find creative achievement, and that moving target we call happiness.
Next, Kate Wolf speaks with Chris Smith about his most recent movie, Sr. It documents the career of the American underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who’s best known for his 1969 farce Putney Swope, about an advertising agency in New York City. Downey made over a dozen other films, such as Greaser’s Palace, Chafed Elbows, and Hugo Pool, which stars his son, the actor Robert Downey Jr., who made his debut in another film of his father’s, Pound, when he was only five years old. In Sr. Smith follows Robert Downey Jr.'s experience of reckoning with his father’s wildly creative and unconventional life, his complicated parenting, and his painful decline as he struggles with Parkinsons, all while celebrating the work of a true iconoclast.

Kate Wolf speaks with the writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster about her most recent book Disorganisation and Sex, which collects a decade’s worth of Webster’s essays on themes such as desire, pleasure, fantasy, and the unconscious, and the often uneasy relationships we have with them in our everyday lives. Sex, Webster writes, is sometimes felt as a curse, not a cure—and by extension its disorganizing force is both highly guarded and legislated against (as it was recently with the overturning of Roe vs Wade). In her writing and clinical work, Webster sees the role of the psychoanalyst as someone “who takes on the burden of disorganisation and tries, at all costs, to do something other than make it go away,” leaving room for its revelatory potential and power to change us.
Also, Hilton Als, author of My Pinup, returns to recommend Henry Green's Party Going.

Hilton Als, joins Eric Newman to discuss his new book, My Pinup, a hybrid memoir-essay that explores questions of race, desire, and autonomy through an intense and intimate focus on Hilton's relationship with and to polymath musician and sexual dynamo Prince.  By looking at Prince as a subject of queer desire and being and at his recording career as a study in the struggle between Black excellence and white corporate control, MY PINUP probes the simultaneous allure of Black queer aesthetics and its disavowal in the hostile terrains of the music industry and American culture. The memoir/essay offers us a chance to remember and get close to the Prince that was, and to mourn the Prince that could have been. 
Also, Dionne Irving, author of The Islands, returns to recommend A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Dionne Irving joins Eric Newman to talk about her debut story collection, The Islands. Moving across the United States, Canada, Jamaica, England, and France, the collection explores the female characters’ experience of diasporic dislocation, that feeling of never quite fitting into the rhythms of either their adopted culture or their culture of origin. Dionne’s stories reveal origin — that foundational and orienting sense of where one is “from” — as an eternally unsettled question for her female protagonists, troubling the ways in which they find or make a home for themselves among people and places that never feel entirely theirs.
Also, Peter Brooks, author of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, returns to recommend The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste as well as The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by literary critic and scholar Peter Brooks. Brooks is the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Yale. He is the author of many books but perhaps most notably of Reading for the Plot, originally published in 1984, which initiated the narrative turn in literary criticism. In it, Brooks focused on the story, how it was told and how it moved forward.  
His latest book Suduced by Story returns to narrative as its main subject, 30 years later. Brooks now finds narrative everywhere — from President Bush invoking the “stories” of all of his cabinet members to corporate websites touting the company “story”. What does this narrative takeover mean? Why have we started to privilege storytelling over any other form of expression? Brooks writes “This…suggests something in our culture has gone astray.” Peter Brooks joins us today to discuss, as he puts it, “the misuses, and mindless uses, of narrative.”
Also, Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September, returns to recommend three books: Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal; Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System; and Marina Warner's Esmond and Ilia.

In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributing editor Jon Wiener to remember the historian Mike Davis, who died last week at 76 years old. Jon and Mike were longtime friends and together they wrote Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, Davis's final book. Then Kate speaks with the writer Constance Debré about her novel, Love Me Tender, the first of her books to be translated in English. It follows a woman, who like Debré was once a lawyer, but has quit her job, and vacated the comforts of her former life to devote herself to her writing. She has a son from her marriage named Paul. After telling her husband, who she's separated from, that she has decided to be with women, the narrator’s ex starts to turn Paul against her and prevents her from seeing him. The novel takes place over the span of a glacial court case that will decide the narrator's fate with her son—all the while asking critical questions about the fearsome nature of unconditional love and attachment, the roles of gender and motherhood, and the unassailability of the truth.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney about his new memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s relationship with a legend of American letters: the singular stylist Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was Pinckney’s professor in a creative writing class at Barnard in the early 1970s, and they quickly became close friends. She invited him into her home, into her writing process, and into a world of New York literary culture and gossip, which Pinckney doles out here in generous cupfuls. It was through Hardwick that Pinckney met Barbara Epstein, an editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, where he began his writing career. His memoir documents a critical time in both his own life and in Hardwick’s, including the dissolution of her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, and the composition of her masterful novel, Sleepless Nights.
Also, Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows, returns to recommend "Old Boys Old Girls" a short story by Edward P. Jones from his collection All Aunt Hagar's Children.

On this special LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Boris Dralyuk and Medaya Ocher are joined by Namwali Serpell, to speak about her new novel, The Furrows. One of the most daring and protean literary voices working today, Serpell is a Zambian-born novelist and essayist, and a professor of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, a genre-bending saga tracing the legacies of three families, appeared in 2019 and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her equally unclassifiable — a compliment, that — work of nonfiction, Stranger Faces, appeared the following year, as part of Transit Books’ series of Undelivered Lectures, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Serpell is also the recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Like The Old Drift, The Furrows defies narrative conventions and readerly expectations, but it does so with a narrower aim in view, homing in on the after-affects — which are, truth be told, manifold — of a particular, though uncertain, trauma, an event that fractures the protagonist’s life and sense of self at the age of 12. Blamed for the death of her younger brother, Cassandra is haunted by the presence of his absence — or is it simply his presence? — for the rest of her days. What Serpell’s novel tells us is what Cassandra promises to tell us: not what happened, but how it felt.
Also, Kathern Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch returns to recommend Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative.

Kathryn Scanlan joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss her new novel, Kick the Latch. A series of taut, electrifying vignettes based on real-life interviews, the book narrates the life of Sonia, a horse trainer in rural Iowa, who enters the world of competitive racing while still in high school. Sonia’s experiences at the racetrack are by turns exultant and brutal: they take place in an atmosphere in which both human and animal are often pushed to the edge of their lives in the name of winning it all. But Sonia’s grit, devotion, and perseverance serve to counter to the exceptional details of her life and work. In her, Scanlan crafts a uniquely humane and gripping voice that reveals itself in small details, idiosyncratic phrases, and deep tenderness.
Also, Hua Hsu, author of Stay True, returns to recommend Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

Hua Hsu joins Eric Newman to discuss his latest book, STAY TRUE. The memoir recounts Hua's feeling of being caught between the Taiwanese culture of his immigrant parents and the burgeoning Silicon Valley suburbs in which he was raised. A lifeline of sorts is thrown to him in the form of Ken Ishida, a confident young man from a multigenerational Japanese American family. At first, it seems that Ken has every Hua lacks—the looks, the easy social confidence, a finger on the pulse of American culture. But during their friendship those first years of college, the young men support and lean on each other as they grow into adults with bright—if intangible—futures ahead of them. But one night, a shocking and random act of violence takes Ken away and Hua and his friends must try to makes sense of a senseless tragedy and pull back together the broken lives left in its wake.
Also, Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less is Lost, returns to recommend Julian Delgado Lopera's Fiebre Tropical.

Andrew Sean Greer, author of six novels, including The Confessions, joins Eric Newman to talk about Less Is Lost, a sequel to his 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Less. This latest installment finds our beloved and bewildered eponymous gay novelist of minor repute dashing across the American Southwest, South, and East Coast as he scrambles to save, and in some ways clarify, his relationship with Freddy Pelu, as well as to pay back some monumental back rent on the charming San Francisco home left to him by his recently deceased lover, Robert Brownburn. As Less takes his fish-out-of-water act on the road, Andrew Sean Greer treats readers to a number of poignant insights into the nature of love, devotion, belonging, and the by turns miserable and, er, miserable condition of being a writer.

Also, Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose, returns to recommend Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.