It’s that time of year again — the end. In our annual “best of” show, Kate, Daya, and Eric select their favorite books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, scandals, and other items from the past 12 months. Sit back, enjoy, and have a very Happy New Year!
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher talk with Anna Della Subin about her new book, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. Accidental Gods traces the rarely told history of the deification of living men in modern times, revealing the phenomenon’s connection to imperial conquest, revolution, and civil war. Taking as a starting point Columbus’ exploitation of his reception by native peoples as a deity come from the heavens, the book offers in-depth studies of figures such as the Ethiopian King Haile Selassie, who is regarded as God by Rastafarians in Jamaica, England’s Prince Philip, who became the center of a religion on an island in the South Pacific, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was seen as divine by early Theosophists. What does it mean to make a man a God? Why is it always a man? And what does that say about notions of masculinity, the place of religion in society, and the relations between political power and divinity?
Also, Sam Quinones, author of The Least of Us, returns to recommend Calvin Trillin’s Killings.
Award-winning author and investigative journalist Sam Quinones joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his latest book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. The book charts the sweeping, shocking rise of synthetic drugs in the United States, and their production here, by corporations such as Purdue Pharma, as well as in labs in Mexico and China. The proliferation of so-called “designer drugs” has led to yet another wave of the opiate crisis, with more overdose deaths between the spring of 2020 and 2021 than ever before recorded. The Least of Us tells the personal stories behind many of these casualties, the larger political and socioeconomic shifts that have exacerbated the problem, the fascinating and disturbing history of the emergence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, and what some communities are doing to fight against the drugs’ devastation.
Also, Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, drops by to recommend Jason Josephson Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf moderate a panel on the use, abuse, and omnipresence of digital technology in our lives — with writers and scholars Christoph Bieber (University of Duisburg-Essen), Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression), and Anna Wiener (The New Yorker, Uncanny Valley).
A global pandemic, a national election, entire regions devastated by one natural disaster after another: new technologies have made it possible for us to track, grasp, and witness these large-scale phenomena in real time and in the palms of our hands. Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter have encouraged a sense of community and mobilized action, even as they have facilitated the spread of misinformation and the formation of fissures in public life. How do we, as individuals and as communities, navigate technologies of information and misinformation? How much power do tech companies have in shaping public conversation, and how much power should they have?
This event was called Online Together and it was a part of LARB’s Semipublic Intellectual Sessions, a tenth anniversary celebration and fundraiser.
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Writer and artist James Hannaham joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his most recent book, Pilot Impostor, a mix of prose, poetry, and visual collage. James is the author of the award-winning novels Delicious Foods and God Says No. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Fence, and Bomb, and he was for many years a writer for the Village Voice and Salon.
Pilot Impostor was partly inspired by a trip to Cape Verde and Lisbon, right after Trump’s election in 2016. The book brings together disparate influences like the work of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, the TV show Air Disasters, and current events. Through shifts in form, narrative, and style, Hannaham asks some of the biggest questions about the self, identity, the failure of leadership, history, and the nature of consciousness.
Also, film critic Melissa Anderson, author of Inland Empire, returns to recommend Jean Stein’s depiction of Hollywood, West of Eden.
In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf is joined by Melissa Anderson to discuss her first book, Inland Empire, a volume in Fireflies Press’s Decadent Editions series, which revisit seminal films from the 2000s. A story of a “woman in trouble,” David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is a bold selection, since, as Anderson points out, to try and make sense of its plot “would be to replicate the tediousness and pointlessness of narrating a dream.” Instead the book concerns itself most with the film’s star, Laura Dern, an electrifyingly expressive performer who has worked in the industry since she was a child. Using the whole of Dern’s career and her many collaborations with Lynch, Anderson explores Inland Empire as the work not so much of an auteur but of an actor, making poignant observations along the way about disintegration and desperation, victimization and agency, the possibilities of the female gaze, and the dark side of Hollywood.
In the second half, Kate is joined by artist and inventor Pippa Garner. Over the past six decades, Garner has satirized American consumer culture with a range of drawings and ideas for outlandish yet, given our zeal for novelty, completely plausible products, custom furniture, and things like the world’s most fuel efficient car — which is actually a bicycle set inside the frame of a miniature Honda. In the 1970s she collaborated with the media collective Ant Farm, and in the 1980s, as Phillip Garner, she published books such as Better Living Catalog: 62 Absolute Necessities for Contemporary Survival and Utopia — or Bust! Products for the Perfect World. She also made regular appearances on the talk show circuit, in character as a small-town inventor, presenting some of her many gadgets — like a crop-top business suit and an umbrella whose canopy is constructed of palm fronds. “Immaculate Misconceptions,” a retrospective of her work, is currently on view at Joan in Los Angeles.
Essayist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker José Vadi joins Eric Newman to discuss his debut essay collection, Inter State. José’s first play, a eulogy for three, was the winner of the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award. He is also the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems that spring from the San Francisco neighborhood of the same name, and his writing has been featured in a number of publications, including Catapult, McSweeney’s, New Life Quarterly, and our own Los Angeles Review of Books. The essays in Inter State move across a California that is at once family home and site of alienation, humming with possibility and on the brink of disaster, energetic and decayed.
Also, Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness, returns to recommend Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph and Other Stories.
Ruth Ozeki is a writer, filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest, and author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Her nonfiction work includes the memoir The Face: A Time Code and the documentary film Halving the Bones.
Ozeki joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her latest work, The Book of Form and Emptiness. The novel opens with the death of Kenji, an itinerant jazz musician who is run over by a chicken truck after he falls down in the street late at night and is too intoxicated to pick himself back up. The story follows Kenji’s wife, Annabelle, and son, Benny, as they both cope, in their own ways, with their terrible tragedy. Annabelle becomes a hoarder, stacking various objects in their home as a kind of insurance against loss. Benny starts to hear those objects, and many others, talking to him, which eventually lands him in a psychiatric ward. As the novel moves forward, Benny meets an alluring, rebellious girl, Aleph, and Slajov the Bottleman, a wheelchair-bound alcoholic whose ravings about poetry, capitalism, and philosophy gin up, in part, the novel’s deep investment in questions about consumption, objects, and grief.
Also, Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation, returns to recommend Ann Quin’s Three.
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by Tom McCarthy, author of the contemporary classic, Remainder, as well as of the novels C and Satin Island, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also the author of the collection of essays Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish and of the literary study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and is the “General Secretary” of the “semi-fictitious organization” the International Necronautical Society (INS), which has exhibited art around the world.
McCarthy’s latest book is The Making of Incarnation, a novel that follows the hunt for a box that has gone missing from the archives of a time-and-motion pioneer named Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Gilbreth’s studies in movement helped birth the era of mass observation and big data, but did she also discover the “perfect” movement, one that would “change everything”?
Also, Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem, returns to recommend poet Desiree C. Bailey’s What Noise Against the Cain.
In a special LARB Book Club installment of the Radio Hour, Boris Dralyuk and Callie Siskel speak with poet Natalie Diaz about her collection Postcolonial Love Poem, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. Diaz is also the author of the collection When My Brother Was an Aztec, which was a 2012 Lannan Literary Selection and won an American Book Award the following year. Throughout her work she explores the beauty and heartbreak of her own experience as a Latina and Mojave American as well as the broader tragedies and contractions of life in the US and in its global shadow.
Also, Dodie Bellamy, author of Bee Reaved, returns to recommend Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall.
Kate, Daya, and Eric speak with director Todd Haynes about his latest movie, and first documentary, The Velvet Underground, which shows just how the legendary rock group became a cultural touchstone representing a range of contradictions. The band is both of their time, yet timeless; rooted in high art and underground culture. The film features in-depth interviews with key artistic players of the 1960s combined with a treasure trove of never- before-seen performances and a rich collection of recordings, Warhol films, and other experimental art. The result is an immersive experience into what founding member John Cale describes as the band's creative ethos: “how to be elegant and how to be brutal."
Also, Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, returns to recommend I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres.
Writer Dodie Bellamy joins Kate Wolf to speak about her latest collection, Bee Reaved. The book gathers nearly 20 essays Bellamy has written over the last few years, with a focus on the state of bereavement, examining not only the loss of her husband Kevin Killian, but the loss of other artists, physical objects, her own past lives, and radical social movements. As with all of Bellamy’s work, the pieces in Bee Reaved foreground the viscera of the body and other aspects of the physical world, while also engaging with ghosts, fairy tales, the internet, spirituality and a deep sense of community.
Then, in this week's second interview, Kate is joined by fillmaker Mia Hansen-Love to discuss her latest, and first English-language movie, Bergman Island, which follows a filmmaking couple during their residency on Fårö, the island in Sweden where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot many of his films. As the couple, Chris and Tony, work on their screenplays and tour the sites that inspired the great filmmaker, the line between real life and fiction becomes ever more ambiguous. Bergman Island opens in theaters October 15th and available for digital rental October 22nd.
Kate Wolf speaks with writer Kelefa Sanneh about his debut book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. An exhaustive, enthralling breakdown of the last 50 years in music, Major Labels diagrams the American sonic landscape, Alfred Barr-style, in the discrete yet overlapping categories of rock, R&B, country, punk, hip hop, dance, and pop; it also pays close attention to the proliferation of genres within genres, covering everything from thrash metal to glitter rock, quiet storm to hip hop soul, and many more. The book reveals what these divisions mean not only for the way music gets made, but how it’s listened to, and by whom. In conversation, we learn what inspired, and continues to inspire, one of our leading music writers.
Also, Cynthia Cruz, author of The Melancholia of Class, returns to recommend a collection of writings by the late Mark Fisher "Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures."
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by author Cynthia Cruz to discuss The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class. A mix of memoir, cultural theory, and polemic, Cruz’s latest work addresses the personal and social consequences of the marginalization of America’s majority population, its working class. Cruz speaks about what inspired her to write the book and how she came to focus on the lives of certain famous working-class people, like musicians Amy Winehouse and Ian Curtis (who both died tragically in their 20s), and Jason Molina (who made it to 39), actress Barbara Loden, and others. How did they and Cynthia contend with the hegemonic “middle-class” culture’s shaming of working-class characteristics? Denial and repression of working-class consciousness is encouraged in our society. This repression is seen as a precondition for success, but it mangles the soul and shreds the bonds of social solidarity that are the foundation of community and provide a sense of belonging. 173 years after Marx and Engels recast the working class as the protagonist of history in their Manifesto, Cruz does the same in hers.
Also, Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, returns to recommend Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac, who are both British sex workers.
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by documentary filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who are perhaps best known for RGB, their Academy Award-nominated documentary about late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That film provided the impetus for their latest project, My Name Is Pauli Murray, which traces the career of a fierce warrior against injustice whose story has been confined to the margins of history. A pioneering African American attorney, activist, and priest, Murray shaped landmark litigation — and consciousness — around race and gender equity, including the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education and the extension of the 14th Amendment to provide equal protection under the law to all Americans, regardless of sex.
Also, Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint returns to recommend a major work scheduled to be released in November, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Graeber was working on The Dawn of Everything at the time of his death last year.
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by writer, critic, and philosopher Amia Srinivasan, whose new book is The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century. Amia is a professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College at Oxford and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. The essays in her book probe how we think and talk about sex. Srinivasan grapples with the subject from a variety of angles, looking closely at the #MeToo movement, the history of feminism and pornography, and the larger political forces that shape our personal lives. She discusses the complicated relationships between sex and racial justice, class, and disability. As she asks in her preface, “What would it take for sex really to be free? We do not yet know; let us try and see.”
Also, poet Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell, returns to recommend Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry, a poetry anthology edited by Jane Hirshfield.
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Maggie Nelson to discuss her latest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. In 2015, Nelson’s bestselling, genre-defying The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her other works of criticism, memoir, and poetry include The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions; Bluets; Jane: A Murder; and The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Warhol Creative Capitol Arts Writing Grant, among other awards. Currently she is a professor of English at USC. Written in the wake of the 2016 election, On Freedom is an ambitious consideration of the complex knots of “sovereignty and self abandon, subjectivity and subjection, autonomy and dependency” that form under the blanket of liberation. Focusing on four topics — art, sex, drugs, and the climate crisis — the book challenges the notion of freedom as a utopian state toward which we might move untethered from our responsibilities to the planet and to one another. At the same time, Nelson carves out a notable amount of space within realms many would be quick to deem as uniquely unfree: caretaking, addiction, conflict, and negative affect, even the ticking time bomb of global warming that leaves so many of us feeling helpless. Here, we’re asked to consider what feeling free might have to do with feeling good — and what could be a better question than that?
Also, Rachel Greenwald Smith, author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal, returns to recommend Heather Berg's Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism.
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by poet Kaveh Akbar to talk about his latest collection, Pilgrim Bell. Whereas Akbar's previous collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, meditated on addiction and the challenges of recovery, Pilgrim Bell figures a turn to the spiritual and the possibility of repair, focusing on the damaged self, the abuses of empire, penitence, the failures of the faithful, and untamable efforts at submission and devotion.
Because the work of faith and thus the work of the faithful, is never complete — indeed, as Akbar’s best lines suggest to us, is always inchoate, compromised, confused — the spiritual is an experience of cycling, of makings, unmakings, and remakings. The poems leave the reader suspended between action and futility, the generosity of love and the pain of loss. Like the pilgrim of the collection’s title, we listen for the words that will ring out to us and we wait, in the interim between the bell’s tolls, to determine how we will respond to its call. Akbar opens the interview with a reading from the collection.
Also, Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, returns to recommend Emily Segal’s novel Mercury Retrograde.
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Rachel Greenwald Smith to discuss her new book, On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal. On Compromise takes a critical look at liberalism’s persistent push towards the center in both political and artistic realms. Instead of Compromise as a measure of good in and of itself, Smith argues for the values of illiberalism, passion, and commitment to a cause, aesthetic or otherwise. Her book explores how conflict and democracy need not be thought of as opposing forces. In doing so, she interprets a wide range of contemporary cultural phenomena, from Beyoncé’s album Lemonade to David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, the history of poetry magazines, Guns N’ Roses, the far right, riot grrrl, and her own experience playing in an indie rock band.
Also, Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives, returns to recommend Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy.
Matthew Specktor, one of the founding editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books, joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his newest book, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California. A memoir and cultural history, Always Crashing explores the work and lives of writers, actors, directors, and musicians who straddle the line between success and anonymity, and whose careers, though majestic, still leave questions about what might have been had circumstances or, in many cases, their temperaments, been different. These include the screenwriters Eleanor Perry and Carole Eastman, the novelist Thomas McGuane, the actress Tuesday Weld, and the filmmaker Hal Ashby. The book questions notions of both success and failure, especially as filtered through the distorted prism of Hollywood. It also touches on Matthew’s own experiences growing up and later working in the film industry, his mother’s brief turn as a screenwriter, and his father’s more abiding success as a talent agent. A native of Los Angeles, Matthew draws a vivid portrait of the city, with both love and disdain.
Also, Jeanetta Rich, whose first collection of poems, Black Venus Fly Trap, was released in June, drops by to recommend Federico Garcia Lorca's play Blood Wedding.
Eric Newman talks with Nawaaz Ahmed about his debut novel, Radiant Fugitives, which loosely centers on Seema, a woman who makes a life for herself as a San Francisco-based campaign worker for progressive politicians after her Muslim family in Chennai, India reject her for being a lesbian. As the book opens, Seema is dying just as she is about to give birth to a son, conceived with a fellow campaign worker to whom Seema was briefly married. Gathered around are Seema's mother, Nafeesa, and Tahera, her deeply devout and jealous younger sister.
Narrated by Seema's newborn son, Ishraaq, Radiant Fugitives moves back and forth in time and space, from Chennai to London to the United States, charting the struggles of a family in the throes of rupture and reconciliation. Set against the backdrop of the Obama era, the novel explores what it means to belong, to be free, to love, to understand, and to forgive across countries, cultures, and desires.
Also, Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, returns to recommend a book that was featured on the LARB Radio Hour just two weeks ago — Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies.
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by Hogir Hirori to talk about his latest film, Sabaya, which documents the heroic efforts to rescue women and girls from ISIS slavery at a refugee camp in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. Sabaya, which premiered at Sundance and is now available nationwide, is a moving and visceral documentary that follows a team of volunteers from the Yazidi Home Center in northern Syria as they try to rescue Yazidi girls, some as young as seven, who have been kidnapped and sold into sexual and physical slavery by ISIS. Armed with just a mobile phone, a handgun, and information from “infiltrators” indicating where the captured girls are being held, Mahmud Ziyad and his team face incredible odds. After the rescued girls return to the Yazidi Home Center, we witness their palpable relief and learn of the horrific treatment they’ve been forced to endure. Sabaya is a harrowing story of both the best and worst of humanity, told from a place, and by a people, who are too often just words in headlines across the world. It also testifies to the power of documentaries and to the courage of filmmakers, who put their lives on the line to tell stories the world needs to hear.
Also, Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies, returns to recommend German author Anna Seghers’s Transit, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, about a refugee attempting to leave Vichy France in 1944 through the port of Marseilles. Katie also recommends German director Christian Petzold’s 2018 film adaptation of the same name, which is set in contemporary France.
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Katie Kitamura to discuss her latest novel, Intimacies, an existential thriller that follows an unnamed narrator who has recently moved to The Hague to serve as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Worldly, well-travelled, and multilingual, she excels at her new job, but grows increasingly uneasy. A similar sense of discomfort permeates her close relationships with an art curator, and with her love interest, a married man. Yet it is the Court, where she is interpreting for a former President of a West African nation who has ordered the carrying out of unbelievable atrocities, that gives rise to her strongest anxieties and to her questions about power, confrontations with violence, and the possibility of neutrality.
Also Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, returns to recommend Anne Michaels’ award-winning 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Rivka Galchen, whose new novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, is set in the Holy Roman Empire in 17th-century Germany, amid the plague and the Thirty Years’ War. It fictionalizes the real-life story of Katharina Kepler, the mother of astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler. Katharina, an elderly widow who seems to care most for her cow Chamomile, is accused of being a witch by another woman in the small town of Leonberg. Soon everyone in town is testifying to Katharina’s wickedness. Her own side of the story is told by her neighbor, Simon, who acts as her guardian — but as a bookseller later tells him, “People don’t like an old lady’s story.” The novel is told through both fictional testimonials as well as actual translated historical documents.
Also, Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl, returns to recommend Raven Leilani’s acclaimed first novel, Luster.
Boris Dralyuk and Medaya Ocher are joined by author Claire Fuller to discuss her new novel, Unsettled Ground, this season’s selection for the LARB Book Club. Born in Oxfordshire, Claire Fuller is the author of four novels: her Desmond Elliot Prize-winning debut Our Endless Numbered Days, as well as Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, and her latest, the griping, intensely evocative, and often unsettling Unsettled Ground, a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The book begins with the death of a woman, which sets her 51-year-old twin children on a difficult journey of survival and discovery.
Also, Kate Zambreno, author of To Write As If Already Dead, returns to recommend Bhanu Kapil's book of poetry How to Wash a Heart.