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LARB Radio Hour

The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.
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Now displaying: 2023
Jul 7, 2023

Eric Newman is joined by scholar and critic Juana María Rodríguez to discuss her latest book, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex. Moving between stories gleaned from archives, interviews, and Rodríguez's personal experience, Puta Life explores the proliferating and often incongruous meanings of the term "puta" as it circulates in Latinx identity and culture as a signifier of power and powerlessness, rebellion and revulsion, exaltation and degradation. In accounting for how the figure of the puta is socially produced through the regimes of race, gender, class, and the state, Rodríguez's moving stories of those living, struggling, and thriving on the margins ask us to reckon with the past, present, and future of sex work. 
Also, Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, returns to recommend Alison Bechdel's collection The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Jun 30, 2023

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak to Rachel Nuwer about her recent book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. They discuss the drug's emergence in the Bay Area during the 1960s when pioneers hailed it as a groundbreaking mental health therapy for treating everything from addiction to trauma before the US government classified it as a dangerous Schedule I drug. Eric, Medaya, and Rachel also discuss MDMA's surge in popularity as a party drug during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as inclusion in new clinical trials currently underway to research its effectiveness in treating severe cases of PTSD. Across her account of MDMA's past, present, and future, Nuwer's accessible journalistic account informs and challenges what we know about how the drug works and how the government, researchers, and underground renegades have shaped the scientific and cultural discourse that surrounds it.

Also, Kristin Ross, the author of The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life returns to recommend a range of works that capture and comment on everyday life: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidaya Hartman, the writing of Mike Davis and Fredric Jamison on Los Angeles, the noir novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald set in Sothern California, the detective novels (and even-darker fictions) of George Simenon, and the historical novels of Janet Lewis, including The Wife of Martin Guerre.

Jun 23, 2023

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross's writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Frederic Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.
Plus, artist Martine Syms, whose new exhibition Loser Back Home is currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles, returns to recommend Steffani Jemison's novel A Rock, A River, A Street.

Jun 16, 2023

Kate Wolf is joined by the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Martine Syms to discuss her new exhibition Loser Back Home, currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles. Sym's work in the show encompasses video, sculpture, painting, photography, installation, publishing, and clothes. It merges recognizable brand names with personal ephemera to create a form of self-portraiture and explores the slippery nature of self as distilled through technology, as well as a state of "dysplacement"—a term coined by the historian Barbara Fields to describe the loss of a shared sense of connection to one’s familiar or home country. Last fall, Syms also released her first narrative feature film, The African Desperate, which she co-wrote and directed. The African Desperate (now streaming on MUBI) takes place over the course of 24-hours in the life of an artist named Palace on the day she receives her Masters of Fine Arts degree at a small college in upstate New York, combining formal innovation with humor, pathos, and astute social commentary.
Also, Craig Seligman, author of Who Does That Bitch Think She is?, returns to recommend Liz Brown's Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire .

Jun 9, 2023

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with writer Craig Seligman about his recent book, Who Does That Bitch Think She is? Doris Fish and The Rise of Drag. The book follows the story of the groundbreaking drag queen, performer, and artist Doris Fish, who was born in Australia in the early 1950s as Philip Mills. Seligman initially wrote about Fish in the 1980s after they met through his boyfriend in San Francisco. He builds on his past interviews to recount Fish’s life, from her early days in Sydney when she was a member of the outre drag group Silvia and the Synthetics, to her time living in San Francisco, where she moved in the late 1970s. She formed the group Sluts A-Go-Go there, and went on to become one of the city’s most celebrated performers, writing and starring in the cult film Vegas in Space, and staging increasingly avant-garde and political performances until her death from AIDS in 1991. In addition to Fish’s story, Seligman looks at larger attitudes toward drag, both within the queer community and outside of it, elucidating the way drag has seeped into popular culture and why it still remains a radical act today.
Also, Joanna Biggs, author of A Life of One's Own, returns to recommend Still Born, a novel by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey.

Jun 2, 2023

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by editor and writer Joanna Biggs, whose new book is called A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Joanna is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, the Financial Times and the Guardian. In her new book, Joanna is attempting to recalibrate her life after a divorce. She turns to literature and specifially, to nine different women writers and philosophers, ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft to Sylvia Plath to Toni Morrison to Elena Ferrante. In exploring their lives and their work, Joanna finds radical ways to live and rebuild, inspired by these women who forged their own paths outside of domestic and societal expectations. With the help of their writing and their example, Joanna slowly starts to find a new sense of self. She writes “I was alone in many ways, but in my reading I had company for the big questions.”
Also, Gary Indiana, author of Do Everything in the Dark, returns to recommend The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic.

May 26, 2023

Kate Wolf is joined by author, critic, and artist Gary Indiana to speak about the recent reissue of his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark. Told on the heels of the aftershock of AIDS and the coming catastrophe of 9/11, alongside an ever-increasing globalization, Do Everything in the Dark centers on a group of friends, who, as Indiana writes in a new introduction, are “experiencing crises in their personal or professional lives, having committed themselves to relationships and careers that, however bright and promising for years, were suddenly not working out.” The characters are artists, actors, filmmakers, and writers like the auto-fictive narrator of the novel, Gary Indiana. In New York City, over the summer of 2001, the narrator becomes both axis point and witness to the various breakdowns his friends undergo: he receives their missives from far-flung locations across the world, their late night phone calls, and follows their private moments from an omniscient point of view. Through it all, he questions his ability to help them or change the course of their lives—if life at this late point in history is even livable— while offering his friendship all the same.

Also, Tom Comitta, author of The Nature Book, returns to recommend the complete oeuvre of Percival Everett.

May 19, 2023

Writer and veteran book critic Christian Lorentzen and Pantheon publisher and editor Lisa Lucas join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about recent shake-ups in the publishing industry. The guests discuss the closure of Bookforum and a spate of other small magazines and websites, changes to social media, the DOJ's decision to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster, and their hope despite the difficulties. Are we at an inflection point for American publishing? Can the industry adapt to these challenges before it's too late?

May 12, 2023

A look at our sometimes uncomfortable relationship to television.
In the first half of the show, Eric Newman is joined by Hunter Hargraves to talk about his new book, Uncomfortable Television. Hargraves argues that since the dawn of the new millennium, American television has kept audiences glued to the screens with intensely plotted and character-driven dramas that borrow from the epic aesthetics of cinema as well as reality programming. At the same time, this type of TV shellacks us with disturbing images and themes: graphic sex, addiction, misogyny and racialized violence, despicable antiheroes, and the exploitative world of ordinary people sharing their profound pain for a national audience of millions. What's unique about this programming is that it encourages us to find pleasure in being disturbed, training us to survive an increasingly precarious world that it also asks us to surrender to.
Next Newman and Kate Wolf speak with LARB's TV editor Phillip Maciak about his new book, Avidly Reads: Screentime. Part cultural criticism, part personal essay, Screentime explores how fears over kids spending too much time playing video games and watching TV in the 1990s has morphed in the current proliferation of ubiquitous screens that capture—and demand—our attention seemingly everywhere. Screentime looks at how what once was a threat has now become a metric tracked in every moment of our lives.

May 5, 2023

Today we’re speaking with writer and critic Claire Dederer, the author of Love and Trouble, as well as the memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. She is a long-time contributor to the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in the AtlanticThe NationNY Magazine as well as many others. Her new book is called Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. The book is a personal and critical investigation of how to deal with the art of difficult, or monstrous people. She first started thinking about this question while working on a book about Roman Polanski. Dederer dives into the knotty moral issues around art and the often flawed people who make it. She considers how an artist’s behavior might stain and affect the way an audience approaches a work. Dederer explores and asks questions about people like Woody Allen, JK Rowling, Picasso, and Nabokov. How do we deal with the monsters among us, especially when they’ve created something we love?
Also, Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, drops by to recommend works by two Norwegian writers, Love by Hanne Orstavik and Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Oyehaug.

Apr 28, 2023

Kate Wolf is joined by the Turner prize-winning artist Helen Cammock to discuss her new book, and current exhibition at Art and Practice in Los Angeles, I Will Keep My Soul. Both are drawn from Cammock’s time in New Orleans—which she began to visit early last year—and address the city’s social history, geography, and community. Her book brings together poetry, film stills, photography, collage, and a number of archival documents from the Amistad Research Center. One of the focuses of Cammock’s research is the artist Elizabeth Cattlet, an active member of the Civils Rights Movement who taught in New Orleans early in her career in the 1940s before leaving the US for Mexico. Decades later, she received a commission to create a sculpture of Louis Armstrong in Congo Square, a historical meeting place for enslaved people in the city. Cattlet’s words and work are woven throughout the book, and evoke the rich accumulations of history that are ever present, and constantly presenting themselves, within a contemporary encounter of place.
Also, Colm Toibin, author of A Guest at the Feast, returns to recommend Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.

Apr 21, 2023

A LARB Radio Hour doubleheader featuring two innovative approaches to addressing nature in, and with, art. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf speaks with LARB-contributor Tom Comitta about their first novel The Nature Book, “a literary supercut” that collects and collages descriptions of the natural world from 300 works of fiction by authors spanning Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte to Toni Morrison and William Gibson. The Nature Book is a narrative encompassing the changing of the seasons and the sweeping movement from islands to jungles and grasslands to outerspace, while also serving as an archive of the way nature has appeared in novels since the form was invented to the present day. Then, in the second half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the scholar Suzaan Boettger to discuss Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, the first biography of the great American artist best known for his breathtaking work of land art The Spiral Jetty. Exploring the autodidact's interest in religion, psychology, sexuality, temporality, and our shifting relationship to the environment, Inside the Spiral offers an account of Smithson as a multi-hyphenate thinker and artist whose work has had an enduring impact on contemporary art and the existential questions of place, space, and relation we wrestle with today.

Apr 14, 2023

Colm Tóibín joins Eric Newman and Kate Wolf to speak about his latest book, a collection of essays, A Guest at the Feast. The book brings together an inspiring range of pieces that Tóibín has published over the last three decades, from his visceral, forthright, and very funny essay on his cancer diagnosis and treatment, to the stirring title essay of the collection, which is an episodic remembrance of his youth in the small town of Enniscorthy in Ireland. The collection also features Tóibín's political commentary, with pieces that draw on his days as a reporter and magazine editor—including coverage of the 1983 Supreme Court case against homosexuality in Ireland and his appraisals of three popes—as well as his masterful literary criticism in considerations of the authors Marilyn Robinson, Francis Stuart, and John McGahern.
Also, Jenny Liou, author of Muscle Memory, returns to recommend Koon Woon's collection of poetry Water Chasing Water.

Apr 7, 2023

On this special LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Editor-In-Chief Michelle Chihara talks to Poet Jenny Liou about her debut book Muscle Memory, Liou’s vulnerable intense series of autobiographical poems about Chinese American ancestry, family, and about Jenny’s time as a Mixed Martial Arts cage fighter.

Jenny practiced martial arts as a kid, ran track in college, and then started training at a jiu jitsu gym during her time in graduate school. Eventually, that led to a career as a professional fighter for a variety of outfits, including Invicta, the pioneering women’s fighting organization that was a pipeline to the UFC. She has an undergrad degree in biology and graduate degrees in English and writing, and she now teaches at a college in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives with her two small kids. Muscle Memory draws on all of her complicated paths through different forms of competition and different kinds of loyalties. Michelle and Jenny talk across the different disciplines of writing and fighting, about how it feels to be in the cage, about who we fight and why and how. We use the word “identity” a lot these days, but Jenny’s poems and this conversation delve into all of the contradictory and complex currents that truly drive us.

Also, McKenzie Wark, author of Raving, returns to recommend Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili.

Mar 31, 2023

Kate Wolf speaks with the writer and scholar McKenzie Wark about her latest book, Raving. Raving beckons readers onto the dance floors of underground parties in New York, combining Wark’s own vivid experience of these spaces with her theories of the rave itself. Wark considers the rave’s potential for a break in linear time, and its offering of a different mode of self-embodiment or self-abandon; its condition as a communion place for a variety of queer and trans bodies; its array of substances; and of course, its techno soundtrack. In the book’s six essays Wark moves seamlessly from autofiction to reportage to cultural critique, and invites the voices of other ravers along for the ride.
Also, Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, returns once again to recommend Antony Loewenstein's The Palestine Laboratory.

Mar 24, 2023

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the renowned Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza about her first book written in English, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. The book begins with Rivera Garza's experience of searching for the police record of her sister Liliana’ murder, which took place in Mexico City in 1990 at the hands of an ex-boyfriend when Liliana was 20 years old. But the maze of bureaucracy and indifference she encounters leads her to another kind of record, that of Liliana’s own writing. A mischievous, funny, and exceedingly bright young woman, Lilliana wrote frequently in journals and letters, and through them, as well as through the recollections of her many friends, Rivera Garza reclaims her sister’s memory. A testament to familial love and the indelible nature of loss, the book also considers the epidemic of femicides in Mexico and the importance of the language and the activism that has emerged around such violence in the three decades since Liliana’s death.
Also, Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, returns to recommend Ma Bo'le's Second Life by Xiao Hong.

Mar 17, 2023

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.

Mar 10, 2023

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.

Mar 3, 2023

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.

Feb 24, 2023

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.

Feb 17, 2023

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.

Feb 10, 2023

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.

Feb 3, 2023

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.

Jan 27, 2023

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.

Jan 20, 2023

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.

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