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?

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.

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 Atlantic, The Nation, NY 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.