On this week's show we're joined by two authors, Kate Zambreno and Susan Bernofsky, who have both written a magisterial work about a past literary master.

First, Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf talk with Kate Zambreno about To Write as if Already Dead, a study of the writing and photography of Herve Guibert (1955-1991); and, in particular, his work To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which documents Guibert's diagnosis and disintegration from HIV, and portrays a character based upon his close friend, philosopher Michel Foucault.

Then, Kate is joined by Susan Bernofsky to discuss Clairvoyant of the Small, her biography of Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956), one of the most influential modernist writers in the German language.  Susan’s biography portrays Walser not just as the eccentric outsider figure he’s often made out to be, but as a fully formed artist, with serious creative aspirations, proliferate charms, and many complications. Clairvoyant of the Small offers a nuanced picture of his turbulent life—much of its drama stemming from financial precarity, family legacy, and the sweeping pendulums of early twentieth century European history—as it also illuminates the complexity and beauty of his writing.

Author Joan Silber, whose previous work Improvement won both the National Book Critic’s Circle Aware and the Pen Faulkner Award, joins Eric and Kate to discuss her new novel Secrets of Happiness, a multi-vocal story that radiates out from a single family dealing with a father's intimate betrayal.  He has a secret family that he told nobody about.  As it moves across characters and continents, Secrets of Happiness considers the weight of love, family, and other attachments in a world where nothing is as it seems, and happiness is a fleeting experience best savored in the presence.

Also, Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993, returns to recommend Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir as well as Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones.

Professor Carol Anderson, whose previous work White Rage won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, joins Eric and Kate to discuss her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.  The Second takes a long historical look at the emergence and development of the second amendment—"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"—against the backdrop of anti-Black violence, fear, and public policy. Professor Anderson reveals the various ways in which slavery—and, in particular, white slaveowners' fears of slave insurrection—shaped the Second amendment from the very beginning, with long-reaching effects that we continue to face today, a year after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. America's most infamous constitutional amendment was not about guns, but about the racial divides through which a white man wielding a gun receives Constitutionally-lauded legal protections, while in the hands of a Black man in America, a firearm can so often be a death sentence.

Also, Jacqueline Rose, author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women, returns to recommend both Anna Burns' The Milkman, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, as well as Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. 

Filmmaker Matthew Heineman joins Eric to talk about his latest documentary, THE BOY FROM MEDELLIN, which centers on reggeton superstar J Balvin (the voice and creative force behind such massive hits as MI GENTE, I LIKE IT,, AGUA, and countless other songs). Heineman's camera turns its gaze on Balvin as the pop star returns to his home city of Medellin for the last stop on his world tour. That homecoming takes a dramatic turn as the country is plunged into anti-government protests led by Colombian youth. Heineman shares what it was like to capture a superstar caught between the desire to entertain and the demands of fans on social media that he speak to the political crisis of his homeland; to witness a brilliantly talented performer with his reputation and tour all on the line. 

Also, Claire Phillips, author of A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia drops by to talk with Kate and recommend Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Medical Science by Ronald Chase.

Writer Sarah Schulman joins Kate and Eric to discuss her new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-1993. A longtime activist, Sarah was a participant in the history she writes about. Back in 1987 Sarah joined The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, known as ACT UP, in New York City.  Let the Record Show is a focused, exceedingly thorough look at ACT UP’s organizational tactics, its diverse range of members and intersecting causes, and its profound impact in fighting for access to treatment and more national attention for people with AIDS at a time when the US government was barely addressing the crisis. The book builds on over 200 oral histories Sarah and her collaborator and fellow ACT-Upper Jim Hubbard conducted with former members. In an ecstatic review, the New York Times wrote that "it’s not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician’s bible."

Also, Helen Oyeyemi, author of Peaces, returns to recommend James Robertson's To Be Continued, or, Conversations with a Toad.

Kate and Medaya are joined by feminist critic Jacqueline Rose to discuss her new book On Violence  and On Violence Against Women.  Jacqueline's addresses the prevalence and persistence of violence through the analytical lenses of feminism, history, psychoanalysis, politics, and literature. Jacqueline argues that violence in our times thrives on a form of mental blindness; and elucidates its relationship to the rise of politicians like Bolsonaro and Trump as well as broader society's complicity in these horrors.

Also, Larissa Pham, author of the collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy, returns to recommend Annie Ernaux's A Girl's Story (2016), which was released last year in translation.

Brooklyn-based artist and writer Larissa Pham joins Medaya and Eric to discuss her debut collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy. Larissa contributed to the collection KINK (previously covered here), with a piece that deals with themes of violence and desire, which are equally reflected in the new collection - and which Larissa addresses throughout the conversation. The entries in Pop Song shift between memoir and an acute attunement to various art objects and experiences in the present, POP SONG explores what it means to want a life and to strive for it: to navigate relationships, to build and rebuild a self, and to appreciate and even desperately rely upon the encounters with art that give such a life meaning. 
Also, Nick Pinkerton, author of Goodbye to Dragon Inn, returns to recommend The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

Eric and Daya speak with the acclaimed short story writer and novelist Helen Oyeyemi. Born in Nigeria, Oyeyemi grew up in England, and her first novel, the Icarus Girl was published while she was still in high school. Her other work includes the short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, along with five other novels, including Mr. Fox, Gingerbread and Boy, Snow, Bird. In 2013, she was named one of Granta‘s Best Young British Novelists. 

She joins us today to talk about her latest novel called Peaces, published this past month. Peaces is about two young lovers, Otto and Xavier Shin, who board an unusual train to celebrate their unofficial honeymoon. Accompanied by their pet mongoose, the two begin to explore the cars and the meet the three other passengers on board. The book can be described as a madcap existential mystery at the center of which is a question about how we see other people and what it means to be seen or not seen.

Rachel Kushner returns to recommend The Autobiography of Chuck Berry.

And there's also special bonus gushing over the recently completed season of Drag Race.

On a special LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Boris Dralyuk and Medaya Ocher are joined by George Saunders, author of four collections of virtuosic short stories and of the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. His latest work is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Examining individual works by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolai Gogol from a variety of angles, Saunders teases out lessons for writers and readers alike. During the conversation, he discusses what fiction can teach us about ourselves and each other, shares his experiences teaching these stories over the past two decades, and reflects on the role of humor in his work.

Kate Wolf is joined by writer and film critic Nick Pinkerton to discuss his book-length essay on Tsai Ming-liang’s film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which revolves around the final screening at a cinema in Taiwan — on the very day that 300 movie theaters were shuttered across Southern California. The book is both a eulogy and a call to arms for cinema. Kate and Nick share a defiant sadness, revel in memories of the power and meaning they found in a communal space of shared dreams, and wonder how it might be preserved amidst the tyranny of tiny screens and the banality of the bottom line.

Also, Sam Cohen, author of the collection of stories Sarahland, drops by to recommend Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

Kate and Medaya are joined by Rachel Kushner, author previously of Telex from Cuba and the Flamethrowers, both nominated for the National Book Award, and The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Award. Rachel's new book is a collection of her essays from the past two decades, The Hard Crowd, which exhibits the inspiring breadth of her interests and influences, many of which she discusses - from motorcycle racing, to prison abolition, the Anarcho-Marxist Italian left, rock impresario Bill Graham, the writing of Marguerite Duras, and the people and places of her rough-edged youth in San Francisco.

Also, Jackie Wang, author of The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, returns to recommend Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea by poet Alice Oswald

Kate and Medaya talk with poet, essayist, and critic Jackie Wang about her new collection of poetry The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void.  As an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School, Wang also works on race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.  In her poetry, she uses dreams to get to very concrete historical and social issues; along with the apocalypse, survival, intimacy, speech, silence and of course, sunflowers. Jackie discusses the relationship between her poetry and academic work; and her exploration of dreams, psychoanalysis, and the work of the imagination “the work of creating openings where there were previously none.”

Also, Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days, returns to recommend both Daniel Orozco's collection of stories Orientation; and also Amy Hempel's collection Sing To It.

Eric Newman is joined by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss her book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, which opens up with some very heavy science, explaining quarks, dark matter and other phenomena that point to the limits of our knowledge about the how the universe, and everything in it, functions. But at the heart of the book is a series of questions about how the social construction of science both foments a toxic culture and might help us to understand not only how to do science better, but how to do better science.

Also, Brian Dillon, author of Suppose a Sentence, returns to recommend Inventory of a Life Mislaid by Marina Warner.

Kate and Medaya speak with two heralded debut novelists. First up is Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind, about Dorothy, a failing adjunct professor in New York City, who suffers a miscarriage, and struggles to maintain her resilience in an unwelcoming world. Christine explains how the novel came to be and reflects on why Dorothy’s travails so successfully capture the texture of our time. Then Sara Davis joins Kate and Daya to talk about her novel The Scapegoat, which also centers around an academic in crisis. The narrator, N, disrupts his routine life to investigate the circumstances of his estranged father’s death, which is clouded in uncertainties of history, identity, and reality. Sara shares how she approached writing such a challenging and rewarding work.

Kate and Medaya welcome essayist Brian Dillon, author of Suppose a Sentence which offers sharp analysis (along with intriguing discursus) of 27 sentences, both celebrated and obscure, from the likes of William Shakespeare, James Baldwin, John Ruskin, and Joan Didion. Brian opens the show with a passage from his introduction, a paean to the work of the writers he loves and the expansive possibilities of a single line. The conversation focuses on the joys and perils of close reading and reverie.

Also, Claudio Lomnitz, author of Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation, returns to recommend On Kings by anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins - and relate its lessons to the reign of Donald Trump.

Kate Wolf talks with Claudio Lomnitz, author of Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation, which traces his family's history in the Jewish diaspora from the Eastern European region of Bessarabia to South America and onto Mexico. Claudio tells tales of his relatives, in particular, his maternal grandfather Misha Adler, a scholar and publisher involved in a number of revolutionary movements in the mid 20th century. He also relates his family's experiences to the struggles of marginalized peoples and migrants across the globe.

Also, Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts, returns to recommend Norman Rush's Mating, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of this revered novel.

Kate and Daya talk with Lauren Oyler, one of the country's leading literary critics, about her first novel, Fake Accounts; which is about a central character who breaks up with her boyfriend after discovering that he's an online conspiracy theorist. She then moves to Berlin where goes on a series of dates under different personas. The conversation addresses online culture and its influence on 21st century notions of subjectivity, secrecy, romance, and literature.

Also, Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, returns to recommend two books by David Quammen - the highly prescient Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic (published in 2012) and The Song of the Dodo.

A double dip, rife with romance, and right on time for a celebration of sex and love. First, Jeremy Atherton Lin joins Eric and Medaya to talk about his new book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, which covers both the history of Gay Bars and Jeremy's personal history in London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles - with a consideration of how these iconic social institutions have fared in the age of hook-up apps and a year-long pandemic. Then, Eric and Kate are joined by Brontez Purnell to discuss his new work of autofiction, 100 Boyfriends, and reflect on queer time.

This week it's a doubleheader. First, Eric and Medaya, speak with Taylor Renee Aldridge, the Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager at the California Afrcian-American Museum,  about a new exhibit Enunciated Life that centers around notions of surrender in Black Spiritual Life - inspired, in part, by the work of Ashon Crawley. Then, LARB contributor Patricia Mattew, Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, joins us to talk about her recent article on the new Netflix hit series Bridgerton, Shondaland's Regency.

Hosts Kate and Medaya are joined by New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, whose new book is called Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, in which Kolbert explores the many ways humans intervene in nature. Kolbert discusses invasive species, the sinking of New Orleans, the triage plan for climate change and how solar geoengineering might bleach our skies. 

Also, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans, returns to recommend Children of the Land by Marcello Hernandez Castillo.

In a special LARB Book Club edition of the Radio Hour, Eric Newman and Boris Dralyuk sit down with R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, co-editors of Kink, a new anthology that aims to push the boundaries of traditional literary representations of love, desire, and sexual behavior. Kink features work by Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and many other leading authors. Kwon and Greenwell speak of their goals for the anthology, the literary history of sex, and the politics in the background and at the heart of the book.

In this encore presentation, on the occasion of Fran Lebowitz's new show Pretend It's a City, Eric Newman, Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with legendary public speaker Fran Lebowitz. In a wide-ranging conversation, the gang flits from the Kavanaugh hearings to how the uber-rich have blighted the landscape of New York, from the escapism of literature (Lebowitz maintains that books are always better than real life) to the changes that have rocked the media environment in which Lebowitz has been a central figure for decades. In her iconic unvarnished style, Fran proves — as if there were ever any need for such a thing — that she’s still one of the most fascinating people to chat with about the lofty and mundane.
Also, Eric recommends classicist Madeline Miller's novel, The Song of Achilles, that brings to life the love affair between Patroclus and Homeric Greece's greatest warrior.

In an encore presentation, Kate and Medaya talk with award-winning screenwriter and novelist Charles Yu about his book, Interior Chinatown; an experimental, yet eminently enjoyable, novel-in-the-form-of-a-screenplay, which won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction. Charles discusses how he came to write such a formally challenging book, in which the central character's world is defined by, and limited to, the horizons available to Asian and Asian-American characters in popular film and television.
Also, J Hoberman, author of Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, returns to recommend Victor Serge's recently discovered Notebooks from 1936-47, in which the great communist writer lived in exile, from Paris to Mexico.

Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio joins co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about The Undocumented Americans, which is both a memoir and a series of essays about immigrant laborers from across the country.  Karla shares her own experiences as an immigrant child, the trauma it has caused her; and relates how widespread, and under-acknowledged, such trauma is among immigrants. In a free-flowing conversation, Karla reflects on what motivated her to write the book in the age of Trump, her love of the immigrant communities in Queens where she grew up (as did Medaya), how literary academia continues to fetishize mental illness, and much else.

Also, Alex Ross, author of Wagnerism, returns to recommend Rick Perlstein's Reaganland.