Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Traci Thomas, host of the "The Stacks” podcast. They discuss the impact of social media on publishing, the content creator life, and the way readers discover books today. At the end of the episode, Medaya, Eric, and Traci offer readers a rundown of recommendations for the books getting us through 2025.
For Independence Day, we dive into the archives to bring you an episode that still feels timely. Ruth Wilson Gilmore joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to talk about her collection, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation , which covers three decades of her thinking about abolition, activism, scholarship, the carceral system, the political economy of racism, and much more. For Gilmore, these are not siloed issues; rather, they are braided effects of an unjust political, economic, and cultural...
Susan Choi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new novel, Flashlight. An epic story that spans multiple generations of a single family, the book is an astute exploration of identity, migration, memory, kinship and the irrepressibility of the past. It begins in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of a young academic named Serk. An ethnic Korean, who was raised in Japan and decided to continue his studies there when his family returned to Korea after WWII, Serk later moves to ...
In this double episode celebrating pride month, Kate Wolf speaks with the critic Vince Aletti about his new book, Physique , an assortment of hundreds of physique photos from Aletti’s own personal collection. The images in the book represent a time when homosexual life in the US was illegal, existed mostly underground, and was by necessity furtive and coded. Yet throughout the country there were photo studios producing erotic and often very beautiful photographs of barely clothed men, and distri...
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Alison Bechdel about her new graphic novel, Spent. Bechdel is the author of "Essential Dykes to Watch Out For," "Fun Home," and "Are You My Mother?" Spent fictionalizes Bechdel’s life with her wife Holly on their pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont. The comic chronicles political and local dramas, generational shifts, experiments with polyamory, and navigating the relationship between success and art. In conversation, Alison shares her struggles with fame, suc...
In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman wrestle with the question: What are we to do about shame? Using Frédéric Gros’s recent book, A Philosophy of Shame , as a guidepost, they discuss shame’s place in culture, politics, and our personal lives. Are there social benefits to feeling shame? And what are the repercussions of trying to avoid it? The hosts debate the possibility of a post-shame society and share personal stories about what they feel most ashamed of....
Dan Nadel joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his new biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life . The book traces the life and art of Robert Crumb, arguably the most influential cartoonist of the last half century. Crumb emerged from the world of underground comics that he helped create in the late 1960s to both mainstream fame and commercial success. But he was a reticent celebrity who often felt at odds with the hippie culture that he became so identified with. Nadel sifts through the a...
Eric Newman speaks with journalist and author Vauhini Vara about her new book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. The book hybrid blend of memoir and modern tech history explore how the internet, AI, and the corporate tech giants behind them have shaped the way we see ourselves and connect with others. Through Vara’s personal anecdotes and digital history deep dives—including a nostalgic look at AOL chat rooms, a rundown of her Google search history and prolific Amazon product reviews, and he...
Eric Newman speaks with Jon Hickey about his debut novel Big Chief . The book is a gripping political thriller about the struggle for power, belonging, and destiny set against a tribal election campaign on a fictional reservation. It follows the story of Mitch Caddo and his childhood friend Max Beck, who is seeking reelection as the tribal president of the Passage Rouge Nation. As Max’s reelection turns ruthless and agitated protesters turn out in force, Mitch is caught between loyalty, love, an...
Medaya Ocher is joined by TV writer, memoirist and librettist Sarah Labrie, author of the book No One Gets to Fall Apart. The book is a memoir of LaBrie’s fraught relationship with her mother, who suffers a psychotic break in 2017 and is found on the side of a freeway, convinced that she is being followed by FBI agents. LaBrie is then forced to confront the difficulties and mysteries of her childhood, the way her family dealt with mental illness, and the many questions we all face around fate an...
Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Sarah Schulman about her latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity . With a focus on practical politics, Schulman explores both how we imagine solidarity and what the work of solidarity requires. Rather than a horizontal movement, the book focuses on the ways achieving today's most pressing political goals—from Palestine's self-determination to immigration reform and protecting LBGTQ rights—requires working across various levels of individual privi...
Maggie Nelson joins Kate Wolf to discuss her new book Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth. It is at once a compressed record of her long struggle with chronic pain and a document of the boundless blur of the pandemic era. It combines vignettes of daily life and doctor’s visits with dreams and memories, pushing at the partition between interior and exterior, symptom and experience, containment and surrender. Nelson depicts the mysteries of pain and the vulnerability of the human body with both h...
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with writer Katie Kitamura about her recent novel, "Audition," which explores a tense, complex relationship between a middle-aged actress and a young man who may or may not be her son. The book raises questions about the roles we play, the stories we inhabit, and the many choices we make. “Audition” is LARB’s Book Club pick this month. Join in on the conversation at https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/larb-book-club-discussion-audition-by-katie-kitamura/...
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Andrea Long Chu about Authority a collection of previously published and new essays and criticism. Authority interrogates what it means to be a critic today, analyzing the work that the critic does in interpreting a book, film, or TV show for us as well as how the status of the critic has developed from antiquity to the present. Andrea, Medaya, and Eric talk about finding one's voice as a critic, how the critic approaches an object of analysis, and the inc...
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Lynne Tillman about her latest book, Thrilled to Death , a collection of short stories selected from over four decades of her work. The stories in Thrilled to Death attest to Tillman’s range as a writer and stylist, showcasing her frenetic humor, deep psychological insight, and her innovation of the form. Ever playful and perverse, these stories cover terrains of urban existence, romantic obsession, familial entanglement, the interplay between culture—particul...
The writer Pankaj Mishra joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his new book, The World After Gaza: A History. It probes how the legacy of the Holocaust has shaped the contemporary world order, including how it has shaped the government of Israel, and the current war in Gaza. The book grapples with how, within the relentless violence of the 20th century, trauma can lead to nationalism, and also how one genocide can lead to another.
Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History , which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins's book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" reckon–or fail to reckon–with atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or norma...
Eric Newman speaks with Torrey Peters about her new story collection, Stag Dance , which spans genre, time, and place to explore the shifting sands of gender, sex, desire, and identity. From a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is trans to a pirate logging camp in the early 1900s where desire and gender explode in surprising ways, the stories in Stag Dance plumb the murky and often ugly feelings that contradict the “good politics” narrative of the transgender experience. Eric and Torrey di...
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to writer Haley Mlotek about No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce and Romance. The book blends the history of divorce law and custom in North America over the last century with cultural criticism on the way divorce has been portrayed in literature, film, and online. Mlotek also records her own experience of ending a marriage, and the front row seat she had growing up to the dissolution of many other unions through her mother’s work as a divorce mediator. At a time when ...
In this special episode, host Eric Newman joins LARB senior editor Paul Thompson and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a look at this year’s Oscar nominees ahead of this weekend’s award ceremony. Surveying this rather strange year in film, the gang discusses the gory camp of The Substance, the omnipresence of Wicked, the multi-genre madness of Emilia Pérez, and much more.
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the art critic and historian Hal Foster to speak about his latest book, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics . A collection of essays that brings together over three decades of Foster’s work, the book exhibits a rigorous philosophical and political engagement with a celebrated group of critics and artists who span the 1960s to the present. Foster digs deep into the work of Pop masters, Minimalists, and the Pictures Generation, as well as conte...
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker ’s Fiction podcast. Deborah is the editor of a new anthology of short stories, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925-2025 , which features some of the incredible writers that The New Yorker has published over the past 100 years. There are stories by J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Gaitskill, Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith...
Eric Newman speaks with Colette Shade about her book “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything.” Revisiting the strange hallmarks of that era–remember inflatable furniture and phones without touch screens?–Colette’s essays explore the social and political antecedents that formed the fashion, culture, and style of the millennial turn. With a sharp eye to the neoliberal forces that shaped the tech-fueled utopianism of the era and its aftermath, Colette’s writing brings into focus the promises of Y2K a...
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and poet Aria Aber to discuss her first novel, Good Girl. Aber is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker , New Republic , The Yale Review , Granta , and elsewhere. Good Girl follows 19-year old Nila, who’s trying to make sense of her family’s history in Afghanistan and their expectations for her own life in Germany. Nila attends uni...
In this week’s episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributor Gideon Jacobs for a discussion about the power of images in the era of Trump. Recorded in the hours after Trump's inauguration, Gideon and the hosts talk about how Trump and his associates use images and spectacle, the flattening and coarsening of our politics, and the possibilities for counter-imaging in dark times. You can read Gideon's essay, “Trump L’Oeil,” here at the Los Angeles Review of Books....
In this week’s episode, we are talking about the wildfires that have ravaged L.A. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to author David L. Ulin about Los Angeles as a place forged in precarity and grit, as well as some of the local literature of disaster, and what it means to accept the city as somewhere catastrophe can strike in an instant. Next they speak with Adrian Scott Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, about some of the historic structures that have been lost in the fire, historic...
In light of the recent fires in Los Angeles, we're re-airing an episode featuring a panel discussion titled "Writing Climate Futures" with David Wallace-Wells, Jenny Offill, Bharat Venkat, and Jonathan Blake. They discuss the role and efficacy of environmental writing, education, and the public discourse around climate change. The panel was hosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books in partnership with the Berggruen Institute.
In this encore special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the case for and against giving up—on life, vices, dreams, creative pursuits, jobs, relationships, exercise, and work. Their conversation is inspired by Adam Phillips’s recent book On Giving Up, in which the psychoanalyst observes that “we give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” The hosts discuss what is acceptable to give up, their own fears of failure, both fiction...
In our last episode of the year, Kate Wolf speaks with the poet, playwright, and performance artist Ariana Reines about her latest book, Wave of Blood. A hybrid text that includes poems, diary entries in verse, and various forms of public address, Wave of Blood spans the six month period between October 2023, after the outbreak of war in Gaza, and April 2024. In it, Reines wrestles with the genocide and what she calls “the mind of war,” as well her own ancestry as the descendant of Holocaust sur...
It’s time for our favorite episode of the year. Hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss their favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, scandals and (new category!) memories of 2024. For a full list of picks, visit lareviewofbooks.org/podcasts/larb-radio-hour/
