Writer, musician, and critic Sasha Frere-Jones joins Kate Wolf to discuss his first book, Earlier. A non-chronological memoir, Earlier collects fragments of Frere-Jones's life: intimate recollections, minor triumphs, path-defining moments, failures, loves, losses, and all stations in-between. An artist formation story that is too humble to declare itself as such, the book enacts the simultaneity of memory, smashing the late 1960s, when Frere-Jones is born, against the 1990s, when he arrives back...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by award-winning director Nicole Newnham to discuss her latest film, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The documentary explores the life and work of Shere Hite, a sexological researcher whose 1976 book The Hite Report on Female Sexuality brought the private reality of women's sexual experience into mainstream consciousness and became one of the bestselling books of all time. But the male cultural anxiety sparked by the book's findings generated a powerful b...
Nov 17, 2023•46 min
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor, Dan Sinykin. His new book is called Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry, which chronicles the many changes publishing has undergone in the past 50 years, starting in 1965 when Random House was bought by an electronics company. Since then we’ve seen the radical conglomoration of publishing, as small independent houses were bought up by multinational companies, slowly forming the Big Five. Dan writes about...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with author Justin Torres about his latest novel, Blackouts. As they discuss the novel's layered revelation of both the characters' lives and the real queer history into which they are imaginatively woven, the conversation explores queerness as a literary identity, history as a particular site of queer desire, and how we tell the stories that make us intelligible to ourselves and others. Also, Anna Biller, author of Bluebeard's Castle, returns to recommend Wide...
Nov 03, 2023•47 min
A LARB Radio Hour double-header Halloween horror special. In the first half, Kate Wolf is joined by the poet Dorothea Lasky to discuss her most recent poetry collection, The Shining. The book is an ekphrastic ode to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, based on the novel by Stephen King. Its poems remix and reimagine the haunted spaces and uncanny elements of King and Kubrick’s story in a uniquely personal register, and from a feminist perspective, touching on violence, time, identity, isolation, and...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 7 min
LARB Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara and Executive Director Irene Yoon speak with author Lydia Kiesling about her novel Mobility, this fall’s LARB Book Club selection. The inaugural book from Crooked Media Reads, Mobility begins in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, following the main character, Bunny, from childhood into her ultimate career transition to Big Oil. The novel is timely and urgent, a macro and micro study of climate change’s destructive impact on the Earth and our individual lives, and evoke...
Oct 20, 2023•43 min
Kate Wolf speaks to author and translator Lydia Davis about her latest collection of stories, Our Strangers. The book, which is notably not available for sale on Amazon, includes well over 100 stories, with many measuring at just a few lines. The stories take a variety forms: sketches of interactions from daily life, letters of complaint, recorded anecdotes, sequential interludes, grammatical inquires, meditations on passing thoughts and fantasies, as well as more sustained looks at life in a sm...
Oct 13, 2023•59 min
Journalist and author Mary Gabriel joins Eric and Medaya to talk about her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life. The massive, richly researched biography follows every detail of the superstar’s life: her Michigan roots, her debut amid New York’s heady underground scene, her film career, her London era, finally catching up with Madge in 2020. The book is also a history of the culture that shaped her, and which she shaped in her wake. Mary discusses writing the book, as well as Madonna’s breakthroug...
Oct 06, 2023•54 min
In the first half of the show, Medaya Ocher speaks with Hilary Leichter about her novel Terrace Story. It follows a young family who live in cramped quarters in a big city, surviving but financially strapped. One day, a woman named Stephanie comes over and when she opens the closet door they discover a magic terrace, which immediately disappears once Stephanie leaves, and only appears again when she returns. Suddenly, the family's tight, mediumrestricted lives take a turn for the magical—and the...
Sep 29, 2023•59 min
Ross Gay joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about his latest, book, THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS, a second installment of THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, published before Ross, us, and the world were plunged into the COVID19 pandemic. Like it's predecessor THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS features a collection of short essays that bring into focus the small wonders we so often overlook in our busy lives. Among them are the wonders of a neighbor's fruit tree, a discovery of self-maturation in an imprompt...
Sep 22, 2023•51 min
