Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by writer Kathryn Davis, the acclaimed author of many novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, The Thin Place, Versailles, Duplex, and Silk Road, and a memoir, Aurelia Aurélia. Davis discusses her novel Versailles, originally published in 2002, recently reissued by Graywolf. Versailles is the story of Marie Antoinette, beginning when she’s a teenager traveling to France. The book is a lyrical meditation on personhood a...
Dec 13, 2024•47 min
Kate Wolf speaks to filmmaker Raoul Peck about his latest documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, out in theaters now. The film excavates the life and work of Ernest Cole, the South African photographer, using his own writing and a recently rediscovered archive of his photographs. Cole was one of the first people to capture the brutal realities of the apartheid regime on film. After escaping South Africa for the United States, he published his landmark book on apartheid, House of Bondage (1967...
Dec 06, 2024•45 min
Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by writer and artist Renee Gladman to discuss the re-release of “To After That (TOAF)” and her latest book, “My Lesbian Novel.” TOAF focuses on one of Gladman's abandoned manuscripts, working through its creation and revision in an attempt to parse what literary failure means. “My Lesbian Novel” completely reinvents and reimagines the lesbian romance. Gladman discusses form and its possibilities, as well as the artist's struggle to realize the vision of a ...
Nov 29, 2024•46 min
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the editorial director of the New York Review of Books and the founder of the NYRB classic series, Edwin Frank, to discuss his first work of nonfiction, the book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel. Taking the novel as the preeminent art form of the last century, Frank’s book charts its winding path of development, beginning with Fyodor Dostoevskey’s Notes from the Underground, published in 1864, and ending with W.G. Sebald’s Aust...
Nov 22, 2024•52 min
In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman are joined by writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster to talk about the role of psychoanalysis in politics. Their discussion emerges from Webster's essay, “Freudulence,” published in the latest issue LARB Quarterly Journal, which reassesses a controversial book co-authored by Sigmund Freud that gives a psychoanalytic reading of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, including his disastrous handling of the Treaty of Versailles. Takin...
Nov 19, 2024•48 min
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. He is the author of the award-winning collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, as well as the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. Toha recently published a series of essays about Gaza in the New Yorker and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His new book is Forest of Noise, a colle...
Nov 15, 2024•52 min
Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, and translator Forrest Gander to discuss his new book, Mojave Ghost. A long poem situated along the 800-mile length of the San Andreas Fault, which runs from Northern California where Gander lives to his birthplace in the Southern California Desert, the work reflects both exterior and interior landscapes with tender precision and heightened awareness. Gander moves through memory, grief, and fault lines— in the earth, ...
Nov 08, 2024•54 min
Kate Wolf speaks with filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing about their new documentary Union, which is out in theaters now. It follows, in real time, the forming of the first ever Amazon union in the country, the ALU, at the JKF8 plant in Staten Island. Later in the conversation Chris Smalls, the president of ALU, joins as well. Chris began to petition for the Amazon union after he was fired by the company in March of 2020 for walking off the job in protest of the lack of Covid safety precau...
Nov 01, 2024•54 min
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with writer and scholar Simon Critchley about his new book, Mysticism. Defining mysticism not as a religion but as a “tendency, a distillation of existing devotional practice,” the book begins by considering some of the great mystics of the Christian tradition. These include Critchley's favorite mystic, Julian of Norwich, known as the first woman to ever write a book in English, Margery Kempe, Christina the Astonishing, and Meister Echkhart, a German theologian w...
Oct 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Survival Is A Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. A deeply researched and impressionistic biography of one of the most iconic figures of 20th century Black, queer, and feminist thought, Survival Is A Promise is a love letter to Lorde, pushing past her broad circulation in social media memes, inspirational quotes, and other forms of contemporary iconography. Gumbs’ book locates the tectonic forces Lorde at once brought into vie...
Oct 18, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Kate Wolf speaks to the author Deborah Levy about her new book, a collection of essays called The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies. The piece collected here cite Levy’s early influences from French writers like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras to JG Ballard and Anna Quinn. The collection also moves through snippets of Levy’s life: her relationship to her mother, her youth in dreary London, her abiding interest in surrealism and psychoanalysis, the way inspiration strikes ...
Oct 11, 2024•48 min
In this special episode of the LARB Radio Hour and LARB Book Club, Medaya Ocher talks with Rumaan Alam about his new novel, Entitlement . We begin with the story of Brooke, a product of the upper middle class, who works for an aging billionaire looking for places to give away his fortune. Brooke comes to recognize all that she could do with a vast fortune of her own. Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story ...
Oct 04, 2024•56 min
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher talk to Emily Witt about her latest book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown. A personal history that reflects on this past turbulent decade, the book begins right before the election of Donald J. Trump, a time when Witt finds herself ever more drawn to Brooklyn’s underground techno music scene. Quitting Wellbutrin in 2012, she’d already started experimenting with psychedelics, but once she’s going out dancing all night, her drug use transforms from a focused ritual under ...
Sep 27, 2024•52 min
Eric Newman speaks with Garth Greenwell about his latest novel, Small Rain. The novel picks up the story of the same unnamed narrator from Greenwell's earlier novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, a poet and teacher now in his forties and settled down with his partner in the Midwest. Their placid life is upended when a sudden and excruciating pain sends the narrator to the hospital, where he's diagnosed with an aortic tear -- a life-threatening condition. Unfolding from this point, the nove...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Katherine Bucknell about her new biography of Christpoher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. The book moves along the horizons of Isherwood's many journeys as a pathbreaking British writer whose work excavated fascist terrors and queer pleasures alike: in plays, films, memoir, voluminous diaries, and celebrated novels such as Goodbye to Berlin and A Single Man. Bucknell's biography examines the tectonic forces of the 20th century that shaped Isherwo...
Sep 13, 2024•59 min
Kate Wolf talks to Danzy Senna about her latest novel, Colored Television. It follows a writer named Jane Gibson who’s finally making headway on her second book, a magnus opus her husband calls the “mulatto War and Peace” that’s been nearly a decade in the making. Jane’s helped along by her family’s stay in the tony, Eastside Los Angeles home of a friend of hers—a former fiction writer who long ago sold out to work in TV. Jane and her husband, Lenny, help themselves to this friend's wine and clo...
Sep 06, 2024•51 min
Sofia Samatar speaks with Kate Wolf about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Opacities is addressed to a fellow writer, Samatar’s close friend Kate Zambreno, and considers both the process of composing a book—the wellspring of inspiration, wishes and anxieties that accompany it— as well as the distance between a work and its author. Samatar explores how to stay alive as a writer through things such as community, extensive reading, and research alongside the dissonant ways w...
Aug 30, 2024•49 min
Charlotte Shane joins Kate Wolf to speak about her latest book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Detailing Shane’s many years as a sex worker, the book is also a candid examination of her own sexuality, as well as her deep fascination with the sex lives and interior worlds of men. Shane writes about the importance of her early “sexperimentation” with a group of close guy friends in high school; the nuances of her relationship to her father, her husband, and her clients—especially ...
Aug 23, 2024•1 hr
Eric Newman speaks with Eugene Lim about his novel Fog & Car. First published in 2008 and freshly brought back into print this year, the novel dilates on the experiences of a couple making a life on their own in the wake of their divorce, the novel explores loneliness, grief, and the struggles of human relation through rotating perspectives of each member of the former couple as well as the friend they share in common. Walking through the novel's key moments, the discussion also explores how...
Aug 16, 2024•45 min
On July 18th, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Berggruen Institute hosted a panel discussion titled "Writing Climate Futures," featuring David Wallace-Wells, Jenny Offill, Bharat Venkat, and Jonathan Blake. As our planet faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency by the day. Through education, envisioning fictitious new worlds, and pushing forward the public discourse, writing holds the power to move the conversation we have a...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Could feeling bad actually be good? In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman consider the uses of pessimism in our approach to contemporary politics. Digging into Joshua Foa Dienstag’s 2006 book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit they discuss this branch of philosophical thought: its core beliefs and practitioners, how it’s been misunderstood, and how we might use it to navigate the boomeranging emotions of our present political climate.
Aug 02, 2024•41 min
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Sarah Manguso about her new novel, Liars, which focuses on a marriage and its disintegration. Jane is a writer, and her husband John is an artist and entrepreneur. Even early on in their relationship, John gives Jane plenty of reason to doubt their future. By the time they have their first child, Jane is subsumed by the role of wife and mother, responsible for tackling the domestic work as well as the chaos of John’s finances and shifting career ambitions, and...
Jul 26, 2024•49 min
Editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about 20 years of the magazine n+1, as well as their new anthology The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. The book collects n+1 essays, short stories, and reviews from the last ten years, covering the rise of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, the George Floyd protests, #MeToo , and the Covid pandemic. The guests discuss the ins and outs of running a small magazine, the current media land...
Jul 19, 2024•51 min
Kate Wolf speaks with writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher about her debut novel, The Coin. An allegorical tale of alienation, loneliness, and repulsion, the book follows a Palestinian woman who’s recently fulfilled her family’s dream of moving to America. In New York, working as a middle school teacher, she finds herself disillusioned with the filth of the city and its poverty. She’s beset with a deep unease at her own body and haunted by memories, especially that of a coin—a shekel—she swallowed...
Jul 12, 2024•47 min
Eric Newman is joined by historian Nell Irvin Painter to discuss I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, a compendium of Painter's writing about art, politics, and race across nearly four decades. The wide-ranging discussion moves from how researching Sojourner Truth inspired Painter to get her MFA in visual art, to the struggle over what can be taught and known about American history, to the ways modern information technology impacts our experience of the present and its echoes in the past, and ...
Jul 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by New Yorker staff writer and former television critic Emily Nussbaum to discuss her book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. Nussbaum's overview of the most dominant genre of our time moves from reality TV's origins in radio to its role in forging the public image of a US president. In a sweeping conversation, the hosts and Nussbaum break down some of the unsung heroes and incredible stories behind the creation of our nostalgic reality TV touchston...
Jun 28, 2024•59 min
Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with author Patrick Nathan about his latest novel, and this month's LARB Book Club pick, The Future Was Color. The novel chronicles the life of Hungarian immigrant writer George Curtis. When we meet George, he's writing the hacky sort of monster movies that are today's cult classics, trying to find sex and love amid the closeted ambiance of life between the wars and in the midst of the McCarthyite purges of communists and homosexuals that plagued the mid-centur...
Jun 21, 2024•45 min
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by celebrated writer Claire Messud, the author of six works of fiction including the highly-acclaimed bestseller The Emperor's Children. Messud's latest novel is This Strange Eventful History, which follows the Cassars, a Pied-Noir family from Algeria, who find themselves constantly displaced by the changing tides of history, first by World War II and then by Algerian independence. Partly based on her own family's story, the book traces the story of each fam...
Jun 14, 2024•39 min
In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman debate an age-old question that's being taken up in new ways amid an increasingly atomized landscape for thinking and writing about the literature and art that moves (as well as enervates) us. What does it mean for criticism to "matter"? And what indications do we have that it does beyond the measure of the marketplace? The hosts discuss what they think has changed—and hasn't—about how and where reviews circulate, the art of...
Jun 11, 2024•46 min
Rachel Khong joins Eric Newman to discuss her latest novel, Real Americans. Divided into three parts that each trace the experiences of different generations of a Chinese American family, the book delves into the thickets of identity, exploring how cultural strictures and the chaos of love shape our reality. The first section, set in 1999, recounts the romance between Lily, a second generation Chinese American media intern in New York, and Matthew, the WASPy private equity investor of the compan...
Jun 07, 2024•54 min
