Episodes
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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 and girlhood, amidst the objects and structures of power, politics and history.
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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). Years later, his career languished, and he became homeless and died of cancer in 1990. Peck’s film looks closely at the conditions that thwarted Cole’s promise as an artist, the legacies of racial segregation, and the devastating ways they still play out today.
Also, Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF), returns to recommend The Long Form by Kate Brigg.
Plus Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America (and producer of our show) stops by to talk about the fate of progressive activism under the incoming Trump administration -
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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 project.
Also, Edwin Frank, author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, returns to recommend Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant. -
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 Austerlitz which arrived more than a 100 years later. Along the way, Frank looks at the many different forms and categories great 20th century novels take, from the distinctly modern and popular science fiction of H.G. Wells to the “minorness” of Franz Kafka; the historical precision of Thomas Mann to Gerturde Stein’s stress on sentence itself, and James Joyce’s stress on words. The book connects an eclectic collection of authors by way of style, sensibility, reception, temporality, and perhaps most importantly the influence of cataclysmic world events on their work and the shaping of their work on the world.
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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. Taking the recent election into account, the panel debates if psychoanalysis indeed belongs in politics. Could it help the electorate as a tool for making wiser decisions or understanding why we’re attracted to certain leaders? How much does self-knowledge, or lack thereof, tip the scales of history?
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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 collection of poems, grappling with his memories, experiences, and many, many losses.
Also, Forrest Gander, author of Mojave Ghost returns to recommend Liontaming in America by Elizabeth Willis. -
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, our country, and himself. He confronts what it means to be a self that contains divisions born out of time, experience, and relationships to other people, both living and gone.
Also, Simon Critchley, author of Mysticism, returns to recommend A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg, and give a tip of the hat to Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. -
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 precautions at the plant. The film picks up about a year later as Chris and his fellow organizers are gathering signatures to ratify their petition to formalize the union process. It captures the ensuing months of grueling work by Chris and other ALU members as they try to convince the 8,000 plus workers at the JFK8 plant that a union is in their best interest. The film is an object lesson in the many tactics needed for political organizing, and the inevitable discord that comes with it, both from the outside—in this case, one of the biggest companies in the world—and from within as well.
Also, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is A Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, returns to recommend Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn. -
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 who influenced philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger and was tried as a heretic shortly after his death by Pope John in 1329. But more than a history or survey of mysticism, Critchley's book is invested in isolating the loss of self and experience of ecstasy its practitioners describe, and looking for resonance within contemporary culture. He examines the work of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard, and the musician Nick Cave, suggesting that mysticism lives on as a secular aesthetic experience in the “world of enchantment opened in art, poetry and—especially—music.”
Also, Deborah Levy, the author of The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, returns to recommend two books scheduled to be published next year, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster, and Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs. -
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 view and moved through herself.
Also, Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement, returns to recommend Visitors by Anita Brookner. -
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 and then takes shape for her novels, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasures of food and nature. In her review of the book for LARB, Grace Linden writes: “It is evident to everyone who reads Levy that language is her plaything….her words are lit from within.”
Also, Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety: A Breakdown. returns to recommend A Song for the River by Philip Connors. -
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 that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.
Also Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain, returns to recommend Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece.
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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 the rubric of the vaguely therapeutic to something more like hedonism: a brief accessing of utopia one party at a time. Then she meets a DJ named Andrew who's at the heart of the scene, and the kind of conventional domestic life she thought she was foregoing suddenly comes into focus, before the pandemic and social uprising of 2020 arrive and change everything. Health and Safety is about trying to find different ways to survive, live, and make family, as well as the changing landscape of New York, the ingenuity and creativity of promoters and DJs, and the shaky line between the collective and the individual in a world gone mad.
Also, Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television, returns to recommend Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace. -
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 novel explores how the narrator navigates his recovery as he's treated in a cramped hospital room in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. Dilating on the power of art and intimacy to buoy us up in moments of extreme suffering, as well as the moments in which suffering overwhelms the transcendent capacity of art, Small Rain reckons with how we make our way through the agonies and ecstasies, unique and mundane, of life itself.
Also, Sofia Samatar, author of Opacities, returns to recommend two books by Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives. -
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 Isherwood's life and career, spanning two world wars, gay liberation, the AIDS crisis, and the spiritual awakening in America of the 1950s and '60s. It brings into intimate relief an enigmatic writer whose experience shuttled between the visceral physicality of erotic desire and the gossamer abstractions of ascetic life, often-conflicted, but always yearning for deeper understanding, and committing everything to the page.
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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 clothes, and Jane yearns for his financial stability. When her novel is rejected by her agent, she decides to try on his career in Hollywood as well. Colored Television is a hilarious unpacking of class, marriage, race, midlife, exploitation, Los Angeles, and what it takes to be an artist when no one cares about your work.
Also, Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman, returns to recommend a trilogy of historical novels by Sharon Kay Penman: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning. -
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 writers are often asked to codify their identities and constantly promote themselves. Drawing on the words of writers like Eduard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot, Clarice Lispector, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Opacities is at heart a book about the furnace of creativity, and the fuel that keeps it burning despite its many trials, risks, and disappointments.
Also, Eugene Lim, author of Fog and Car, returns to recommend Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. -
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 the almost decade long bond she shared with one of them named Roger. She comes to sex work, and even heterosexuality, with both curiosity and empathy, as well as a feminist perspective. Her book focuses less on matters of harm and power than the intricacies of desire and the variety of intimacy possible between women and men.
Also, Sarah Manguso, author of Liars, returns to recommend Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. -
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 the passage of time has changed Lim's relationship to the characters and the existential loneliness that orbits the core of Fog & Car.
Also, Mark Krotov co-editor of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade, retruns to recommend Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library. -
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 around the future of our planet. LARB and The Berggruen Institute convened exciting voices in the climate movement from across genres to discuss how writing can enact change.
David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Penguin Random House, 2019), which argues that the state of the world, environmentally speaking, is “worse, much worse, than you think.” He is a weekly columnist and staff writer for the New York Times, deputy editor of New York Magazine, and he was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology.
Jenny Offill is the author of three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and most recently, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She teaches at Bard College and lives in upstate New York.
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His forthcoming title—tentatively titled Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. Dr. Venkat is the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab, which investigates thermal inequality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from biology and history to anthropology and urban planning.
Jonathan Blake directs the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute. He is the coauthor, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises and author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland. - Show more
