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.      

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.

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.

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.

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 ultimately his betrayal. The novel focuses on the trespasses of a single relationship, but it’s also about art, wifehood, and the institution of marriage itself, as well as the stories we tell about it from inside and outside its vows. Also, Dayna Tortorici, co-editor of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade, returns to recommend All Fours by Miranda July.

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 landscape, their commitment to formal experimentation and political discourse, and their vision for the future of print. Also, Yasmin Zaher, author of The Coin, returns top recommend The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere.

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 on a car ride as a child just moments before a horrible accident. Estranged from the few people she knows in the city, her behavior becomes increasingly unhinged and bizarre in ways that complicate standard stories of immigration, and instead imagine the path of a character who sees through America’s promise and realizes she has nothing to lose. Also, Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking, returns to recommend three books and one magazine: The Plague Edition of Konch Magazine edited by Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed’s; Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings edited by Michael Kelly and Monique Roelofs; James: a Novel by Percival Everett; and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.

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 to how we might navigate a bleak present in which fascism seems newly on the march. Also, Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, returns to recommend Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv.

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 touchstones, the harbingers of a darker genre to come, and its relationship to broad, tectonic social and political changes in American life. Also, Patrick Nathan, author of The Future was Color, returns to recommend Housemates: A Novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg.

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-century film industry. As George demurs writing the studio's next big hit to create something of greater substance about Hungary and the war from his exile perspective, he follows a passionate affair with his coworker in the writers' room. But when he departs the studio office for a residency of sorts with a Malibu actress and her gay husband, a dramatic chain reaction brings new motivations and possibilities to light. A novel about a moment in time that is also in so many ways timeless, The Future Was Color is an exploration of the line between the personal and political, between safety and risk, the art we create and the art that creates us. Also, Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History, returns to recommend Susie Boyt's novel, Loved and Missed.

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 family member, across three generations, as they encounter the world as well as their own personal joys and tragedies. The novel is, of course, about history, both personal and global, as well as the ways people build homes outide of their homelands.

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 the take down, what they look for in a good piece of criticism, and if you can trust the New York Times Book Review. They also discuss the many roles critics play—from forming canons to puncturing them, using specific language, and transforming personal taste and sensibility into something that can, occasionally, change culture.

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 company where she struggles to eke out a living. The second section transports us to Seattle in 2021, where Lily's son, Nick, is navigating the end of high school and early college years with his father, Matthew, conspicuously absent. When Nick reconnects with Matthew through a DNA ancestry test, old wounds heal even as new ones are opened up in the wake of long-buried family secrets. In the final section, Nick's grandmother reflects on her experience fleeing Mao Zedong's China to make a new life in the United States, while trying to reconcile with a tattered and scattered family in present-day San Francisco. As these three lives are woven together and torn apart, Real Americans moves propulsively through questions of race, class, and gender as its characters work to understand their relationship to inheritance, variously conceived, around the tripwires of silence, desire, and pain. Also, Erik Davis, author of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, returns to recommend Dale Pendell's Pharmako Trilogy.

Erik Davis joins Kate Wolf to speak about his latest book, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. The book is a study and history of the emergence of acid blotter paper from the late 1970s to the present day. It charts not only how the distribution and legal definition of LSD has changed over the decades—along with shifting cultural attitudes towards the drug—but also how blotter makers reflected these changes in their designs. The book examines the many recurring themes and aesthetics of blotter from cartoon characters, underground comics and advertising, to religious and political imagery, as well as associations with modern art movements like pop and minimalism. As psychedelics move closer to legalization for therapeutic purposes, Blotter is a reminder of the freak culture, anti-establishment origins of LSD and the inventive and playful path one of its main mediums has cut across countless minds over the last half century.

Writer and curator Legacy Russell joins Kate Wolf to discuss her new book, Black Meme, which theorizes the history of viral images of Blackness in America from the dawn of the 20th century to the present. The book argues for the centrality of Black culture in the formation of the digital sphere; it also points to the many ways images of Black people have been exploited, decontextualized, and abused both before and after the internet. Russell draws on a variety of examples, from the open-casket photos of Emmet Till that appeared in Jet Magazine, to the phenomena of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, which helped popularize the VCR, to more recent viral videos of police violence and Black social death. Calling for a reexamination of notions of private and public property, Black Meme urges a reconsideration of what an equitable exchange might look like for Black creators online, as well as engagement on the internet that goes beyond a reshare. Also, Miranda July, author of All Fours, returns to recommend Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.

Miranda July speaks to Kate Wolf about her latest novel, All Fours. Its narrator is a woman in the middle of her life, a recognized artist who’s worked steadily for years with “the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path.” Shortly after her 45th birthday, she decides to take a road trip to New York to celebrate with money she’s recently made from a whiskey commercial. She leaves her husband and child one morning and ends up stopping in a small suburb outside of Los Angeles for breakfast. But instead of continuing on, she rents a motel room there and proceeds to stay for the next three weeks. Part of her decision is based on her intense desire for a Hertz rental car employee she meets named Davey, a younger man, who yearns to be a hip hop dancer. But other aspects of her reasoning are more ineffable, fueled perhaps by the uncertainty of the future, aging, mortality, and struggles with the confines of domestic life. Her sojourn in the motel room becomes the catalyst for a reckoning with that life upon her return, and the basis for a deeper philosophical and visceral inquiry into desire, the female body, social and sexual possibility, caregiving, and what truly makes life worth living. Also, Danielle Dutton, author of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, returns to recommend The New Animals by Pip Adam.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and publisher Danielle Dutton, author of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other as well as Margaret the First and Sprawl. Dutton is also co-founder of the outstanding press Dorothy Project. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a collection of stories and essays that exemplify Dutton’s approach to writing: ekphrastic, collaborative, laced with dread, wonder, and silence, as well as the power of landscapes (outer and inner) to transport both characters and readers beyond the normal bounds of being. Many of the stories in the book are set in the open plains of the Midwest—a space that becomes rife for projections of bodily harm and climate collapse, where the real world and the digital sphere frequently overlap. Also, Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey, returns to recommend Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.

In this 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 fictional and real-life inspirational quitters, and whether Bartleby was onto something when he said he’d prefer not to.

Scholar and writer Anna Shechtman joins Medaya Ocher to discuss her book The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle. Shechtman is an accomplished cruciverbalist, constructing a bimonthly crossword at The New Yorker; she is the former Humanities and Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is now an editor-at-large. Her book is a history of how women shaped the crossword puzzle, only to be pushed out of the puzzling industry. It’s also a memoir of Shechtman's own start with crossword constructing and the simultaneous development of her eating disorder. Riddles explores language, meaning-making, the body, as well as who is allowed to set the rules and write the clues. Also, Katya Apekina, author of Mother Doll, returns to recommend four diaries written during the Russian Revolution: Earthly Signs by Marina Tsvetaeva; and three volumes by Teffi, Other Worlds; Memories; and Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me.

Scholar Randol Contreras joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to discuss his new book  The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. The book is a study of the history and present lives of veterans of the legendary Maravilla gang that long dominated the scene in East Los Angeles before a bitter rivalry with the La Eme during the 1990s and early 2000s that had Maravillas scrambling for their lives in the streets and in prison. Though centered around the experience of that epic gang rivalry, The Marvelous Ones is also an examination of how masculinity, race, and cultural identity are shaped and reshaped within the context of organized crime inside state institutions and in the everyday lives of those living in Los Angeles. It is also a story about what it means to matter and to be remembered as a man, as a husband, as a father, and as a Maravilla amid the roiling waters of political, social, and historical change. Also, poet Victoria Chang, whose latest collection is With My Back to the World, returns to recommend an anthology of poetry entitled You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by the current Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limon.

A double-header episode about two new novels that each feature high stakes feats of translation. First, the translator and writer Jenny Croft speaks with Medaya Ocher about her debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey. It follows eight translators who have just arrived at the house of a famous, beloved writer, the titular Irena Rey. Suddenly, Irena disappears, and the translators are left to figure out what has happened to her. Stuck and isolated in a primeval Polish forest and driven by ambition, paranoia, and obsession, the group uncovers secrets about Irena and the stakes of their endeavor become higher and higher. Then, writer and translator Katya Apekina joins Kate Wolf to discuss her latest novel, Mother Doll. The book examines how we can be haunted, sometimes literally, by the choices and experiences of our ancestors. Its main character is an adrift young woman named Zhenia. In the midst of finding out she’s pregnant and splitting up with her husband, Zhenia receives a mysterious call from Paul, a pet psychic who has been communicating with her great-grandmother, Irina. Paul needs Zhenia to translate Irina’s story, from Russian, about her role in the Russian Revolution and why she decided to place Zhenia’s beloved grandmother in an orphanage; Irina meanwhile needs Zhenia to understand her choices, and just perhaps, forgive her.

Kate Wolf speaks with the poet Victoria Chang about her latest collection of poems, With My Back to the World. The book is in deep conversation with the work of the painter Agnes Martin: each poem takes the title of one of Martin’s paintings and is also often accompanied by Chang’s own visual interpretations of Martin’s work. Regarding Martin’s intricate grids and spare compositions inevitably allows Chang to reflect on form, emptiness, nature and light; along with more personal reflections on depression, identity, solitude, violence, and destruction. Chang writes about the act of looking along with the feeling of being seen—and the border between the two, especially within everyday encounters on the internet, where, as she writes, “solitude grabs my phone and takes a selfie.”

Eric Newman speaks with director Morgan Neville about his new film "STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces," which explores the legendary comedian's meteoric rise to standup stardom, his abrupt pivot to TV and film, and his return to stage in the present as he and close friend Martin Short prep a new comedy tour. Eric and Morgan discuss the treasure trove of never-before-seen archival that brings Martin's early career to life, what Morgan has learned about fame and the psychology of entertainers from his storied work documenting the lives of cultural luminaries, and much more. writingComedystandupSNLMoviesTVStageactingDocumentaryMorgan NevilleEric NewmanLos Angeles Review of BooksSteve Martinfame      

On this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman talk about the ethics and politics of memoir in the wake of several recent controversies. Touching on Blake Butler’s Molly, Emily Gould’s essay in The Cut on her flirtation with divorce, and much more, the gang considers who gets to tell whose stories, how, and why.

Eric Newman speaks with writer Tommy Orange about his novel Wandering Stars, a multigenerational epic that is both prequel and sequel to his award-winning 2018 debut There There. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, the novel follows a Native family's journey across more than 150 years as they struggle to maintain their connection to one another and to their Cheyenne history and identity in the face of addiction and the brutal legacy of forced assimilation. Also, Gretchen Sisson, author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, returns to recommend The Turnaway Study bhy Diana Greene Foster.

Kate Wolf speaks with sociologist Gretchen Sisson about her first book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. The book is based on interviews Sisson conducted over the last decade with birth mothers who relinquished their children for private adoption in the US. Most often Sisson found that these women deeply regretted their decision, and that poverty was the driving force behind it. Alongside the harrowing stories of the women who Sisson spoke with, her book also looks at the history of adoption in the United States and its ties to conservative Christianity, as well as family policing systems of the state. In an age of narrowing reproductive freedom, when adoption is touted by the Supreme Court as an answer to the need for abortion, Relinquished asks hard questions about the compatibility of the practice with the possibility for true reproductive justice. Also, Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, returns to recommend Candy Darling by Cynthia Carr.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Brad Gooch about his new biography, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. A deep-dive into the life of an artist whose work can be seen today on everything from museum walls to t-shirts and tote bags, Gooch's book unearths the cultural moment that gave rise to Haring's meteoric career before his untimely death in 1990. Moving across topics including the commercialization of art, cultural appropriation, the AIDS crisis, and more, Radiant brings the highly-recognizable artist into nuanced focus. Also, Tana French, author of The Hunter, returns to recommend Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with megawatt mystery maven Tana French about her latest novel, The Hunter. Set in the fictional rural Irish town of Ardnakelty, The Hunter is a dark, slow-burning story of the ties that knit together small communities–and the animosities that tear them apart. French talks about how American Westerns influenced the tone and texture of her latest novels, where she gets the ideas for her dark stories, and how her globe-hopping childhood made her the mystery writer she is today. Also, Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, returns to recommend Eliza Barry Callahan's The Hearing Test: A Novel, as well as Emmeline Clein's Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.

In this special episode, Eric Newman chats with LARB Film & TV editor Annie Berke and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a preview of this year's Academy Awards. Breaking down the top Oscar contenders, the group talks the best and worst of the year in movies, from Barbie to Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, Maestro, and more. If you loved–or hated!–the year in film, this episode is for you.

Leslie Jamison joins Medaya and Kate to discuss her latest book Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, a memoir that chronicles the birth of her daughter and the collapse of her marriage soon after. Jamison writes about the bond with her own mother, as well as the intense, consuming love for her child. The book is not only a story about her most intimate relationships, but an examination of doubt, betrayal, forgiveness and, as the subtitle says, love. Also, Phillip B. Williams, author of Ours, returns to recommend The Black Book, edited by Toni Morrison. Literaturememoirmotherchildmarriagebreak-updoubtbetrayalforgivenessLoveLeslie JamisonSplinterMedaya OcherKate WolfLos Angeles Review of BooksPhillip B. WilliamsOursThe Black BookToni MorrisonEric Newman      

Eric Newman speaks with Phillip B. Williams about his debut novel, Ours. A surrealist epic largely set in the American midwest both pre- and post-emancipation, the book tells the story of Saint, a conjure woman who uses her supernatural powers to liberate slaves and keep them safe in a magically secluded town near St. Louis. But as Saint's magic begins to falter and newcomers appear in the town, the residents chafe at her power over them, eager for a freedom, identity, and community forged on their own terms. In the interview, Williams discusses his novel's blend of diasporic traditions and spirituality, how his characters repair themselves and each other, and what it means to read–and write–with love. Also, Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, returns to recommend April Ashley's Odyssey by Duncan Fallowell and April Ashley.

Kate Wolf speaks to cultural critic and historian Lucy Sante about her latest book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. It is the story of how as living as Luc for almost the entirety of her life, three years ago, she became Lucy. The book begins with the letter she sent her closest friends with the "bombshell" confession that the image of herself as a woman had been “the consuming furnace at the center” of her life, but that she had repressed it with almost equal force. Sante goes on to reflect back on that life, from her time growing up in Belgium as the only child of emotionally distant working class parents, to her adolescence as an immigrant in suburban New Jersey, and finally her nascent adult years as a punk and budding writer in a pre-corporatized New York City. Intercutting this past with the practical steps and transcendent emotions that accompany her first few months of transitioning, Sante explores the ways she contorted herself to fit into her male identity and the great unhappiness it caused, as well as the path to finally unburdening herself of her secret and emerging as Lucy. Also, Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, returns to recommend Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience.

Adam Shatz speaks with Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. The book is both a biography of Fanon— one of the most important thinkers on race and colonialism of the last century— as well as an intellectual history that looks closely at his most seminal texts. Shatz uncovers the events that led to the writing of books such as Black Skin, White Masks and the Wretched of the Earth by following Fanon from his birth in Martinique (then a French colony), to his time serving in World War II, his studies in Lyon, his innovative work as a psychiatrist in France and Algeria, as well as his pivotal decision to join in the fight for Algerian independence and become a part of the FLN. Though Fanon died at only 36, in 1961, Shatz also explores the many afterlives of his work, from his embrace by the Black Panthers and his influence on filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann and Ousmane Sembene to echoes of his thought in the continued movements for Black liberation and decolonization today. Also, E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators, returns to recommend The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Writer Nathan Thrall joins Kate Wolf to talk about his recent book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was published last October and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic and the Financial Times. It is an account of a horrific accident that took place in the outskirts of Jerusalem on a rainy day in 2012, when a school bus full of kindergarten students on their way to a class trip collided with a semi-trailer and caught on fire. Thrall follows the lives of a number of people who were directly impacted by the tragedy, delving into their pasts and the ways in which the decades-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has indelibly shaped their trajectories. Chief among them is Abed Salama, a Palestinian, and father of five-year-old Milad, who was a passenger on the bus. In looking closely at the material conditions of Salama’s life, and the way they play out within the worst circumstances imaginable, Thrall evinces the toll of occupation in the most human of terms. Also, Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, returns to recommend Naomi Klein's No Logo.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by E.J. Koh to discuss her debut novel, The Liberators, LARB Book Club's pick for Winter 2024. Widely acclaimed by critics, The Liberators tells the story of two families as they navigate love and survival from the Korean dictatorship of the early 1980s through the Sewol Ferry sinking of 2014. Between those bookending events lie a fraught terrain of marriage, birth, death, love, hope, and disappointment that unfurls itself across Korea and the United States. Moving from questions of form and diaspora to the relics that secure our belonging to places and people, the discussion explores how history both makes and unmakes us. Also, Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn, returns to recommend To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Herve Guibert. The Liberators is the Winter 2024 selection for the LARB Book Club. The Book Club is one of many perks offered to our wonderful supporting members. To learn more about our membership program, check out lareviewofbooks.org/membership/

The philosopher Kohei Saito speaks to Eric Newman and Kate Wolf about his book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. A critique of our insufficient response to the climate crisis, Slow Down aptly points to capitalism—its race for profits and endlessly expansive production— as the chief cause of our present emergency. The cure is not a green capitalism (such as what we see in proposals for a Green New Deal here in the United States) but rather degrowth: a vision for reorganizing labor, production, and consumption in ways that Saito argues are the only sustainable future. Drawing on previously unpublished work by Karl Marx, Saito argues that degrowth may help thread the needle between the horrors of Soviet-style socialism and the insufficiency of green Keynesianism, or techno-optimism, to help foster a world and community in which we can all thrive. Also, Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required, returns to recommend two books: Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work by Diana Garvin; and National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by Anya con Bremzen.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by author Lexi Freiman to discuss her latest novel, The Book of Ayn. A punchy satire of contemporary life, the story centers on Anna, a writer reeling from being cancelled after the New York Times dubs her novel classist. When Anna happens upon a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, she takes a shine to Rand's philosophy and biography, seeking to reorient her life around Rand's ideal of "rational selfishness." Across Anna's existential journey through Los Angeles and the Greek island of Lesbos, Freiman's by turns hilarious and poignant novel skewers and reckons with the politics and cultural currents that shape contemporary life. Also, Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, returns to recommend two books: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever, and I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with writer Alicia Kennedy about No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. The book unpacks the ethical, spiritual, environmental, economic, and political dimensions of vegetarianism and veganism. It traces the emergence of meatless eating in the US, from 19th century religious groups to various subcultures—including commune-dwellers, Rastafarians, Buddhists, punks, ecofeminists and Black Nationalists—to the watershed moment of Frances Moore Lappé’s book, Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971. Kennedy also interrogates more recent trends like wellness culture and meatless Big Macs, considering how the radical origins of not eating meat are becoming obscured as veganism hits the mainstream. A rejoinder to questions about the efficacy of personal choices in the fight against climate change and social injustice, No Meat Required argues for the critical importance of biodiversity, local agriculture, and local economies, and offers a holistic vision of food consumption and production for both the present and future. Also, Blake Butler, author of Molly, returns to recommend Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin.