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LARB Radio Hour

Los Angeles Review of Books

The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.

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22 episodes
weekly
Avg 53 min
English

Episodes 22

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Friday · 1 hr 9 min
Susan Stryker's "Changing Gender"
Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Susan Stryker about her new book Changing Gender. Part cultural history, part grammar lesson, and part memoir, Changing Gender confronts not only the long historical slipperiness of gender and identity in U.S. culture, but also the ways in which the very language we use to describe and understand gender becomes a cultural battleground for meaning and identity. Stryker discusses the relatively recent origins of our thinking about "gender," the ways that thinking has been misunderstood and misappropriated for political skirmishes, and the difficulty of pinning down exactly what we're talking about when we talk about gender.
August 21 · 54 min
Chang-Rae Lee's "A Tender Age"
Eric Newman speaks with Chang-Rae Lee about his latest novel, A Tender Age, a coming-of-age novel centered on Jeon-Gi, the troubled son of hardworking Korean immigrants, who must navigate the meaning of masculinity, desire, and identity as he begins the journey into adulthood. After a violent outburst that lands him in reform school, Jeon-Gi has the opportunity for a reset at a church sleepaway camp, where he develops new, felicitous feelings of belonging and wonder that repair his frayed, isolated sense of self. When an accident during a transformative hiking trip threatens to once again wrench him out of his community, Jeon-Gi's story confronts how circumstance, impulse, and agency shape our lives. Lee discusses the novel's exploration of nostalgia, immigrant family dynamics, masculinity, and learning to take responsibility for oneself.
August 14 · 57 min
Claudia Rankine's "Triage"
Claudia Rankine joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new book, Triage. It follows the lifelong friendship between its narrator and someone she refers to as the "theorist." The two meet in college and begin to play a game called "collapse" — they simply fall to the floor whenever they see each other. In this game, Rankine finds an apt metaphor for the ongoing political struggles that the two friends talk, argue, and labor through. How do we deal with the onslaught of tragedy, genocide, climate change, and poverty? In other words, how do we deal with the daily news? What can we do when we are on the brink of collapse? Rankine examines these questions by looking at art — including a variety of sculptures of couches — as well as through the eyes of the theorist and the narrator as they debate what happens after the fall.
August 7 · 55 min
Eleni Sikelianos' "Memory Rehearsal"
The writer and poet Eleni Sikelianos joins Kate Wolf to discuss Memory Rehearsal, a hybrid-memoir that tracks the history of her great-grandparents, the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and the American actress, writer, and artist Eva Palmer. The book probes ancestry, legacy, ancient history, and queer life at the turn of last century. Using a variety of narrative methods, Sikelianos enacts the long process of discovering who her great-grandparents were, the traces they left on her more immediate family, and the ways their artistic and romantic passions sustained and shaped their lives, as well as her own life.
July 31 · 47 min
Erin Maglaque's "Presence"
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which interrogates contemporary notions of how women's bodies work. The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work, and sleep. Maglaque contrasts the idea of our bodies as separate from our minds—both optimizable and containable—with a pre-Cartesian conception of them as porous, vulnerable, and infinitely complex, inviting a consideration of some of the freedom of the deeper past and its starkly different ways of being embodied.
July 24 · 43 min
Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics
Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's founding to today. Moving from accounts about John Adams and William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Peter Thiel, she traces how these and other influential figures defended hierarchy and sought to normalize inequality as a defining and even necessary feature of the American experiment.
July 17 · 44 min
Rachel Aviv's "Strangers to Ourselves"
This week we are listening back to Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv as she discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. The book collects the stories of people whose mental health crises subvert our usual understanding of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. It begins with Aviv herself, who was hospitalized at the age of six for anorexia, before she even knew the term for her illness. Each chapter is then dedicated to a different person: Bapu, an Indian Brahmin woman, who shortly after giving birth dedicates herself to religious asceticism and mysticism; Naomi, a Black woman, who in her psychosis, despairs of the very real racism and generational oppression that surrounds her; and Ray Osheroff and Laura Delano whose chapters both show the ways in which psychiatry is still grappling with medication and biology. Aviv explores how mental illness can defy psychiatric explanation, requiring a broader view of the economic, social and lived realities of the people who experience it.
July 10 · 50 min
Pemi Aguda's "One Leg on Earth"
Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with the Nigerian writer Pemi Aguda about her debut novel, One Leg on Earth. Set in Lagos, a young woman is at the start of a promising new architecture career working on an ultra-luxury development when she becomes pregnant after a one night stand. As she's coming to grips with what it will mean to be a mother, a rash of pregnant Lagosians suddenly are drowning themselves. As she navigates this disturbing mystery, secrets about the city's past, present, and future are revealed. Drawing on Aguda's background in architecture and land development, One Leg on Earth explores the tensions between urban expansion and historical erasure, as well as the relationship between place, the body, and agency. One Leg on Earth is the LARB Book Club selection for summer. To become a member of the book club, and experience the other perks of supporting LARB, including a subscription to the LARB Quarterly journal and exclusive events other members and LARB staff, visit lareviewofbooks.org/membership.
July 3 · 45 min
Forever Young
Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman come together for a special episode about aging. In the past decade, medical miracles and technological innovations have given us the chance to cheat or at least elude death longer. But what social and cultural changes are necessary to sustain a world in which many of us are living to be older than before? What is the difference between growing older and aging, and how do we mark those differences? When, if ever, is a good time to die?
June 26 · 51 min
Harriet Clark's "The Hill"
Harriet Clark joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut novel, The Hill, which mirrors Clark's own life story. It follows a young girl named Suzanna whose mother is a political radical and was incarcerated for a bank robbery gone wrong when her daughter was only a year old. Suzanna is eight as the novel opens and is being raised by her grandparents. But after the death of her grandfather, her grandmother, a former radical herself, refuses to bring her to visit her mother, and she must find other ways to see her. The book charts Suzanna's intertwined desire to both remain near her mother for the rest of her life while also honoring her autonomy, her family history, and her own future.
June 19 · 47 min
Carlos Barragán's "The Yahoo Boys"
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by journalist Carlos Barragán, whose new book is called The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers. After his own mother is targeted by a scammer pretending to be an American soldier, reporter and researcher Barragán made his way down to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate the so-called "Yahoo Boys," young men who catfish millions out of lonely victims. Barragán immerses himself in the group, exploring how scamming has been shaped by the global economy, how it has become a local industry and how these young men are finding agency, experiencing loss, and navigating their lives online and off.
June 12 · 49 min
Barry Walters' "Mighty Real"
Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to journalist and music critic Barry Walters about Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000. Spanning three decades of pop, disco, rock, funk, folk, and much more, Mighty Real looks at the power of popular music to challenge sexual norms and gender categories in ways both coded and overt. Covering headliners such as David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Motown, Nirvana and Judas Priest, to more obscure players like Lavender Country and the lesbian label, Olivia Records, Walters shows how queerness is encoded in the very DNA of some of our most beloved songs and albums. Mighty Real also testifies to how music both reflects the reality of gay culture and, subversively, brings it into the mainstream.
June 5 · 1 hr 17 min
Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Backtalker: an American Memoir"
Eric Newman interviews Kimberlé Crenshaw about her memoir Backtalker: An American Memoir. One of the most influential legal scholars of the past half century, Crenshaw is widely known for developing the analytical framework of intersectionality and pioneering the field of critical race theory. In Backtalker, she reflects on the personal experiences, intellectual influences, and era-defining cultural events that shaped her thinking about prejudice, power, and the law. In this conversation, Crenshaw talks about her family, traces the conflicts and inequalities that continue to define public life and the law in the United States, and considers how we might face the racial, sexual, and gendered retrenchment in the present.
May 29 · 52 min
Andrew Durbin's "The Wonderful World that Almost Was"
Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Andrew Durbin about his new biography, The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. A joint portrait of two influential yet under-sung American artists, the book follows Thek and Hujar's romance and deep friendship as it parallels their artistic formation. Both New York natives, the two men met in the 1950s, became lovers in the early 1960s, and sustained a complicated relationship until they succumbed to AIDS in the late 1980s. Uncompromising about their work, they have received growing critical interest in recent years: Hujar for his photographs of downtown artists and intellectuals and Thek for his sculptures and installations. But the core of Durbin's book traces a shaky period where each struggled to move forward as an artist while also experiencing aesthetic breakthroughs, travel, and sexual liberation.
May 22 · 1 hr 12 min
Nose Jobs and Reality TV
A double header show on beauty, class, surgical intervention, media manipulation, and assimilation American style. First Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with debut novelist Sarah Wang about her book, New Skin, a mother-daughter story rendered in the hallucinatory glare of Los Angeles and its unrepentant standard for perfection. It follows Linli Feng, who returns home to the San Gabriel Valley to help her mother, Fanny, after yet another botched plastic surgery. Linli ends up trapped, supporting Fanny as she accepts a role on the reality show, America's Beauty Extreme. Next Kate Wolf is joined by MJ Corey to discuss the real-life reality empire of America's most famous family. Corey's book, Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto unpacks almost two decades of the Kardashian clan via postmodern theory, examining how they have transformed not only television and the internet, but American culture at large.
May 15 · 48 min
On Honesty
In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss the "honesty crisis" facing contemporary culture. Using a recent book by the philosopher Christian Miller for reference, the hosts examine the internet as an engine for dishonesty, fueling everything from deepfakes to infidelity, AI cheating, political manipulation, and influencer peddling. Is dishonesty just part of the human condition, and perhaps even the social contract? What would a culture of radical honesty — or radical transparency — look like, and is that what we want?
May 8 · 55 min
Suzy Hansen's "From Life Itself"
Kate Wolf speaks to the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Suzy Hansen about her new book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. It centers on Istanbul's neighborhood of Karagümrük, which Hansen first began reporting on in 2015. She writes about the influx of Syrian immigrants, the constant new construction, the conflicts between residents, and local muhtar's role in resolving them. Both a record of place and refraction of the global forces shaping Turkey today—not least the consolidation of power by president Erdogan—From Life Itself explores the ways that small lives become intruded on by the larger world. Hansen discusses her work as a foreign correspondent, Turkey's history, and its outsized role in current international conflicts from the war in Ukraine to Gaza and Iran.
May 1 · 37 min
Lucrecia Martel "Nuestra Tierra"
Acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel joins Kate Wolf to discuss her documentary Nuestra Tierra, which follows a 2018 trial in Argentina over a crime in the remote northwestern region of Tucaman. In a showdown between a local landowner and the indigenous people of the area, a man named Javier Chacobar was shot and killed and two other community members were severely wounded; the crime footage was captured on video and shared widely on the internet. The trial's larger subtext was the rights of indigenous communities to their own land. Using drone shots as well as more intimate camera work and archival photographs, Martel presents a survey of this land, its people, and its history from colonialism to the present, portraying the often unspoken conflicts that have plagued Argentina since its founding and which reverberate throughout the Americas to this day.
April 24 · 59 min
A Return to the Queer 90's
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by French writer Ann Scott, whose cult novel, Superstars, was just translated into English. Superstars depicts Paris' queer techno scene—the music, the fashion, the drugs, as well as the passionate love affairs. Scott talks about that era and how she turned heartbreak into art. In the second half of our show, Eric Newman speaks with queer historian Hugh Ryan about his new memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond. Eric and Hugh discuss queer representation in mainstream media and why we're all feeling nostalgic for those analog, offline times.
April 17 · 52 min
Patrick Radden Keefe's "London Falling"
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by investigative journalist and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, to discuss his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. The book begins with the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London, a tragedy that soon reveals a web of deception, wealth, and hidden influence. Keefe traces Zac's life and the shadowy figures around him, drawing a larger portrait of London reshaped by global capital and restless ambition. Medaya and Eric speak with Patrick about how he first became interested in the case, how he investigated it, and the broader questions it raises about globalization, masculinity, and the pursuit of wealth at any cost.

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