LARB Radio Hour

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, the writer and director behind Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw the TV Glow . Schoenbrun discusses their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld , a propulsive blend of conspiracy theory, sci-fi, mystery, and early internet nostalgia. The book opens with two teenagers encountering a mysterious transmission coming throug...

After watching Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary You Can See Everything , we're revisiting our chat show, "On Honesty," this week. 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 dishone...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the director and cinematographer, David Greaves, and his daughter, producer Liani Greaves, to speak about their new documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem . Originally conceived by David's father, the filmmaker William Greaves, Once Upon a Time in Harlem was shot in 1972 at a party that Willian engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by Palestinian American poet, translator and physician Fady Joudah to discuss his latest book,  Exhibit G.  The collection, a nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry, brings together poetry, prose, and photographs on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In this bold and illuminating work, Joudah wrestles with language, perspective, as well as the innate tensi...

In this special chat episode, Medaya Ocher, Eric Newman, and Kate Wolf use Catherine Liu's new book Traumatized to dive into the political uses and pitfalls of trauma. Liu argues that the elite professional class has fully absorbed the trauma narrative; the story of an individual's suffering and recovery courses through the culture on social and mass media not as a tool for liberation, but as a me...

The writer and housing policy advocate Samuel Stein joins Kate Wolf to speak about his new book,   A Right to Housing? It lays out how housing could indeed become a human right, accessible to all, through things like the decommodification of the real estate market, the construction of—and conversion to—more social housing, federal regulation, and continued tenant organizing. The second half of the...

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein about their new book,  End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World . A remarkably up to date analysis of our present moment of "messianic" wars in the Middle East and Silicon Valley's go-for broke investment in AI and space travel, the book looks at the shared narrative that unites a coalition of evangelical Christians, tec...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer  Izabella  Scott. Scott is the author of the new book  The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial . Her work has appeared in the  Financial Times, Granta, London Review of   Books,  and on BBC Radio 4's  Free Thinking . She was formerly co-editor of  The White Review. The Bed Trick  recounts the true story of a 2015 trial in the UK, in which a woman...

Eric Newman speaks with Marlon James about his latest novel,  The Disappearers . Returning to Jamaica as an historical setting for the first time since his Booker-prize winning  A Brief History of Seven Killings , James's latest tells a haunting story of violence and recovery against the backdrop of anti-gay violence in the 1980s. The novel follows seven gay men working together on a provocative p...

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...

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 c...

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 tha...

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 lon...

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,...

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 foundi...

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 a...

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 drownin...

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 ag...

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 gra...

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 mi...

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 l ooks 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,...

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 cul...

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...

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 t...

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 hum...