LA Review of Books

Richard Hell joins Kate Wolf to speak about the reissue of his novel, "Godlike." Originally published in 2005, "Godlike" transposes the relationship of the 19th century poets Arthur Rimabaud and Paul Verlaine to 1970s New York. Told from the hospital room of poet Paul Vaughn, the story centers on his meeting of a wily and charismatic 16-year-old punk named R.T. Wode decades earlier. Their attracti...

In this week's episode from the archives, Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her book, "The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life," a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross’s writing about the everyday in French political, social, and...

A double header show on sculpture, public art, communal space, and gaps and omissions in American history. First, Kate Wolf speaks to Hamza Walker, co-curator of “Monuments,” an exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and The Brick. The show presents a series of decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities across the US alongside contemporary pieces by Karon...

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer Lauren Rothery to discuss her novel "Television," which follows an aging movie star named Verity, his on and off lover Helen, and Phoebe a screenwriter and filmmaker. One day, on a whim, Verity decides to hold a lottery, giving away his earnings from a massive superhero movie to one lucky filmgoer. Rothery discusses the relationship between failure and success, the...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Caroline Fraser about her new book, "Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers." Taking an ecological approach to true crime, the book explores how decades of industrial pollution from large smelting plants in the Pacific Northwest may have shaped the social and environmental conditions that coincided with an unusually high number of serial...

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer and author Susan Orlean, whose latest book is "Joyride: A Memoir." In "Joyride," Orlean recounts how she became a writer: the strokes of luck, as well as the ambition and talent that led her from alt-weeklies to Esquire, Vogue and The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992. Orlean has written essays and books that have since become classics of con...

This week, we are revisiting our episode with photographer and writer Sally Mann about her book, "Art Work: On the Creative Life." Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Mann, whose book describes her path to becoming an artist and provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come...

Today’s episode features a live recording from a LARB Luminary Dinner honoring writer, performer and actor Jenny Slate. Author Sarah Manguso sits down with Slate for an intimate conversation exploring the complexities of balancing artistic practice with the demands of parenthood and the ways personal transformation shapes creative expression. 

Kate Wolf is joined by two of today's finest film critics to discuss the current state of Hollywood—including the sale of Warner Brothers Discovery—the art of writing about movies, and some of the year's best films. Up first is critic A.S. Hamrah, author of two new books: "Last Week In End Times Cinema," which compiles the relentless follies of the film industry from March of 2024 to 2025 in an an...

It's that time of the year again! Hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman look back on some of the bright lights from a pretty dark year with a rundown of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, and scandals from 2025. For a full list of this year's picks, visit lareviewofbooks.org/podcasts/larb-radio-hour/

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with director Julia Loktev about her new documentary "My Undesirable Friends." Filmed in 2021, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the five-hour epic follows independent journalists at TV Rain as they navigate escalating government repression and the “foreign agent” laws designed to silence dissent. The film is a moving, unsettling portrait of resilience an...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Robin Coste Lewis about her new poetry collection, "Archive of Desire." The four part collection emerged out of a collaboration with other artists commissioned by the Onassis Foundation to celebrate the 160th birthday of poet Constantin Cavafy, exploring Lewis's encounters with Cavafy's life, work, and sexual history. Lewis discusses her experience poring over...

Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures.” It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career...

This week we are listening back to an episode from earlier this year. Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Sarah Schulman about her latest book, "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity." With a focus on practical politics, Schulman explores both how we imagine solidarity and what the work of solidarity requires. Rather than a horizontal movement, the book focuses on the ways achieving today’s mos...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Angela Flournoy about her novel, "The Wilderness." Moving back and forth from the early 2000s to the present, the novel looks at the stories of five women living in New York and Los Angeles, capturing the mess and power of their deep, complicated friendships as they navigate love, motherhood, careers, and everything in between. Angela discusses how she develope...

In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss how Big Tech dreams – from iPhones to social media to AI – have become nightmares. How did these decade-defining innovations end up making modern life feel sadder, lonelier, and scarier? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Using two recent books — Cory Doctorow's "Ensh*ttification" and Paul Kingsnorth's "Against...

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her new movie, "The Mastermind," out in theaters now. Josh O’Connor stars as an unemployed carpenter named JB, who hatches a plan to rob the museum in his small Massachusetts town of its collection of Arthur Dove paintings. JB soon he finds himself on the run, leaving his young family behind for a Greyhound tour of 1970s Ame...

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with writer Grace Byron about her debut novel, "Herculine." Set between the freelance rat race of New York and an equally cutthroat commune for trans women in rural Indiana, "Herculine" follows a narrator trying to put her life together. Featuring demons, conversion therapy, and blood rites, the novel is part horror part coming-of-age tale. Byron discusses how th...

Chris Kraus joins Kate Wolf to talk about her new novel, "The Four Spent the Day Together." Organized into three linked sections, the book begins with a portrait of Kraus’s avatar, Catt Greene, and her family, as they struggle to overcome the isolation of the suburbs after moving into their first home in Milford, Connecticut, in the late 1950s. The book’s second part takes place many decades later...

Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, "Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde." It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era's cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman...

Eric Newman speaks to Alejandro Varela about his latest novel, "Middle Spoon." Told in epistolary form through the narrator's unsent emails, the novel opens in the immediate aftermath of a devastating breakup. The breakup, like the relationship, was complicated. It was the narrator's first experience with polyamory, and his now ex-boyfriend ended things because the narrator refused to leave his hu...

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to the photographer and writer Sally Mann about her new book, "Art Work: On the Creative Life." In describing her path to becoming an artist, Mann provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes select...

In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the "crisis" du jour in American publishing: the erosion of male literary stars and their readers across the landscape of contemporary fiction. Is this even happening—and if so, why? Tackling cultural anxieties about the waning centrality of the straight, white male author alongside spurious statistics and questions ab...

Kate Wolf speaks with historian Fara Dabhoiwala about his new book, "What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea." A foundational aspect of the U.S. Constitution, free speech is a relatively recent invention and one rooted less in democratic ideals than first may be clear. Tracking its evolution from the pre-modern age through the Enlightenment to our present day, Dabhoiwala explores how...

This week we're listening back to Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher's interview with the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. Abu Toha 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 one day rebuild. In 2025, Toha was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for hi...