LA Review of Books

Eric, Kate, and Medaya talk with Kiese about the struggle to buy his work back from the original publisher in order to revise and republish them, an experience that highlights the imbalance of power in the industry and the commodification of a writer’s work. The gang also chats about how the intervening years, including the Trump presidency now coming to a close, shaped his revisions.  Also, Sarah...

Medaya and Eric are joined by Alex Ross, the New Yorker's longtime music critic and author of Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadows of Music. Wagner's wide reaching influence across centuries, thinkers and artists reaches far beyond the realm of music. As they explore the complexity of his impact, the conversation wrestles with the stain of anti-Semitism, in Wagner’s thought and the Nazis emb...

This week co-hosts Kate and Medaya are joined by author Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, whose latest book is the collection of short stories Likes. Sarah discusses the magic of childhood, the difficulties of family life in the current political climate, and ways to see the quotidian in new and unexpected ways. Also, Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine, returns to recommend Benjamin Taylor's H...

Co-hosts Kate and Eric speak with filmmaker Alexander Nanau about his stunning new documentary Collective about corruption in the Romanian Hospital system, government, and the broader society.  Alexander discusses the terrifying story at the heart of the film, the state of politics in his home country, and how he produced the film.  If a tale like Collective might have seemed from a far off land,...

We’re joined by Tom Zoellner, award-winning author and the LA Review of Books Politics Editor. Tom and the co-hosts talk about the election, the tenor of the online political debate, and the future of patriotism. We also discuss Tom’s new book, The National Road: Dispatches from a Changing America, a collection of essays from Tom’s travels throughout the country. Also, former LARB intern Jenna Bea...

This week's show opens with Kate, Eric, and Medaya sharing their thoughts on the morning after Election Day. At the time, Joe Biden seemed to have a pathway to victory; but the trauma of the previous evening when, for a few hours, Trump seemed destined to repeat his improbable feat from four years earlier. The conversation revolves around a shared sense of incredulity that Trump's outrageous, nigh...

This week, we have filmmaker Garrett Bradley discussing her new documentary Time, which follows a larger-than-life matriarch, fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. Bradley discusses the idea of time in her film — time served, the slowness of justice and the accumulation of grief and joy. Later in the episode, we have one of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, alias Kathe K...

Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine,  joins Eric and Kate to discuss the “social industry" — online platforms that monetize and manipulate our need to share our lives online. Seymour moves beyond the negative effects social media has on us as individuals and as a community, bringing into view a bigger picture: the social, economic, and political perils that are now at our fingertips....

Suzanne Nossel, of PEN America, on the decimation of the local news landscape.

A special episode, featuring Alain Mabanckou, author of "Black Moses," our latest pick for LARB’s members-only Book Club. Mabanckou is an award-winning Francophone novelist who was born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966 and grew up in a time of political upheaval and repression. Mabanckou joins LARB editors to discuss his novel, his childhood, and his experience of religious schooling and revolution. H...

Akhtar talks about his new book Homeland Elegies, a hybrid of memoir, cultural criticism, psychological study, and loosely plotted novel that uniquely responds to the chaos and confusion of contemporary American life. The hosts also talk with Akhtar about the political, social, and affective entanglements of diaspora consciousness and experience (in this case, for Muslims from Pakistan living in t...

This week, we’re joined by acclaimed writer and critic Vivian Gornick. Gornick began her career in 1969, as a staff writer for The Village Voice. Since then she has published a number of nonfiction books, like The Situation and the Story, the memoirs Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman in the City, as well as essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, which were both n...

Author, activist, and novelist Arundhati Roy joins us from Delhi to discuss her new collection of essays, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Roy is well known for her impassioned political writing, as well as her two novels, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker in 1997. She talks with us about the rise of Indian nationalism, Modi’s descent into fas...

Author Sigrid Nunez, who won the National Book Award for 2018's The Friend, joins Kate and Eric to talk about her new novel, What Are You Going Through, which focuses on the narrator's close relationship to a friend with a terminal illness. The work revolves around witnessing the lives and needs of others; intertwines with themes of friendship, mortality, bravery, and even transcendence, amidst th...

Yaa Gyasi’s latest novel, Transcendent Kingdom, takes on family and the gulfs of diaspora experience through an intimate narrative of a neuroscientist trying to come to grips with her brother’s drug overdose and her mother’s crippling depression. Gyasi joins us to reflect on the different ways in which faith and science attempt to answer the unfathomable and inchoate, and talks about the addiction...

Hosts Kate and Medaya talk to Kelli Jo Ford, author of the new novel, Crooked Hallelujah, a multi-generational story about Justine — a mixed-blood Cherokee woman — and her daughter Reney. Kelli Jo Ford, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, discusses her love of landscape, her childhood, and how she has come to consider about faith, even in the most difficult of times. Also, Melissa Falive...

Hosts Kate, Eric, and Medaya are joined by renowned Chinese writer Yan Lianke, whose latest book is the memoir Three Brothers, about his childhood growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Calling in from Beijing, Yan discusses his life as a writer, being banned and censored in his own country and how he thinks literature can influence politics. Nicole Liu translates from the Chinese. Also, Nicol...

Co-hosts Kate and Medaya are joined by writer Joni Murphy, whose new novel, Talking Animals, takes place in a fictional New York City, populated entirely by animals. Joni discusses why she chose an alpaca and a llama as her protagonists, and how animals might allow us to talk about climate change, politics, and culture differently.  Plus, Akwaeke Emezi, author of The Death of Vivek Oji, returns to...

Hosts Eric and Medaya are joined by the writer Awkaeke Emezi, whose new novel The Death of Vivek Oji, explores the life and death of a young transgender person, Vivek, who is discovering and navigating his identity in contemporary Nigeria. We talk with Akwaeke about what inspired this story, their own life and childhood in Nigeria, and how they think about work as an “artist and writer based in li...

Eric and Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland, parse the history of the tomboy, its queer geographic and temporal character, as part of a broader discussion about how gender remains a wonderfully incoherent experience for so many of us, yet one that social and cultural norms is forever trying to fit into neat, rigid boxes. As she reflects on her debut collection of essays, Faliveno talks about b...

Authors Aminatou Sow and Ann Friendman join co-hosts Kate and Medaya to discuss their exploration of their friend, and close adult friendships in general, Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. The discussion opens up with Aminatou and Ann telling the story of their friendship, how they met, bonded, grew inseparable, and have remained emotionally-so through trials, tribulations, and major l...

Mieko Kawakami, whose poignant and pointed debut novel Breasts and Eggs is this season’s LARB’s Book Club selection, joins Medaya Ocher and Boris Dralyuk to discuss her career as a musician, poet, blogger, and author, the challenges facing women around the world, the state of Japanese literature, and the wonders of translation. Also, Eric Cervani, author of The Deviant's War: The Homosexual Vs. th...

This week, co-hosts Eric and Medaya talk to professor, writer, and revolutionary, Frank B. Wilderson III, whose latest book, Afropessimism, is a work of memoir and theory. Wilderson defines Afropessism, the ways it has been misrepresented and how it can shape our understanding of contemporary justice. Wilderson also recounts his childhood and how he became an Afropessimist. Also, writer and transl...

This week, Medaya speaks with acclaimed filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda about his new film, The Truth (La Vérité), starring French film screen legends Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. Kore-eda discusses complicated family dynamics, the relationship between art and truth-telling and what brought him to France. In our second interview, Kate and Medaya are joined by scholar and translator Joyce Zo...

Author Eric Cervini Cervini explains Frank Kameny's legacy as a complex figure in the history of the LGBTQ struggle, as he discusses his new book The Deviant's War with Daya, Kate , and Eric. Kameny was a trailblazer for civil rights yet also a person deeply committed to an assimilationist vision of queer equality, one that often sidelined people of color as well as trans and gender-nonconforming...