LA Review of Books

Eric Newman speaks with Nicholas Boggs about his monumental new biography, "James Baldwin: A Love Story." Drawing on fresh archival research and interviews, Boggs offers an intimate portrait of the literary legend anchored by the romances that shaped his life, writing, and political vision. Spanning Baldwin’s formative mentorship under artist Beauford Delaney, his romance with Lucien Happersberger...

Kate Wolf speaks with Nathan Kernan about his new biography, "A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler." It’s an intimate look at the great poet who was born in 1923 and would become one of the original members of the so-called New York School along with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbra Guest. With the restraint, precision and wry humor of one of Schuyler’s own poems, Ke...

Eric Newman speaks with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their new documentary "Heightened Scrutiny." The film follows ACLU attorney Chase Strangio’s journey to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, which sought to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Alongside Strangio's work on the case, interviews with journalists, activists, and others...

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, "Pan." It captures the frenetic mind of a 15-year old boy named Nicholas as he undergoes his first panic attacks. Trapped in suburban Illinois in a time before the internet, Nicholas has little basis to understand what is happening to him. His search to understand his panic leads him to the condition’s na...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor Sebastian Castillo whose new novel "Fresh, Green Life" is the LARB Book Club pick for the summer. "Fresh, Green Life" follows a narrator, also named Sebastian Castillo, who has resolved to spend a year alone, exercising, watching self-improvement videos and thinking about how he has arrived at this particular point in his life: a laps...

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with writer Catherine Lacey, author of the novels "Biography of X," "Pew," "The Answers," and a short story collection, "Certain American States." Her most recent work is "The Möbius Book," which is split in two — one half is fiction and the other memoir. The novel tells the story of two friends, catching up on a grim Christmas Eve. The memoir is about Catherine he...

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Traci Thomas, host of the "The Stacks” podcast. They discuss the impact of social media on publishing, the content creator life, and the way readers discover books today. At the end of the episode, Medaya, Eric, and Traci offer readers a rundown of recommendations for the books getting us through 2025.

For Independence Day, we dive into the archives to bring you an episode that still feels timely. Ruth Wilson Gilmore joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to talk about her collection, "Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation," which covers three decades of her thinking about abolition, activism, scholarship, the carceral system, the political economy of racism, and much more. For Gilmore, these a...

Susan Choi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new novel, "Flashlight." An epic story that spans multiple generations of a single family, the book is an astute exploration of identity, migration, memory, kinship and the irrepressibility of the past. It begins in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of a young academic named Serk. An ethnic Korean, who was raised in Japan and de...

In this double episode celebrating pride month, Kate Wolf speaks with the critic Vince Aletti about his new book, "Physique," an assortment of hundreds of physique photos from Aletti’s own personal collection. The images in the book represent a time when homosexual life in the US was illegal, existed mostly underground, and was by necessity furtive and coded. Yet throughout the country there were...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Alison Bechdel about her new graphic novel, "Spent." Bechdel is the author of "Essential Dykes to Watch Out For," "Fun Home," and "Are You My Mother?" "Spent" fictionalizes Bechdel’s life with her wife Holly on their pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont. The comic chronicles political and local dramas, generational shifts, experiments with polyamory, and navigati...

In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman wrestle with the question: What are we to do about shame? Using Frédéric Gros’s recent book, "A Philosophy of Shame," as a guidepost, they discuss shame’s place in culture, politics, and our personal lives. Are there social benefits to feeling shame? And what are the repercussions of trying to avoid it? The hosts debate the po...

Dan Nadel joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his new biography, "Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life." The book traces the life and art of Robert Crumb, arguably the most influential cartoonist of the last half century. Crumb emerged from the world of underground comics that he helped create in the late 1960s to both mainstream fame and commercial success. But he was a reticent celebrity who of...

Eric Newman speaks with journalist and author Vauhini Vara about her new book “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age.” The book hybrid blend of memoir and modern tech history explore how the internet, AI, and the corporate tech giants behind them have shaped the way we see ourselves and connect with others. Through Vara’s personal anecdotes and digital history deep dives—including a nostalgic look...

Eric Newman speaks with Jon Hickey about his debut novel "Big Chief." The book is a gripping political thriller about the struggle for power, belonging, and destiny set against a tribal election campaign on a fictional reservation. It follows the story of Mitch Caddo and his childhood friend Max Beck, who is seeking reelection as the tribal president of the Passage Rouge Nation. As Max’s reelectio...

Medaya Ocher is joined by TV writer, memoirist and librettist Sarah Labrie, author of the book "No One Gets to Fall Apart." The book is a memoir of LaBrie’s fraught relationship with her mother, who suffers a psychotic break in 2017 and is found on the side of a freeway, convinced that she is being followed by FBI agents. LaBrie is then forced to confront the difficulties and mysteries of her chil...

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 most pressing political goals—from Palestine's self-determination to immi...

Maggie Nelson joins Kate Wolf to discuss her new book "Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth." It is at once a compressed record of her long struggle with chronic pain and a document of the boundless blur of the pandemic era. It combines vignettes of daily life and doctor’s visits with dreams and memories, pushing at the partition between interior and exterior, symptom and experience, containment a...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with writer Katie Kitamura about her recent novel, "Audition," which explores a tense, complex relationship between a middle-aged actress and a young man who may or may not be her son. The book raises questions about the roles we play, the stories we inhabit, and the many choices we make. “Audition” is LARB’s Book Club pick this month. Join in on the conversation...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Andrea Long Chu about "Authority," a collection of previously published and new essays and criticism. "Authority" interrogates what it means to be a critic today, analyzing the work that the critic does in interpreting a book, film, or TV show for us as well as how the status of the critic has developed from antiquity to the present. Andrea, Medaya, and Eric...

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Lynne Tillman about her latest book, "Thrilled to Death," a collection of short stories selected from over four decades of her work. The stories in "Thrilled to Death" attest to Tillman’s range as a writer and stylist, showcasing her frenetic humor, deep psychological insight, and her innovation of the form. Ever playful and perverse, these stories cover terrain...

The writer Pankaj Mishra joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his new book, "The World After Gaza: A History." It probes how the legacy of the Holocaust has shaped the contemporary world order, including how it has shaped the government of Israel, and the current war in Gaza. The book grapples with how, within the relentless violence of the 20th century, trauma can lead to nationalism, and...

Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, "Atrocity: A Literary History," which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins's book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" reckon–or fail to reckon–with at...

Eric Newman speaks with Torrey Peters about her new story collection, "Stag Dance," which spans genre, time, and place to explore the shifting sands of gender, sex, desire, and identity. From a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is trans to a pirate logging camp in the early 1900s where desire and gender explode in surprising ways, the stories in "Stag Dance" plumb the murky and often ugly f...

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to writer Haley Mlotek about "No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce and Romance." The book blends the history of divorce law and custom in North America over the last century with cultural criticism on the way divorce has been portrayed in literature, film, and online. Mlotek also records her own experience of ending a marriage, and the front row seat she had growing up to...