LA Review of Books

Today we’re speaking with writer and critic Claire Dederer, the author of Love and Trouble, as well as the memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. She is a long-time contributor to the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in the Atlantic, The Nation, NY Magazine as well as many others. Her new book is called Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. The book is a personal and critical investi...

Kate Wolf is joined by the Turner prize-winning artist Helen Cammock to discuss her new book, and current exhibition at Art and Practice in Los Angeles, I Will Keep My Soul. Both are drawn from Cammock’s time in New Orleans—which she began to visit early last year—and address the city’s social history, geography, and community. Her book brings together poetry, film stills, photography, collage, an...

A LARB Radio Hour doubleheader featuring two innovative approaches to addressing nature in, and with, art. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf speaks with LARB-contributor Tom Comitta about their first novel The Nature Book, “a literary supercut” that collects and collages descriptions of the natural world from 300 works of fiction by authors spanning Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte to Toni...

Colm Tóibín joins Eric Newman and Kate Wolf to speak about his latest book, a collection of essays, A Guest at the Feast. The book brings together an inspiring range of pieces that Tóibín has published over the last three decades, from his visceral, forthright, and very funny essay on his cancer diagnosis and treatment, to the stirring title essay of the collection, which is an episodic remembranc...

On this special LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Editor-In-Chief Michelle Chihara talks to Poet Jenny Liou about her debut book Muscle Memory, Liou’s vulnerable intense series of autobiographical poems about Chinese American ancestry, family, and about Jenny’s time as a Mixed Martial Arts cage fighter. Jenny practiced martial arts as a kid, ran track in college, and then started training...

Kate Wolf speaks with the writer and scholar McKenzie Wark about her latest book, Raving. Raving beckons readers onto the dance floors of underground parties in New York, combining Wark’s own vivid experience of these spaces with her theories of the rave itself. Wark considers the rave’s potential for a break in linear time, and its offering of a different mode of self-embodiment or self-abandon;...

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the renowned Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza about her first book written in English, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. The book begins with Rivera Garza's experience of searching for the police record of her sister Liliana’ murder, which took place in Mexico City in 1990 at the hands of an ex-boyfriend when Liliana was 20 years...

Malcolm Harris joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to discuss Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. A native of Northern California, Malcolm attended Palo Alto High School and that High School experience is a jumping off point of sorts — and a dark one — for the book that Malcolm joins us to discuss. Malcolm's hefty tome, a history of California told through a Marxist lens,...

Eric Newman is joined by LARB Film Editor Annie Berke and film critic Kyle Turner for a special 2023 Oscars Preview episode. Ahead of this weekend's award show, the trio chats about general trends from the past year in movies and in the film industry more broadly and offers a few predictions for which stars and flicks they think will take home the night's biggest prizes. Eric, Annie, and Kyle also...

Kate Wolf is joined by writer and critic Emmanuel Iduma to discuss his new memoir, I Am Still With You: A Reckoning With Silence, Inheritance, and History. The book follows Iduma’s return to his native Nigeria after many years of living abroad. It recounts his travels through the southern portion of the country in search of information about one of his uncles—the man for whom he was named but neve...

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak to Laura Poitras about her latest documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, recently nominated for an Academy Award. The film explores the efforts of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin and a group of activists to compel arts institutions to refuse donations from the Sackler pharmaceutical family and remove their names from the walls of the many exhibits and...

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the celebrated translator Ann Goldstein, whose most recent translated work is a novel called Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. Ann Goldstein is a former editor at the New Yorker, where she worked from 1974 to 2017. She began translating Italian literature in the ’90s and in 2005 she translated Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. She went on to translat...

Maggie Millner joins Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf to discuss her debut book, Couplets, a love story in verse, written in alternating chapters of couplets and prose poems. It’s about a woman whose life is good: she has a loving partner, caring friends, organic vegetables, plenty of tote bags. Everything changes when she meets a woman at a bar and falls deeply in love, beginning an intense, consuming...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by author De'Shawn Charles Winslow to speak about his novel, Decent People. The book is set in the fictional small town of West Mills, North Carolina, and takes place in 1976, when West Mill is still segregated. It focuses on a crime: the calculated murder of three siblings in their home. Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon have been found dead, and there are ple...

Kathryn Ma joins Eric Newman to discuss her most recent novel, The Chinese Groove, which follows protagonist Xi Liu Zheng, who goes by Shelley, as he leaves his home in China's Yunnan province to make his future with the help of a rich uncle in San Francisco. But Shelly's journey is a comedy of errors in which nothing is as he expected. Yet, with indefatigable optimism, compassion, and determinati...

Curtis White joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his latest essay collection, Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse. The book offers an incisive critique of the Westernization of Buddhism, from its adoption by tech companies like Amazon and Google into a practice of corporate mindfulness that aids with productivity in the workplace; to its embrace by New Atheists, such as S...

Award-winning journalist Anand Giridharadas joins Eric Newman and LARB’s new Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara to talk about his latest book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. The Persuaders –– this month’s LARB Book Club selection –– offers an inside account of how activists, politicians, educators, and other Left leaders are working to manifest chan...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Sabrina Imbler, a Brooklyn-based writer and science journalist, about their debut essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Part creature feature part memoir, each essay explores the life of a unique sea animal as a means of illuminating key experiences from Sabrina's own life story. Across essays the life of a Chinese sturgeo...

In an encore presentation, Adam Phillips joins Kate Wolf to discuss his two latest books, both published this year, On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better. The series looks at the very human impulse toward transformation, from religious and political conversion, and the conversion to family life from which one must ultimately emerge, to the aims and practices of psychoanalysis, along with more...

Writer and curator Jordan Stein joins Kate Wolf to discuss his book Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada and Other Pieces. The book centers on the American artist Jay DeFeo who’s best known for her monumental 2,000 pound painting The Rose, which she worked on for eight years. Following her eviction, in 1965, it had to be removed from her apartment by a forklift after the building’s bay window was sawed...

We made it to the end of the year... and our favorite episode! Kate, Medaya, and Eric share their favorite books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, music, and more in this look back at the year that was 2022.

A LARB Radio double header on two mavericks of independent cinema. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Joyce Chopra to discuss her new memoir, Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond. The book traces Chopra's earliest inspirations as a young girl growing up near Coney Island to the projects that launched her storied career across TV news, d...

Kate Wolf speaks with the writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster about her most recent book Disorganisation and Sex, which collects a decade’s worth of Webster’s essays on themes such as desire, pleasure, fantasy, and the unconscious, and the often uneasy relationships we have with them in our everyday lives. Sex, Webster writes, is sometimes felt as a curse, not a cure—and by extension its dis...

Hilton Als, joins Eric Newman to discuss his new book, My Pinup, a hybrid memoir-essay that explores questions of race, desire, and autonomy through an intense and intimate focus on Hilton's relationship with and to polymath musician and sexual dynamo Prince. By looking at Prince as a subject of queer desire and being and at his recording career as a study in the struggle between Black excellence...

Dionne Irving joins Eric Newman to talk about her debut story collection, The Islands. Moving across the United States, Canada, Jamaica, England, and France, the collection explores the female characters’ experience of diasporic dislocation, that feeling of never quite fitting into the rhythms of either their adopted culture or their culture of origin. Dionne’s stories reveal origin — that foundat...