LARB Radio Hour

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...

Kate Wolf speaks to the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Suzy Hansen about her new book,  From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan.  It centers on Istanbul's neighborhood of  Karagümrük,  which Hansen first began reporting on in 2015. She writes about the influx of Syrian immigrants, the constant new construction, the conflicts between residents, and local mu...

Acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel joins Kate Wolf to discuss her documentary  Nuestra Tierra,  which follows a 2018 trial in Argentina over a crime in the remote northwestern region of Tucaman. In a showdown between a local landowner and the indigenous people of the area, a man named Javier Chacobar was shot and killed and two other community members were severely wounded; the crime footage was...

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by French writer Ann Scott, whose cult novel,  Superstars , was just translated into English.  Superstars  depicts Paris' queer techno scene—the music, the fashion, the drugs, as well as the passionate love affairs. Scott talks about that era and how she turned heartbreak into art. In the second half of our show, Eric Newman speaks with queer historian Hugh Ry...

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by investigative journalist and  New Yorker  staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, to discuss his new book,  London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth . The book begins with the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London, a tragedy that soon reveals a web of deception, wealth, and hidden influence. Keefe traces Za...

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Karan Mahajan about his latest novel, The Complex . Taking its name from the collection of buildings that patriarch SP Chopra built for his family in Delhi amid the fallout of the 1947 partition crisis, the novel explores how Chopra's descendants struggle to escape the pull of an overbearing family and the long shadow cast by their storied ancestor. As they...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by photographer Reynaldo Rivera, whose work is featured on the cover of the LARB's spring issue, which celebrates 15 years of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rivera discusses his latest photobook, Propiedad Privada , edited by Lauren Mackler and Hedi El Kholti. Along with essays and stories by writers such as Constance Debre, Brontez Purnell, Colm Tóibín, and...

In this special episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the current political quagmire we find ourselves in through the frame of Anton Jäger's  Hyperpolitics.  Moving from the 1990s to the present, Jäger's new book charts how the US has moved away from the mass political movements that defined the early- and mid-twentieth century. Though voter turnout reached a record in 2020, wh...

Kate  Wolf is joined by veteran journalist Jonathan Shainin, who has worked at  The Guardian ,  The New Yorker , and  The Caravan , among other publications. Most recently, he is one of the founding editors of  Equator , a new magazine covering politics, culture and art, launched as a response to what the editors see as the dominant mode of Western media: "boilerplate journalism," "facile binaries...

In this special episode, host Eric Newman is joined by LARB Film Editors Annie Berke and Elizabeth Alsop and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a look back at the year in film and the current crop of Oscar nominees ahead of this year's awards.

Kate Wolf speaks to Vigdis Hjorth about her latest novel,  Repetition . In the book, the narrator, a novelist in her 60s, returns with an almost trancelike intensity to an episode from her youth in which she had her first sexual experience. Leading up to her encounter with the young man she loses her virginity to, she is subjected to extreme scrutiny by her mother, who questions her daughter's eve...

Eric Newman speaks with Lauren Groff about her latest story collection, "Brawler," an intimate and tender exploration of the all-too-human struggle to balance a life between compassion and hatred, love and vengeance. Groff shares her approach to writing stories, from the inception of a gossamer idea or mood through to the editorial grunt work of arranging and sharpening characters and sentences, a...

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the novelist and critic Namwali Serpell to discuss her latest book,  On Morrison . Through close readings of Toni Morrison's many novels, as well as her plays, short stories, and early work as a book editor, Serpell's book appraises how critics, scholars, and the public received Morrison across her career and beyond. The book rigorously examines Morrison's w...

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 attraction...

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 c...

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...