LARB Radio Hour

Nov 19 2024 100 ep. 52 mins 718
LARB Radio Hour Podcast artwork

The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.

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Politics on the Couch: Psychoanalysis and the Presidency

Nov 19 2024 48 mins  
In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman are joined by writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster to talk about the role of psychoanalysis in politics. Their discussion emerges from Webster's essay, “Freudulence,” published in the latest issue LARB Quarterly Journal, which reassesses a controversial book co-authored by Sigmund Freud that gives a psychoan

Mosab Abu Toha's "Forest of Noise"

Nov 15 2024 52 mins  
Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. He 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 rebuild. Toha recently published a series of essays about Gaza in the New Yorker and his work h

Forrest Gander's "Mojave Ghost"

Nov 08 2024 53 mins  
Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, and translator Forrest Gander to discuss his new book, Mojave Ghost. A long poem situated along the 800-mile length of the San Andreas Fault, which runs from Northern California where Gander lives to his birthplace in the Southern California Desert, the work reflects both exterior and interior landscapes

The Fight to Unionize Amazon

Nov 01 2024 54 mins  
Kate Wolf speaks with filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing about their new documentary Union, which is out in theaters now. It follows, in real time, the forming of the first ever Amazon union in the country, the ALU, at the JKF8 plant in Staten Island. Later in the conversation Chris Smalls, the president of ALU, joins as well. Chris began to petition for the Amazon union afte

Simon Critchley's "Mysticism"

Oct 25 2024 61 mins  
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with writer and scholar Simon Critchley about his new book, Mysticism. Defining mysticism not as a religion but as a “tendency, a distillation of existing devotional practice,” the book begins by considering some of the great mystics of the Christian tradition. These include Critchley's favorite mystic, Julian of Norwich, known as the first woma

Alexis Pauline Gumbs' "Survival Is A Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde"

Oct 18 2024 66 mins  
Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Survival Is A Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. A deeply researched and impressionistic biography of one of the most iconic figures of 20th century Black, queer, and feminist thought, Survival Is A Promise is a love letter to Lorde, pushing past her broad circulation in social media memes, inspirational quotes,

Deborah Levy's "The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies"

Oct 11 2024 47 mins  
Kate Wolf speaks to the author Deborah Levy about her new book, a collection of essays called The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies. The piece collected here cite Levy’s early influences from French writers like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras to JG Ballard and Anna Quinn. The collection also moves through snippets of Levy’s life: her relationship to her

Rumaan Alam's "Entitlement"

Oct 04 2024 56 mins  
In this special episode of the LARB Radio Hour and LARB Book Club, Medaya Ocher talks with Rumaan Alam about his new novel, Entitlement. We begin with the story of Brooke, a product of the upper middle class, who works for an aging billionaire looking for places to give away his fortune. Brooke comes to recognize all that she could do with a vast fortune of her own. Taut, unsett

Emily Witt's "Health and Safety: A Breakdown"

Sep 27 2024 52 mins  
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher talk to Emily Witt about her latest book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown. A personal history that reflects on this past turbulent decade, the book begins right before the election of Donald J. Trump, a time when Witt finds herself ever more drawn to Brooklyn’s underground techno music scene. Quitting Wellbutrin in 2012, she’d already started experimen

Garth Greenwell's "Small Rain"

Sep 20 2024 61 mins  
Eric Newman speaks with Garth Greenwell about his latest novel, Small Rain. The novel picks up the story of the same unnamed narrator from Greenwell's earlier novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, a poet and teacher now in his forties and settled down with his partner in the Midwest. Their placid life is upended when a sudden and excruciating pain sends the narrator to the hos