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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Eric Newman speaks with Chang-Rae Lee about his latest novel, A Tender Age, a coming-of-age novel centered on Jeon-Gi, the troubled son of hardworking Korean immigrants, who must navigate the meaning of masculinity, desire, and identity as he begins the journey into adulthood. After a violent outburst that lands him in reform school, Jeon-Gi has the opportunity for a reset at a church sleepaway…
Claudia Rankine joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new book, Triage. It follows the lifelong friendship between its narrator and someone she refers to as the "theorist." The two meet in college and begin to play a game called "collapse" — they simply fall to the floor whenever they see each other. In this game, Rankine finds an apt metaphor for the ongoing political struggles that…
The writer and poet Eleni Sikelianos joins Kate Wolf to discuss Memory Rehearsal , a hybrid-memoir that tracks the history of her great-grandparents, the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and the American actress, writer, and artist Eva Palmer. The book probes ancestry, legacy, ancient history, and queer life at the turn of last century. Using a variety of narrative methods, Sikelianos enacts the long…
Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body , which interrogates contemporary notions of how women's bodies work. The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work,…
Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America . Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's…
This week we are listening back to Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv as she discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us . The book collects the stories of people whose mental health crises subvert our usual understanding of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. It begins with Aviv herself, who was hospitalized at…
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 drowning…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
