LARB Radio Hour

Los Angeles Review of Books
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LARB Radio Hour

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.

  1. 4 HR. AGO

    Simon Critchley's "Mysticism"

    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 woman to ever write a book in English, Margery Kempe, Christina the Astonishing, and Meister Echkhart, a German theologian who influenced philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger and was tried as a heretic shortly after his death by Pope John in 1329. But more than a history or survey of mysticism, Critchley's book is invested in isolating the loss of self and experience of ecstasy its practitioners describe, and looking for resonance within contemporary culture. He examines the work of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard, and the musician Nick Cave, suggesting that mysticism lives on as a secular aesthetic experience in the “world of enchantment opened in art, poetry and—especially—music.” Also, Deborah Levy, the author of The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, returns to recommend two books scheduled to be published next year, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Carastrophe by Jamieson Webster, and Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs.

    1h 1m

  2. OCT 18

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

    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, and other forms of contemporary iconography. Gumbs’ book locates the tectonic forces Lorde at once brought into view and moved through herself. Also, Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement, returns to recommend Visitors by Anita Brookner.

    1h 7m

  3. OCT 11

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

    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 mother, her youth in dreary London, her abiding interest in surrealism and psychoanalysis, the way inspiration strikes and then takes shape for her novels, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasures of food and nature. In her review of the book for LARB, Grace Linden writes: “It is evident to everyone who reads Levy that language is her plaything….her words are lit from within.” Also, Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety: A Breakdown. returns to recommend A Song for the River by Philip Connors.

    48 min

  4. OCT 4

    Rumaan Alam's "Entitlement"

    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, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination. Also Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain, returns to recommend Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece.

    56 min

  5. SEP 27

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

    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 experimenting with psychedelics, but once she’s going out dancing all night, her drug use transforms from a focused ritual under the rubric of the vaguely therapeutic to something more like hedonism: a brief accessing of utopia one party at a time. Then she meets a DJ named Andrew who's at the heart of the scene, and the kind of conventional domestic life she thought she was foregoing suddenly comes into focus, before the pandemic and social uprising of 2020 arrive and change everything. Health and Safety is about trying to find different ways to survive, live, and make family, as well as the changing landscape of New York, the ingenuity and creativity of promoters and DJs, and the shaky line between the collective and the individual in a world gone mad. Also, Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television, returns to recommend Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace.

    52 min

  6. SEP 20

    Garth Greenwell's "Small Rain"

    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 hospital, where he's diagnosed with an aortic tear -- a life-threatening condition. Unfolding from this point, the novel explores how the narrator navigates his recovery as he's treated in a cramped hospital room in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. Dilating on the power of art and intimacy to buoy us up in moments of extreme suffering, as well as the moments in which suffering overwhelms the transcendent capacity of art, Small Rain reckons with how we make our way through the agonies and ecstasies, unique and mundane, of life itself. Also, Sofia Samatar, author of Opacities, returns to recommend two books by Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives.

    1h 1m

  7. SEP 13

    Katherine Bucknell's "Christopher Isherwood Inside Out"

    Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Katherine Bucknell about her new biography of Christpoher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. The book moves along the horizons of Isherwood's many journeys as a pathbreaking British writer whose work excavated fascist terrors and queer pleasures alike: in plays, films, memoir, voluminous diaries, and celebrated novels such as Goodbye to Berlin and A Single Man. Bucknell's biography examines the tectonic forces of the 20th century that shaped Isherwood's life and career, spanning two world wars, gay liberation, the AIDS crisis, and the spiritual awakening in America of the 1950s and '60s. It brings into intimate relief an enigmatic writer whose experience shuttled between the visceral physicality of erotic desire and the gossamer abstractions of ascetic life, often-conflicted, but always yearning for deeper understanding, and committing everything to the page.

    59 min

  8. SEP 6

    Danzy Senna's ''Colored Television"

    Kate Wolf talks to Danzy Senna about her latest novel, Colored Television. It follows a writer named Jane Gibson who’s finally making headway on her second book, a magnus opus her husband calls the “mulatto War and Peace” that’s been nearly a decade in the making. Jane’s helped along by her family’s stay in the tony, Eastside Los Angeles home of a friend of hers—a former fiction writer who long ago sold out to work in TV. Jane and her husband, Lenny, help themselves to this friend's wine and clothes, and Jane yearns for his financial stability. When her novel is rejected by her agent, she decides to try on his career in Hollywood as well. Colored Television is a hilarious unpacking of class, marriage, race, midlife, exploitation, Los Angeles, and what it takes to be an artist when no one cares about your work. Also, Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman, returns to recommend a trilogy of historical novels by Sharon Kay Penman: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning.

    51 min
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4.9
out of 5
122 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Los Angeles Review of Books
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2024
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    LARB Radio Hour

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