LA Review of Books

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, opens with a grim reflection on the spate of suicides that darkened his high school years. Teens who took their lives on the train tracks over which Leland Stanford built Palo Alto and much of the booming Western economy that has made the Bay Area and California in general such a dominant pole of global wealth, innovation, and the allure of good, easy living. It's that darker side to this history that Malcolm brings into focus throughout PALO ALTO, a history of Silicon Valley that traces the region's celebrated ideologies, technologies, and policies to its roots in Anglo settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the ravages of an extractive system that builds glittering new worlds and opportunities for a few, too often at the expense of everyone else up to and including the earth itself. Malcolm explores how the histories of big tech, the military industrial complex, and Stanford University converge in the story of Palo Alto, braided together in a way that at once builds the world we have today at the cost of a potentially better one. Also, Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still With You, returns to recommend three books: The Return by Hisham Matar, Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, and A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo.

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 dish on their faves and flops from the year in film, including The Fabelmans, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tár, The Whale, Don't Worry Darling, M3GAN, and much more.

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 never met. The elder Emmanuel disappeared after fighting in Nigeria’s Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, a conflict that lasted from 1967 to 1970, and came on the heels of Nigeria’s independence from British Rule. Though it touched the lives of a significant amount of the population, and killed over a million Igbo people, the war is still shrouded in mystery within the country, and like Iduma’s uncle, the fates of many of its casualties remain unknown. In I Am Still With You, Iduma meets the lacunae of his uncle’s life head on, in turn confronting other painful absences within his family with a thoughtful introspection, using history, literature, the archive, and vivid encounters from everyday life to make a path across the abyss.

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 museums they fund in recognition of the damage their highly lucrative opioid OxyContin has wreaked in communities across America. Blending an intimate and revealing look at Goldin's with footage of the group's actions against the Sacklers, this moving documentary offers a powerful account of art, activism, and the struggle to be heard above the clamor of wealth and the cultural and political power it concentrates. Also, Ann Goldstein, translator of Alba de Cespedes' Forbidden Notebook, returns to recommend The Cazalet Chronicles, a five book series, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

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 translate Ferrante’s entire Neapolitan trilogy, starting with My Brilliant Friend. Goldstein’s latest translation, Forbidden Notebook, is a novel written by the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. First published in Italy in the 1950s, the novel centers around a woman who buys a notebook on a whim, and begins to furtively write in it, hiding it and herself from her husband and her children. Through the notebook, she begins to learn more about her desire, her guilt, and the sacrifices she has made for her family, her past, and her future. Also, Maggie Millner, author of Couplets, returns to recommend The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme by Cat Fitzpatrick.

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 affair. What follows is an exploration of selfhood — a body and heart turned inside out. Millner writes about the ways in which we discover ourselves, the power other people have over us, about being both subject and object. Couplets is about relationships, queerness, sex and desire, as well as the very act of writing all of that down and turning it into poetry. Also, De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of Decent People, returns to recommend What Napolean Could Not Do by DK Nnuro.

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 plenty of people to suspect of having wanted to kill them, including their half-brother Lymp, whose fiancé Jo is determined to prove his innocence; Eunice, an acquaintance from church whose teenage son Marian has wronged; Savannah, who was close friends with Marva and shared a drug habit with her; and Savannah’s father, Ted, who served as the landlord of the siblings’ pediatric practice in town. Alternating perspectives between many of these characters, the novel untangles the tightly knit and interrelated stories of people in a community who know each other intimately—sometimes too intimately for comfort—and considers the ways in which the need for privacy and autonomy can corrode into secrecy, even conspiracy, as well as the harmful effects of racism and homophobia across decades. Also, Kathryn Ma, author of The Chinese Groove, returns to recommend Gish Jen's short story collection Thank You, Mr. Nixon.

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 determination, Shelly works to change his fortune and repair fractured family bonds. At once a harrowing immigrant tale and a humorous romp through cultural misunderstandings, The Chinese Groove explores the everyday negotiations of romance and family ties, as well as the power of belief that helps us make our way through the world without breaking. Also, Curtis White, author of Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse, returns to recommend two classic authobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, and The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton.

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 Stephen Batchelor, who argue for Buddhism without beliefs; to its reduction to being solely a matter of neuroscience. White emphasizes the more unruly, unmaterialistic aspects of the dharma—defamiliarization, passion, and metaphysical consciousness— all of which he argues share a deep connection to the work of Western artists, musicians, and poets. Writing with a fiery skepticism about techno-capitalism as the only solution to solving the world’s crises, White advocates for Buddhism’s place as a form of resistance and a way to think against the status quo. Also, Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, returns to recommend V.S. Naipaul's A Million Mutinies Now.

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 change in a divided America. It is a fabulous study, full of interesting testimonials from hundreds of hours of interviews with Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza, Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders’ campaign workers, and many more. The Persuaders goes deep on what helps change hearts and minds as our fragile nation struggles to find common ground. Also, Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, returns to recommend Patricia Likes to Cuddle by Samantha Allen. (To sign up for the LARB Book Club membership, visit www.shop.lareviewofbooks.org/join)