LA Review of Books

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by Hogir Hirori to talk about his latest film, Sabaya, which documents the heroic efforts to rescue women and girls from ISIS slavery at a refugee camp in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. Sabaya, which premiered at Sundance and is now available nationwide, is a moving and visceral documentary that follows a team of volunteers from the Yazidi Home Center in northern Syria as they try to rescue Yazidi girls, some as young as seven, who have been kidnapped and sold into sexual and physical slavery by ISIS. Armed with just a mobile phone, a handgun, and information from “infiltrators” indicating where the captured girls are being held, Mahmud Ziyad and his team face incredible odds. After the rescued girls return to the Yazidi Home Center, we witness their palpable relief and learn of the horrific treatment they’ve been forced to endure. Sabaya is a harrowing story of both the best and worst of humanity, told from a place, and by a people, who are too often just words in headlines across the world. It also testifies to the power of documentaries and to the courage of filmmakers, who put their lives on the line to tell stories the world needs to hear. Also, Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies, returns to recommend German author Anna Seghers’s Transit, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, about a refugee attempting to leave Vichy France in 1944 through the port of Marseilles. Katie also recommends German director Christian Petzold’s 2018 film adaptation of the same name, which is set in contemporary France.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Katie Kitamura to discuss her latest novel, Intimacies, an existential thriller that follows an unnamed narrator who has recently moved to The Hague to serve as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Worldly, well-travelled, and multilingual, she excels at her new job, but grows increasingly uneasy. A similar sense of discomfort permeates her close relationships with an art curator, and with her love interest, a married man. Yet it is the Court, where she is interpreting for a former President of a West African nation who has ordered the carrying out of unbelievable atrocities, that gives rise to her strongest anxieties and to her questions about power, confrontations with violence, and the possibility of neutrality. Also Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, returns to recommend Anne Michaels’ award-winning 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Rivka Galchen, whose new novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, is set in the Holy Roman Empire in 17th-century Germany, amid the plague and the Thirty Years’ War. It fictionalizes the real-life story of Katharina Kepler, the mother of astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler. Katharina, an elderly widow who seems to care most for her cow Chamomile, is accused of being a witch by another woman in the small town of Leonberg. Soon everyone in town is testifying to Katharina’s wickedness. Her own side of the story is told by her neighbor, Simon, who acts as her guardian — but as a bookseller later tells him, “People don’t like an old lady’s story.” The novel is told through both fictional testimonials as well as actual translated historical documents. Also, Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl, returns to recommend Raven Leilani’s acclaimed first novel, Luster.

Boris Dralyuk and Medaya Ocher are joined by author Claire Fuller to discuss her new novel, Unsettled Ground, this season’s selection for the LARB Book Club. Born in Oxfordshire, Claire Fuller is the author of four novels: her Desmond Elliot Prize-winning debut Our Endless Numbered Days, as well as Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, and her latest, the griping, intensely evocative, and often unsettling Unsettled Ground, a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The book begins with the death of a woman, which sets her 51-year-old twin children on a difficult journey of survival and discovery.  Also, Kate Zambreno, author of To Write As If Already Dead, returns to recommend Bhanu Kapil's book of poetry How to Wash a Heart.

Eric and Medaya are joined by Zakiya Dalila Harris to discuss The Other Black Girl; her sharp and often funny debut novel that centers large contemporary questions about the politics of race as it encounters diversity, inclusivity, and representation through the unique lens of working in the publishing industry.  The novel opens from the perspective of Nella Rogers, the only Black girl in the editorial department at a prestigious publishing house.  Nella has to navigate the familiar landmines of race in the modern workplace: microaggressions from her white coworkers, diversity initiatives that no one takes seriously, and the daily exhaustion of navigating the elite cultural spaces she's managed to gain access to but which definitely are not built nor maintained for her. Then, shortly after Nella raises concerns about racist stereotypes in the manuscript of one of the publisher's most famous white male authors, she starts receiving anonymous notes telling her to leave the publisher if she knows what's good for her. What was previously claustrophobic and uninviting begins to feel much more sinister.  Bouncing between mystery, satire, and an indictment of the modern publishing industry, THE OTHER BLACK GIRL keeps the reader guessing right up to its haunting end and we're thrilled to have Zakiya here with us to break it all down. Also, Davarian L Baldwin, the author of The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, returns to recommend Ralph Ellison's ever-brilliant 1952 novel, Invisible Man.

Kate and Eric speak with writer and historian Davarian L. Baldwin, the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College. His newest book is In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, an exploration of the often uneasy relationship between universities and the cities they inhabit. The book draws on numerous examples, such as Yale, Columbia, NYU, University of Chicago and even Trinity College, to show the impact schools have on their surrounding neighborhoods. As often as not, these universities are drivers of inequality, displacement, and gentrification. In an era of post-industrialization, universities have replaced factories to regularly become the largest employers of their cities, with tax-exempt status to boot, giving them an undue amount of power, while their focus remains on self-enrichment.  Also, we are joined by Susan Bernofsky, author of Clairvoyant of the Small, a book length study of the the life and works of Robert Walser. Susan recommends Kate  Zambreno's To Write as if Already Dead, which is itself a study of the work of author and artist Herve Guibert, who died in his early thirties from AIDS.

Eric and Medaya talk with queer writer Kristen Arnett about her knew novel, With Teeth, which centers on the troubled relationships between Sammie, her wife Monica and their son, Samson.  As Samson grows up, it becomes clear that he isn't quite like the other children. He is emotionally aloof and prone o outbursts. As a teenager, he's even more of a mystery: a loner and a threat to the image of a normal family that Monica is so desperate to present to the world. As the stay at home Mom, and narrative focal point, Sammie is tasked with trying to understand both her mysterious son; and herself, as her marriage and seemingly every else begins to deteriorate around her - or so it seems. As With Teeth spins through its insightful portrayal of queer parenthood, the struggle for identity and autonomy amidst the disintegration of a marriage, Kristen Arnett keeps us guessing until the final moment when it appears that everything we think we know about Sammie, Monica, and Samson might be wrong. Also, Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness, returns to recommend two recent novels: The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter; and The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey.

On this week's show we're joined by two authors, Kate Zambreno and Susan Bernofsky, who have both written a magisterial work about a past literary master. First, Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf talk with Kate Zambreno about To Write as if Already Dead, a study of the writing and photography of Herve Guibert (1955-1991); and, in particular, his work To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which documents Guibert's diagnosis and disintegration from HIV, and portrays a character based upon his close friend, philosopher Michel Foucault. Then, Kate is joined by Susan Bernofsky to discuss Clairvoyant of the Small, her biography of Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956), one of the most influential modernist writers in the German language.  Susan’s biography portrays Walser not just as the eccentric outsider figure he’s often made out to be, but as a fully formed artist, with serious creative aspirations, proliferate charms, and many complications. Clairvoyant of the Small offers a nuanced picture of his turbulent life—much of its drama stemming from financial precarity, family legacy, and the sweeping pendulums of early twentieth century European history—as it also illuminates the complexity and beauty of his writing.

Author Joan Silber, whose previous work Improvement won both the National Book Critic’s Circle Aware and the Pen Faulkner Award, joins Kate and Eric to discuss her new novel Secrets of Happiness, a multi-vocal story that radiates out from a single family dealing with a father's intimate betrayal.  He has a secret family that he told nobody about.  As it moves across characters and continents, Secrets of Happiness considers the weight of love, family, and other attachments in a world where nothing is as it seems, and happiness is a fleeting experience best savored in the presence. Also, Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993, returns to recommend Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir as well as Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones.

Professor Carol Anderson, whose previous work White Rage won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, joins Kate and Eric to discuss her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.  The Second takes a long historical look at the emergence and development of the second amendment—"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"—against the backdrop of anti-Black violence, fear, and public policy. Professor Anderson reveals the various ways in which slavery—and, in particular, white slaveowners' fears of slave insurrection—shaped the Second amendment from the very beginning, with long-reaching effects that we continue to face today, a year after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. America's most infamous constitutional amendment was not about guns, but about the racial divides through which a white man wielding a gun receives Constitutionally-lauded legal protections, while in the hands of a Black man in America, a firearm can so often be a death sentence. Also, Jacqueline Rose, author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women, returns to recommend both Anna Burns' The Milkman, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, as well as Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.