LA Review of Books

This week, we have filmmaker Garrett Bradley discussing her new documentary Time, which follows a larger-than-life matriarch, fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. Bradley discusses the idea of time in her film — time served, the slowness of justice and the accumulation of grief and joy. Later in the episode, we have one of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, alias Kathe Kollwitz, on to discuss the legendary Guerrilla Girl movement, misogyny and racism in the arts, the battles ahead and the battles won.

Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine,  joins Eric and Kate to discuss the “social industry" — online platforms that monetize and manipulate our need to share our lives online. Seymour moves beyond the negative effects social media has on us as individuals and as a community, bringing into view a bigger picture: the social, economic, and political perils that are now at our fingertips. Also, Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies, returns to recommend Saul Bellow's Ravelstein.

Suzanne Nossel, of PEN America, on the decimation of the local news landscape.

A special episode, featuring Alain Mabanckou, author of "Black Moses," our latest pick for LARB’s members-only Book Club. Mabanckou is an award-winning Francophone novelist who was born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966 and grew up in a time of political upheaval and repression. Mabanckou joins LARB editors to discuss his novel, his childhood, and his experience of religious schooling and revolution. He also discusses his relationship with the French language, his move to the US, and his thoughts on contemporary American politics. Also, former LARB intern and writer Yi Wei returns to recommend Emily Jungmin Yoon's collection of poems, A Cruelty Special to Our Species.

Akhtar talks about his new book Homeland Elegies, a hybrid of memoir, cultural criticism, psychological study, and loosely plotted novel that uniquely responds to the chaos and confusion of contemporary American life. The hosts also talk with Akhtar about the political, social, and affective entanglements of diaspora consciousness and experience (in this case, for Muslims from Pakistan living in the US), and about the Whitmanian fantasy of a diverse nation. Also, Vivian Gornick, author of Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, returns to recommend a collection she has returned to her entire life, Natalia Ginzburg's The Little Virtues.

This week, we’re joined by acclaimed writer and critic Vivian Gornick. Gornick began her career in 1969, as a staff writer for The Village Voice. Since then she has published a number of nonfiction books, like The Situation and the Story, the memoirs Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman in the City, as well as essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, which were both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader. Gornick looks back on her long writing career, and talks to us about how feminism oriented her life and her reading habits. Also, Arundhati Roy returns to recommend Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler.

Author, activist, and novelist Arundhati Roy joins us from Delhi to discuss her new collection of essays, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Roy is well known for her impassioned political writing, as well as her two novels, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker in 1997. She talks with us about the rise of Indian nationalism, Modi’s descent into fascism, the oppression of Muslims in India, and the role of fiction and literature in the world today. Also, Yaa Gyasi, author of Transcendent Kingdom, returns to recommend Saidiya Hartman's groundbreaking Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.

Author Sigrid Nunez, who won the National Book Award for 2018's The Friend, joins Kate and Eric to talk about her new novel, What Are You Going Through, which focuses on the narrator's close relationship to a friend with a terminal illness. The work revolves around witnessing the lives and needs of others; intertwines with themes of friendship, mortality, bravery, and even transcendence, amidst the commonplace. The conversation touches on how we contend with death in our society, and in relation to the pandemic. Nunez discusses contemporaries who have inspired her as they faced their mortality. Also, Joni Murphy, author of Talking Animals, returns to recommend Matthew Goulish's 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance.

Yaa Gyasi’s latest novel, Transcendent Kingdom, takes on family and the gulfs of diaspora experience through an intimate narrative of a neuroscientist trying to come to grips with her brother’s drug overdose and her mother’s crippling depression. Gyasi joins us to reflect on the different ways in which faith and science attempt to answer the unfathomable and inchoate, and talks about the addiction narrative, so often seen through the lens of white, rural poverty. Gyasi also describes a friendship that led her to fascinating impasses in what remain fundamental mysteries in the neuroscience research on addiction. Also, Kelli Jo Ford, author of Crooked Hallelujah, returns to recommend David Heska Wanbli Weiden's highly acclaimed first novel, Winter Counts.

Hosts Kate and Medaya talk to Kelli Jo Ford, author of the new novel, Crooked Hallelujah, a multi-generational story about Justine — a mixed-blood Cherokee woman — and her daughter Reney. Kelli Jo Ford, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, discusses her love of landscape, her childhood, and how she has come to consider about faith, even in the most difficult of times. Also, Melissa Faliveno, author of the collection of essays Tomboyland, returns to recommend Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon.