LA Review of Books

In this week’s episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributor Gideon Jacobs for a discussion about the power of images in the era of Trump. Recorded in the hours after Trump's inauguration, Gideon and the hosts talk about how Trump and his associates use images and spectacle, the flattening and coarsening of our politics, and the possibilities for counter-imaging in dark times. You can read Gideon's essay, “Trump L’Oeil,” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In this week’s episode, we are talking about the wildfires that have ravaged LA. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to author David L. Ulin about Los Angeles as a place forged in precarity and grit, as well as some of the local literature of disaster, and what it means to accept the city as somewhere catastrophe can strike in an instant. Next they speak with Adrian Scott Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, about some of the historic structures that have been lost in the fire, historical and cultural memory, and how to honor the history of the city. Please find a full list of resources from Mutual Aid LA on lareviewofbooks.org. The Los Angeles Review of Books is hoping for collective safety and looking forward to a communal recovery.

On July 18th, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Berggruen Institute hosted a panel discussion titled "Writing Climate Futures," featuring David Wallace-Wells, Jenny Offill, Bharat Venkat, and Jonathan Blake. As our planet faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency by the day. Through education, envisioning fictitious new worlds, and pushing forward the public discourse, writing holds the power to move the conversation we have around the future of our planet. LARB and The Berggruen Institute convened exciting voices in the climate movement from across genres to discuss how writing can enact change. David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Penguin Random House, 2019), which argues that the state of the world, environmentally speaking, is “worse, much worse, than you think.” He is a weekly columnist and staff writer for the New York Times, deputy editor of New York Magazine, and he was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology. Jenny Offill is the author of three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and most recently, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She teaches at Bard College and lives in upstate New York. Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His forthcoming title—tentatively titled Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. Dr. Venkat is the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab, which investigates thermal inequality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from biology and history to anthropology and urban planning. Jonathan Blake directs the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute. He is the coauthor, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises and author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland.

In this encore special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the case for and against giving up—on life, vices, dreams, creative pursuits, jobs, relationships, exercise, and work. Their conversation is inspired by Adam Phillips’s recent book On Giving Up, in which the psychoanalyst observes that “we give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” The hosts discuss what is acceptable to give up, their own fears of failure, both fictional and real-life inspirational quitters, and whether Bartleby was onto something when he said he’d prefer not to.

Ariana Reines, a celebrated poet, playwright, and recipient of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize, dives deep into her latest work, Wave of Blood. She reflects on the atrocities in Gaza and her own familial grief related to the Holocaust. Reines discusses the intersection of art and time, emphasizing literature's role in processing collective trauma. The conversation touches on spirituality in creativity, the struggles of writing amid chaos, and the transformative power of poetry as a means of self-exploration and healing.

It’s time for our favorite episode of the year. Hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss their favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, scandals and (new category!) memories of 2024. For a full list of picks, visit https://lareviewofbooks.org/podcasts/larb-radio-hour/

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by writer Kathryn Davis, the acclaimed author of many novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, The Thin Place, Versailles, Duplex, and Silk Road, and a memoir, Aurelia Aurélia. Davis discusses her novel Versailles, originally published in 2002, recently reissued by Graywolf. Versailles is the story of Marie Antoinette, beginning when she’s a teenager traveling to France. The book is a lyrical meditation on personhood and girlhood, amidst the objects and structures of power, politics and history.

Kate Wolf speaks to filmmaker Raoul Peck about his latest documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, out in theaters now. The film excavates the life and work of Ernest Cole, the South African photographer, using his own writing and a recently rediscovered archive of his photographs. Cole was one of the first people to capture the brutal realities of the apartheid regime on film. After escaping South Africa for the United States, he published his landmark book on apartheid, House of Bondage (1967). Years later, his career languished, and he became homeless and died of cancer in 1990. Peck’s film looks closely at the conditions that thwarted Cole’s promise as an artist, the legacies of racial segregation, and the devastating ways they still play out today. Also, Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF), returns to recommend The Long Form by Kate Brigg. Plus Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America (and producer of our show) stops by to talk about the fate of progressive activism under the incoming Trump administration

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by writer and artist Renee Gladman to discuss the re-release of “To After That (TOAF)” and her latest book, “My Lesbian Novel.” TOAF focuses on one of Gladman's abandoned manuscripts, working through its creation and revision in an attempt to parse what literary failure means. “My Lesbian Novel” completely reinvents and reimagines the lesbian romance. Gladman discusses form and its possibilities, as well as the artist's struggle to realize the vision of a project. Also, Edwin Frank, author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, returns to recommend Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the editorial director of the New York Review of Books and the founder of the NYRB classic series, Edwin Frank, to discuss his first work of nonfiction, the book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel. Taking the novel as the preeminent art form of the last century, Frank’s book charts its winding path of development, beginning with Fyodor Dostoevskey’s Notes from the Underground, published in 1864, and ending with W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz which arrived more than a 100 years later. Along the way, Frank looks at the many different forms and categories great 20th century novels take, from the distinctly modern and popular science fiction of H.G. Wells to the “minorness” of Franz Kafka; the historical precision of Thomas Mann to Gerturde Stein’s stress on sentence itself, and James Joyce’s stress on words. The book connects an eclectic collection of authors by way of style, sensibility, reception, temporality, and perhaps most importantly the influence of cataclysmic world events on their work and the shaping of their work on the world.