LA Review of Books

Tom Lutz opens the show with a spirited introduction of co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher and author Leslie Jamison, who has a new collection of essays: Make It Scream, Make it Burn. Jamison describes her empathic approach to her eclectic subjects, her relationship to the body and how she thinks about writing and authorship. Also, Jenny Odell returns to recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.

Co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by filmmaker, Bong Joon Ho, whose latest film is Parasite. Parasite has already gathered a wide range of acclaim, winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and breaking specialty box office records. Bong joins us to discuss how he grew up, how he came up with the idea for the movie, and how he understands the relationship between the rich and the poor. Bong’s previous films include Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Also, Sarah M Broom, author of The Yellow House, returns to recommend The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald.

Host Eric Newman is joined by Stephen Van Dyck, author of People I Met on the Internet, a series of narrative vignettes derived from the list Van Dyck kept for over a decade of all the men he first met online. Van Dyck talks about how internet chat rooms and blogs offered him a new safe world of contact as a shy queer teen; the unique counterintuitive intimacy of online encounters, and how sex often operates as a backdrop for more interesting experiences. Also, Shelly Oria, editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement, returns to recommend the books authored by the contributors to the collection including Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Shappell; The Bed Moved: Stories by Rebecca Schiff; See Through: Stories by Nelly Reifler; The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt; Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan; and Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury by Honor Moore. This is the second episode in our series on LA and Southern California writers, artists and filmmakers. This episode of the LARB Radio Hour is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. Any findings, opinions, or conclusions contained herein are not necessarily those of the California Arts Council.

Co-Hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Shelly Oria to talk about her new anthology Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the #MeToo Movement. The collection includes essays, poetry, and fiction around harassment, abuse and the underlying power dynamics in our everyday lives. Oria explains how the collection came together and the need for diverse voices and styles in our fraught political moment. Also, Tea Obreht, author of Inland, returns again to recommend Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's short story collection Friday Black.

Co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with Sarah M Broom about her latest work The Yellow House; a moving and beautiful book rooted in one place, which combines memoir, archival history of her family, and a story of her growing up in New Orleans East. Sarah explains how the culture of this forgotten part of the city - isolated by the industrial canal, accessible only by the High Rise bridge - came alive in and around her family's home. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans East and destroyed The Yellow House; but through days of interviews and years of research Sarah conjures them back to life, reviving her large extended family, re-animating a lost world rife with character, tragedy, wisdom, and love. Also, Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife and Inland, returns to recommend Salvatore Scibona's stunning second novel, The Volunteer.

Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, joins co-hosts Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf to asses the state of the human soul in the age of social media reproduction. The verdict is clear: we need strategies of resistance. Constantly tracked and hunted by the digital panopticon, we have no time for reverie, reflection, letting go, or just being. We desperately need Nothing, which is everything. Jenny shares details of her own liberation. Also, Susan Straight, author of In The Country of Women, returns to honor Toni Morrison by sharing how she has read her favorite book every single year since she was twelve, Morrison's luminous second novel, Sula.

What if that most celebrated of American genres, the Western, was stripped of its traditional tropes? Gone are the heroic lonesome gunslingers, the helpless women on the homesteads, the rampant outlaws, and cliched representations of inidigenous people. Is it possible that a such novel, rooted in greater historical accuracy, could prove equally (if not more) engaging? Tea Obreht's Inland accepts this challenge; and she joins co-hosts Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman to explain how she came to tell the story of two women, 40 years apart, on the western frontier. There's heartbreak, bravery, ghosts and camels because, when it comes to the western, reality is stranger than mythology. Also, writer and translator Magdalena Edwards, whose article for LARB "Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World" became a viral sensation, returns to direct folks to an astonishing filmed interview of Clarice Lispector, the only one available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwGLBpULs

The redemptive power of oral history is at the heart of Susan Straight's new memoir, In The Country Of Women; and also in this installment of the LARB Radio Hour, the first in a special series featuring Los Angeles authors. As Susan relates the amazing stories of the women in her family from across many generations to host Kate Wolf, the spirit and character of these women is conjured back to life. Our troubled times are presaged in the tragedies and violence encountered by Susan's ancestors; but the promise, not yet extinguished, of this blood-stained land shines through from these women of the past to their sisters in the present. Also, filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, whose latest film is American Factory, return to recommend four books: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead; The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson; and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This episode of the LARB Radio Hour is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. Any findings, opinions, or conclusions contained herein are not necessarily those of the California Arts Council.

We have two great interviews this week. First up, Magdalena Edwards joins co-hosts Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss her article for LARB "Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World," which has gone viral. This dialogue is no less gripping, as Magdalena outlines her experience working with a publishing industry icon as the hired translator for Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier; and what that harrowing experience led her to reveal about the sordid underbelly of intellectual accreditation. Suffice to say, the powerful readily exploit the vulnerable; but, in this case, the pen and the podcast are gaining the upper hand. Then, Kate and Medaya are joined by Jess Row to discuss his new groundbreaking work White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American imagination. Row brilliantly critiques a broad range of white American authors as he advocates for reparative writing, in which writers use fiction "to approach each other again" in full awareness of America's long racist history. It's nothing short of a clarion call for authors to ply their trade in the fight against Trump and the on-going racist/enthno-nationalist revival that he leads. (p.s. The amount of great literature referenced and discussed in both halves of this podcast would satisfy anyone's late summer reading list.)

LARB's Medaya Ocher talks with Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert about their new film which documents the recent history of an American factory in Dayton, OH that was closed last decade and re-opened this decade under Chinese ownership and management. The tale is rife with paradoxes: the communists are the capitalists; and the workers from the land of Reagan and Trump channel socialist solidarity as they move to form a union against the wishes of the folks from the People's Republic. The conversation fills in the backstory; and, along the way, reveals what makes this highly political documentary so compelling - the filmmakers' drive to capture the humanity of all the players in the drama. Also, author Anthony McCann returns to recommend No One Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's beautifully written biography of Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the Mormon religion.