LA Review of Books

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Sarah Manguso about her new novel, Liars, which focuses on a marriage and its disintegration. Jane is a writer, and her husband John is an artist and entrepreneur. Even early on in their relationship, John gives Jane plenty of reason to doubt their future. By the time they have their first child, Jane is subsumed by the role of wife and mother, responsible for tackling the domestic work as well as the chaos of John’s finances and shifting career ambitions, and ultimately his betrayal. The novel focuses on the trespasses of a single relationship, but it’s also about art, wifehood, and the institution of marriage itself, as well as the stories we tell about it from inside and outside its vows. Also, Dayna Tortorici, co-editor of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade, returns to recommend All Fours by Miranda July.

Editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about 20 years of the magazine n+1, as well as their new anthology The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. The book collects n+1 essays, short stories, and reviews from the last ten years, covering the rise of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, the George Floyd protests, #MeToo, and the Covid pandemic. The guests discuss the ins and outs of running a small magazine, the current media landscape, their commitment to formal experimentation and political discourse, and their vision for the future of print. Also, Yasmin Zaher, author of The Coin, returns top recommend The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere.

Kate Wolf speaks with writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher about her debut novel, The Coin. An allegorical tale of alienation, loneliness, and repulsion, the book follows a Palestinian woman who’s recently fulfilled her family’s dream of moving to America. In New York, working as a middle school teacher, she finds herself disillusioned with the filth of the city and its poverty. She’s beset with a deep unease at her own body and haunted by memories, especially that of a coin—a shekel—she swallowed on a car ride as a child just moments before a horrible accident. Estranged from the few people she knows in the city, her behavior becomes increasingly unhinged and bizarre in ways that complicate standard stories of immigration, and instead imagine the path of a character who sees through America’s promise and realizes she has nothing to lose. Also, Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking, returns to recommend three books and one magazine: The Plague Edition of Konch Magazine edited by Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed’s; Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings edited by Michael Kelly and Monique Roelofs; James: a Novel by Percival Everett; and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.

Eric Newman is joined by historian Nell Irvin Painter to discuss I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, a compendium of Painter's writing about art, politics, and race across nearly four decades. The wide-ranging discussion moves from how researching Sojourner Truth inspired Painter to get her MFA in visual art, to the struggle over what can be taught and known about American history, to the ways modern information technology impacts our experience of the present and its echoes in the past, and to how we might navigate a bleak present in which fascism seems newly on the march. Also, Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, returns to recommend Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by New Yorker staff writer and former television critic Emily Nussbaum to discuss her book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. Nussbaum's overview of the most dominant genre of our time moves from reality TV's origins in radio to its role in forging the public image of a US president. In a sweeping conversation, the hosts and Nussbaum break down some of the unsung heroes and incredible stories behind the creation of our nostalgic reality TV touchstones, the harbingers of a darker genre to come, and its relationship to broad, tectonic social and political changes in American life. Also, Patrick Nathan, author of The Future was Color, returns to recommend Housemates: A Novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with author Patrick Nathan about his latest novel, and this month's LARB Book Club pick, The Future Was Color. The novel chronicles the life of Hungarian immigrant writer George Curtis. When we meet George, he's writing the hacky sort of monster movies that are today's cult classics, trying to find sex and love amid the closeted ambiance of life between the wars and in the midst of the McCarthyite purges of communists and homosexuals that plagued the mid-century film industry. As George demurs writing the studio's next big hit to create something of greater substance about Hungary and the war from his exile perspective, he follows a passionate affair with his coworker in the writers' room. But when he departs the studio office for a residency of sorts with a Malibu actress and her gay husband, a dramatic chain reaction brings new motivations and possibilities to light. A novel about a moment in time that is also in so many ways timeless, The Future Was Color is an exploration of the line between the personal and political, between safety and risk, the art we create and the art that creates us. Also, Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History, returns to recommend Susie Boyt's novel, Loved and Missed.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by celebrated writer Claire Messud, the author of six works of fiction including the highly-acclaimed bestseller The Emperor's Children. Messud's latest novel is This Strange Eventful History, which follows the Cassars, a Pied-Noir family from Algeria, who find themselves constantly displaced by the changing tides of history, first by World War II and then by Algerian independence. Partly based on her own family's story, the book traces the story of each family member, across three generations, as they encounter the world as well as their own personal joys and tragedies. The novel is, of course, about history, both personal and global, as well as the ways people build homes outide of their homelands.

A lively debate unfolds around the significance of criticism in today's fragmented cultural landscape. Hosts explore how critiques can elevate overlooked works and influence societal engagement with art. They discuss the tensions between literary critics and fiction writers and the impact of social media on critical discourse. The conversation highlights the need for diverse voices in criticism, questioning the trends of negative reviews and asserting the critical role critics play in enriching cultural conversations.

Rachel Khong joins Eric Newman to discuss her latest novel, Real Americans. Divided into three parts that each trace the experiences of different generations of a Chinese American family, the book delves into the thickets of identity, exploring how cultural strictures and the chaos of love shape our reality. The first section, set in 1999, recounts the romance between Lily, a second generation Chinese American media intern in New York, and Matthew, the WASPy private equity investor of the company where she struggles to eke out a living. The second section transports us to Seattle in 2021, where Lily's son, Nick, is navigating the end of high school and early college years with his father, Matthew, conspicuously absent. When Nick reconnects with Matthew through a DNA ancestry test, old wounds heal even as new ones are opened up in the wake of long-buried family secrets. In the final section, Nick's grandmother reflects on her experience fleeing Mao Zedong's China to make a new life in the United States, while trying to reconcile with a tattered and scattered family in present-day San Francisco. As these three lives are woven together and torn apart, Real Americans moves propulsively through questions of race, class, and gender as its characters work to understand their relationship to inheritance, variously conceived, around the tripwires of silence, desire, and pain. Also, Erik Davis, author of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, returns to recommend Dale Pendell's Pharmako Trilogy.

Erik Davis joins Kate Wolf to speak about his latest book, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium. The book is a study and history of the emergence of acid blotter paper from the late 1970s to the present day. It charts not only how the distribution and legal definition of LSD has changed over the decades—along with shifting cultural attitudes towards the drug—but also how blotter makers reflected these changes in their designs. The book examines the many recurring themes and aesthetics of blotter from cartoon characters, underground comics and advertising, to religious and political imagery, as well as associations with modern art movements like pop and minimalism. As psychedelics move closer to legalization for therapeutic purposes, Blotter is a reminder of the freak culture, anti-establishment origins of LSD and the inventive and playful path one of its main mediums has cut across countless minds over the last half century.