LARB Radio Hour
342 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 120 ratingsThe Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.
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Episodes
Victoria Chang on Finding Agnes Martin During Crisis
April 12, 2024 12:00 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MBKate Wolf speaks with the poet Victoria Chang about her latest collection of poems, With My Back to the World. The book is in deep conversation with the work of the painter Agnes Martin: each poem takes the title of one of Martin’s paintings and is also often accompanied by Chang’s own visual interpretations of Martin’s work. Regarding Martin’s intricate grids and spare compositions inevitably allows Chang to reflect on form, emptiness, nature and light; along with more personal reflections ...
Morgan Neville's "STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces"
April 05, 2024 12:00 - 30 minutes - 42.4 MBEric Newman speaks with director Morgan Neville about his new film "STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces," which explores the legendary comedian's meteoric rise to standup stardom, his abrupt pivot to TV and film, and his return to stage in the present as he and close friend Martin Short prep a new comedy tour. Eric and Morgan discuss the treasure trove of never-before-seen archival that brings Martin's early career to life, what Morgan has learned about fame and the psychology of ente...
The Morality of Memoir, or, Daddy I Want Coffee!
April 02, 2024 12:00 - 49 minutes - 68.2 MBOn this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman talk about the ethics and politics of memoir in the wake of several recent controversies. Touching on Blake Butler’s Molly, Emily Gould’s essay in The Cut on her flirtation with divorce, and much more, the gang considers who gets to tell whose stories, how, and why.
Tommy Orange's "Wandering Stars"
March 29, 2024 12:00 - 50 minutes - 69 MBEric Newman speaks with writer Tommy Orange about his novel Wandering Stars, a multigenerational epic that is both prequel and sequel to his award-winning 2018 debut There There. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, the novel follows a Native family's journey across more than 150 years as they struggle to maintain their connection to one another and to their Cheyenne history and identity in the face of addiction and the brutal legacy of forced assimilation...
The Problem with Adoption
March 22, 2024 12:00 - 56 minutes - 77.1 MBKate Wolf speaks with sociologist Gretchen Sisson about her first book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. The book is based on interviews Sisson conducted over the last decade with birth mothers who relinquished their children for private adoption in the US. Most often Sisson found that these women deeply regretted their decision, and that poverty was the driving force behind it. Alongside the harrowing stories of the women who Sisson spoke with...
Brad Gooch's "Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring"
March 15, 2024 12:00 - 59 minutes - 82.1 MBEric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Brad Gooch about his new biography, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. A deep-dive into the life of an artist whose work can be seen today on everything from museum walls to t-shirts and tote bags, Gooch's book unearths the cultural moment that gave rise to Haring's meteoric career before his untimely death in 1990. Moving across topics including the commercialization of art, cultural appropriation, the AIDS crisis, and more, Radiant brings the h...
Tana French's "The Hunter"
March 08, 2024 13:00 - 57 minutes - 79.3 MBMedaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with megawatt mystery maven Tana French about her latest novel, The Hunter. Set in the fictional rural Irish town of Ardnakelty, The Hunter is a dark, slow-burning story of the ties that knit together small communities–and the animosities that tear them apart. French talks about how American Westerns influenced the tone and texture of her latest novels, where she gets the ideas for her dark stories, and how her globe-hopping childhood made her the mystery w...
LARB Radio Hour x Film Comment 2024 Oscars Preview
March 05, 2024 13:00 - 1 hour - 133 MBIn this special episode, Eric Newman chats with LARB Film & TV editor Annie Berke and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a preview of this year's Academy Awards. Breaking down the top Oscar contenders, the group talks the best and worst of the year in movies, from Barbie to Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, Maestro, and more. If you loved–or hated!–the year in film, this episode is for you.
Leslie Jamison's "Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story"
March 01, 2024 13:10 - 54 minutes - 75.1 MBLeslie Jamison joins Medaya and Kate to discuss her latest book Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, a memoir that chronicles the birth of her daughter and the collapse of her marriage soon after. Jamison writes about the bond with her own mother, as well as the intense, consuming love for her child. The book is not only a story about her most intimate relationships, but an examination of doubt, betrayal, forgiveness and, as the subtitle says, love. Also, Phillip B. Williams, author of O...
Phillip B. Williams' "Ours"
February 23, 2024 13:00 - 59 minutes - 82.2 MBEric Newman speaks with Phillip B. Williams about his debut novel, Ours. A surrealist epic largely set in the American midwest both pre- and post-emancipation, the book tells the story of Saint, a conjure woman who uses her supernatural powers to liberate slaves and keep them safe in a magically secluded town near St. Louis. But as Saint's magic begins to falter and newcomers appear in the town, the residents chafe at her power over them, eager for a freedom, identity, and community forged o...
Lucy Sante's "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition"
February 16, 2024 13:00 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MBKate Wolf speaks to cultural critic and historian Lucy Sante about her latest book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. It is the story of how as living as Luc for almost the entirety of her life, three years ago, she became Lucy. The book begins with the letter she sent her closest friends with the "bombshell" confession that the image of herself as a woman had been “the consuming furnace at the center” of her life, but that she had repressed it with almost equal force. Sante ...
Adam Shatz's "The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon"
February 09, 2024 13:00 - 1 hour - 92.9 MBAdam Shatz speaks with Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. The book is both a biography of Fanon— one of the most important thinkers on race and colonialism of the last century— as well as an intellectual history that looks closely at his most seminal texts. Shatz uncovers the events that led to the writing of books such as Black Skin, White Masks and the Wretched of the Earth by following Fanon from his birth in Marti...
Nathan Thrall's "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy"
February 02, 2024 13:00 - 47 minutes - 65.9 MBWriter Nathan Thrall joins Kate Wolf to talk about his recent book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was published last October and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic and the Financial Times. It is an account of a horrific accident that took place in the outskirts of Jerusalem on a rainy day in 2012, when a school bus full of kindergarten students on their way to a class trip collided with a semi-t...
E.J. Koh's "The Liberators"
January 26, 2024 13:00 - 55 minutes - 76.1 MBMedaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by E.J. Koh to discuss her debut novel, The Liberators, LARB Book Club's pick for Winter 2024. Widely acclaimed by critics, The Liberators tells the story of two families as they navigate love and survival from the Korean dictatorship of the early 1980s through the Sewol Ferry sinking of 2014. Between those bookending events lie a fraught terrain of marriage, birth, death, love, hope, and disappointment that unfurls itself across Korea and the United S...
Kohei Saito's "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"
January 19, 2024 13:00 - 47 minutes - 65.8 MBThe philosopher Kohei Saito speaks to Eric Newman and Kate Wolf about his book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. A critique of our insufficient response to the climate crisis, Slow Down aptly points to capitalism—its race for profits and endlessly expansive production— as the chief cause of our present emergency. The cure is not a green capitalism (such as what we see in proposals for a Green New Deal here in the United States) but rather degrowth: a vision for reorganizing labor, productio...
Lexi Freiman's "The Book of Ayn"
January 12, 2024 15:40 - 51 minutes - 70.7 MBMedaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by author Lexi Freiman to discuss her latest novel, The Book of Ayn. A punchy satire of contemporary life, the story centers on Anna, a writer reeling from being cancelled after the New York Times dubs her novel classist. When Anna happens upon a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, she takes a shine to Rand's philosophy and biography, seeking to reorient her life around Rand's ideal of "rational selfishness." Across Anna's existential journey through Los An...
Alicia Kennedy's "No Meat Required"
January 05, 2024 13:00 - 52 minutes - 72.4 MBEric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with writer Alicia Kennedy about No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. The book unpacks the ethical, spiritual, environmental, economic, and political dimensions of vegetarianism and veganism. It traces the emergence of meatless eating in the US, from 19th century religious groups to various subcultures—including commune-dwellers, Rastafarians, Buddhists, punks, ecofeminists and Black Nationalists—to the watershed mo...
Ed Park's "Same Bed Different Dreams"
December 29, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes - 67.4 MBAuthor Ed Park joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to discuss his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. It begins with a former writer named Soon Shen, who’s given up fiction for a cozy suburban life in upstate New York, working for a tech conglomerate. At a booze-soaked literary dinner back in Manhattan one night, Soon encounters a famous Korean author named Echo and later finds himself in possession of Echo’s new book, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Being A True Account of the Korean Provisional ...
The Best of 2023
December 22, 2023 13:00 - 58 minutes - 80.3 MBTogether we've travelled one more trip around the sun... and that means it's time for our favorite episode of the year! Kate, Medaya, and Eric share their favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, magazines (a new category!) and more in this look back at the year that was 2023.
Blake Butler's "Molly"
December 15, 2023 13:00 - 48 minutes - 66.2 MBKate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with the writer and editor Blake Butler about his latest book, a memoir called Molly. Molly is dedicated to the poet and writer Molly Brodak, Butler's wife of three years. Molly committed suicide one spring afternoon, near the house they shared outside of Atlanta. After her death, Molly comes into clearer view, as the secrets and traumas she hid during her life begin to reveal themselves. The book is an extraordinarily honest account of her death, of their re...
Robert Glück's "About Ed"
December 08, 2023 13:00 - 45 minutes - 62.5 MBEric Newman and Kate Wolf are joined by the author, editor, and co-founder of the New Narrative movement Robert Glück to discuss his latest book, About Ed. The book is a non-linear memoir (of sorts), parsing the life and death of Glück's lover, the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai. The narrative moves promiscuously back and forth between the 1970s when Bob and Ed's relationship takes shape, to the 1980s when AIDS ravages the gay community and Ed is diagnosed with HIV, to Ed's death in 1994, and Bob'...
Andrew Chan's "Why Mariah Carey Matters"
December 01, 2023 14:00 - 55 minutes - 75.7 MBEric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and critic Andrew Chan to discuss his latest book, Why Mariah Carey Matters. Exploring Mariah's career as a singer, performer, and dexterous music producer, Andrew's book unpacks how the music industry of the 1980s and 1990s shaped and was reshaped by the work of the landmark whistle-tone diva. The conversation ranges across developments in R&B, cultural battles over Mariah's "authenticity" as a Black artist, and the erosion of the ballad's c...
Sasha Frere-Jones' "Earlier"
November 24, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour - 85 MBWriter, musician, and critic Sasha Frere-Jones joins Kate Wolf to discuss his first book, Earlier. A non-chronological memoir, Earlier collects fragments of Frere-Jones's life: intimate recollections, minor triumphs, path-defining moments, failures, loves, losses, and all stations in-between. An artist formation story that is too humble to declare itself as such, the book enacts the simultaneity of memory, smashing the late 1960s, when Frere-Jones is born, against the 1990s, when he arrives ...
Nicole Newnham's "The Disappearance of Shere Hite"
November 17, 2023 08:07 - 45 minutes - 62.7 MBEric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by award-winning director Nicole Newnham to discuss her latest film, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The documentary explores the life and work of Shere Hite, a sexological researcher whose 1976 book The Hite Report on Female Sexuality brought the private reality of women's sexual experience into mainstream consciousness and became one of the bestselling books of all time. But the male cultural anxiety sparked by the book's findings generated a powerf...
Dan Sinykin's "Big Fiction"
November 10, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour - 88 MBEric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor, Dan Sinykin. His new book is called Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry, which chronicles the many changes publishing has undergone in the past 50 years, starting in 1965 when Random House was bought by an electronics company. Since then we’ve seen the radical conglomoration of publishing, as small independent houses were bought up by multinational companies, slowly forming the Big Five. Dan writes a...
Justin Torres's "Blackouts"
November 03, 2023 12:00 - 46 minutes - 64.5 MBMedaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with author Justin Torres about his latest novel, Blackouts. As they discuss the novel's layered revelation of both the characters' lives and the real queer history into which they are imaginatively woven, the conversation explores queerness as a literary identity, history as a particular site of queer desire, and how we tell the stories that make us intelligible to ourselves and others. Also, Anna Biller, author of Bluebeard's Castle, returns to recommen...
Dorothea Lasky's "The Shining" and Anna Biller's "Bluebeard's Castle"
October 27, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 91.6 MBA LARB Radio Hour double-header Halloween horror special. In the first half, Kate Wolf is joined by the poet Dorothea Lasky to discuss her most recent poetry collection, The Shining. The book is an ekphrastic ode to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, based on the novel by Stephen King. Its poems remix and reimagine the haunted spaces and uncanny elements of King and Kubrick’s story in a uniquely personal register, and from a feminist perspective, touching on violence, time, identity, isolation,...
Lydia Kiesling's "Mobility"
October 20, 2023 12:00 - 43 minutes - 59.4 MBLARB Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara and Executive Director Irene Yoon speak with author Lydia Kiesling about her novel Mobility, this fall’s LARB Book Club selection. The inaugural book from Crooked Media Reads, Mobility begins in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, following the main character, Bunny, from childhood into her ultimate career transition to Big Oil. The novel is timely and urgent, a macro and micro study of climate change’s destructive impact on the Earth and our individual lives, and e...
Lydia Davis's "Our Strangers"
October 13, 2023 12:00 - 58 minutes - 80.3 MBKate Wolf speaks to author and translator Lydia Davis about her latest collection of stories, Our Strangers. The book, which is notably not available for sale on Amazon, includes well over 100 stories, with many measuring at just a few lines. The stories take a variety forms: sketches of interactions from daily life, letters of complaint, recorded anecdotes, sequential interludes, grammatical inquires, meditations on passing thoughts and fantasies, as well as more sustained looks at life in ...
Mary Gabriel's "Madonna: A Rebel Life"
October 06, 2023 15:00 - 54 minutes - 74.5 MBJournalist and author Mary Gabriel joins Eric and Medaya to talk about her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life. The massive, richly researched biography follows every detail of the superstar’s life: her Michigan roots, her debut amid New York’s heady underground scene, her film career, her London era, finally catching up with Madge in 2020. The book is also a history of the culture that shaped her, and which she shaped in her wake. Mary discusses writing the book, as well as Madonna’s breakth...
Hilary Leichter's "Terrace Story" and Lisa Teasley's "Fluid"
September 29, 2023 12:00 - 58 minutes - 80.9 MBIn the first half of the show, Medaya Ocher speaks with Hilary Leichter about her novel Terrace Story. It follows a young family who live in cramped quarters in a big city, surviving but financially strapped. One day, a woman named Stephanie comes over and when she opens the closet door they discover a magic terrace, which immediately disappears once Stephanie leaves, and only appears again when she returns. Suddenly, the family's tight, mediumrestricted lives take a turn for the magical—and...
Ross Gay's "The Book of (More) Delights"
September 22, 2023 12:00 - 51 minutes - 70.2 MBRoss Gay joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about his latest, book, THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS, a second installment of THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, published before Ross, us, and the world were plunged into the COVID19 pandemic. Like it's predecessor THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS features a collection of short essays that bring into focus the small wonders we so often overlook in our busy lives. Among them are the wonders of a neighbor's fruit tree, a discovery of self-maturation in an impr...
Thea Lenarduzzi's "Dandelions"
September 15, 2023 12:00 - 50 minutes - 69 MBWriter and longtime TLS editor Thea Lenarduzzi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut book Dandelions, a winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. Weaving together memoir, history, and criticism, Dandelions explores the life of Lenarduzzi’s grandmother, Dirce, a totemic figure in her family who was born almost a century ago into Mussolini’s Italy. Political and economic circumstances, as well as personal tragedy, force Dirce to leave Italy for England, first as a ch...
Colin Dickey's "Under the Eye of Power"
September 08, 2023 12:34 - 46 minutes - 63.9 MBColin Dickey joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to discuss his latest book, Under the Eye of Power, in which he charts the history of America through its fear of secret societies, like the Illuminati and the Freemasons, as well as the enduring cultures of conspiracy theories that spring up around these shadowy clubs. Colin posits that our national belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial is the slave we reach for in view of the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling fort...
Maya Binyam's "Hangman"
September 01, 2023 12:00 - 55 minutes - 76.5 MBWriter Maya Binyam joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut novel Hangman. The book begins with a man who finds himself returning to his home country somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in 26 years. But the places, customs, and traditions he encounters there have become foreign or burdensome to him, and the people he meets, even members of his own family, strange and unrecognizable. Somewhere in the country his brother lays dying, but his journey to be by his ...
Prudence Peiffer's "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever"
August 25, 2023 12:00 - 54 minutes - 74.8 MBWriter, editor, and art historian Prudence Peiffer joins Kate Wolf to speak about her first book, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. The book is a group biography of a collection of luminous American artists including Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman, as well as his wife, the French actress and filmmaker, Delphine Seyrig. From the late 1950s to the middle of the 1960s, all of them happened to live in the sa...
Andrew Leland's "The Country of the Blind"
August 18, 2023 12:00 - 49 minutes - 67.8 MBAndrew Leland joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about his first book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. The book recounts Leland’s experience of gradually losing his vision due to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually results in blindness. The knowledge that it’s not a question of if, but when he will become blind, leads him to a deeper investigation of blindness itself: how it is represented in literature, language, and media; what its politi...
Koritha Mitchell and Michelle Lanier on Harriet Jacobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”
August 11, 2023 12:00 - 42 minutes - 58.1 MBIn this special edition LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara talks with Koritha Mitchell, editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Michelle Lanier, professor and public historian in North Carolina. The two recount Lanier’s invitation to Mitchell to visit Edenton, North Carolina, the hometown of Harriet Jacobs. By visiting the historic site at the culmination of her project, out now by Broadview Press, Mitchell embraced the pr...
D. Smith's "Kokomo City" and Claire Simon's "Our Body"
August 04, 2023 12:00 - 54 minutes - 75.4 MBA LARB Radio Hour double feature. In the first half of the show Eric Newman speaks to D. Smith about her new documentary—and directorial debut—Kokomo City. The film turns an intimate lens onto the lives of four Black transgender sex workers in Atlanta and New York, revealing their everyday experience alongside probing conversations about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race as they struggle to survive and find acceptance within the Black community and a world at large that too of...
Heidi Julavits’s “Directions to Myself"
July 28, 2023 12:00 - 49 minutes - 67.6 MBKate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by author Heidi Julavits, whose new book is called "Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years." Heidi Julavits is also the author of The Folded Clock: A Diary as well as four novels. She is an associate professor at Columbia University. In Directions to Myself, Heidi returns to her own life, specifically her relationship to her pre-adolescent son, whose childhood is nearly at an end. After a student at her university accuses another of rape, she begin...
Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin's "Do Not Detonate Without Presidential Approval"
July 21, 2023 12:00 - 45 minutes - 62.5 MBKate Wolf is joined by filmmaker Wes Anderson and film programmer and distributor Jake Perlin to discuss Do Not Detonate Without Presidential Approval, an anthology inspired by Anderson's latest, Asteroid City, which is out in theaters now. The book, edited by Perlin, interprets different aspects of Asteroid City, including its setting, which is the American West (in a small town in the 1950s hosting a Junior Stargazers award ceremony) as well as it’s parallel existence as a televised stage ...
John Yau's "Please Wait By the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art"
July 14, 2023 12:00 - 46 minutes - 64.4 MBThe poet and longtime art critic John Yau joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his latest collection of criticism, Please Wait By the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. The book's title comes from an essay Yau wrote in 1988 on reductive readings of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and the unwillingness of art historians and curators to consider Lam’s biracial identity as relevant to his work. In his collection, Yau makes a case for the role identity and cultural...
Juana María Rodríguez's "Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex"
July 07, 2023 12:00 - 57 minutes - 79.1 MBEric Newman is joined by scholar and critic Juana María Rodríguez to discuss her latest book, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex. Moving between stories gleaned from archives, interviews, and Rodríguez's personal experience, Puta Life explores the proliferating and often incongruous meanings of the term "puta" as it circulates in Latinx identity and culture as a signifier of power and powerlessness, rebellion and revulsion, exaltation and degradation. In accounting for how the figure of ...
Rachel Nuwer's "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World"
June 30, 2023 12:00 - 41 minutes - 57.3 MBMedaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak to Rachel Nuwer about her recent book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. They discuss the drug's emergence in the Bay Area during the 1960s when pioneers hailed it as a groundbreaking mental health therapy for treating everything from addiction to trauma before the US government classified it as a dangerous Schedule I drug. Eric, Medaya, and Rachel also discuss MDMA's surge in popularity as a party drug during the 1980s an...
Kristin Ross' "The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life"
June 23, 2023 12:00 - 45 minutes - 62.1 MBEric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross's writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 196...
Martine Syms' "Loser Back Home"
June 16, 2023 12:00 - 43 minutes - 60.4 MBKate Wolf is joined by the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Martine Syms to discuss her new exhibition Loser Back Home, currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles. Sym's work in the show encompasses video, sculpture, painting, photography, installation, publishing, and clothes. It merges recognizable brand names with personal ephemera to create a form of self-portraiture and explores the slippery nature of self as distilled through technology, as well as a state of "dysplacement"—a term...
Craig Seligman's "Who Does That Bitch Think She is? Doris Fish and The Rise of Drag"
June 09, 2023 12:30 - 47 minutes - 65.8 MBEric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with writer Craig Seligman about his recent book, Who Does That Bitch Think She is? Doris Fish and The Rise of Drag. The book follows the story of the groundbreaking drag queen, performer, and artist Doris Fish, who was born in Australia in the early 1950s as Philip Mills. Seligman initially wrote about Fish in the 1980s after they met through his boyfriend in San Francisco. He builds on his past interviews to recount Fish’s life, from her early days in Sydney...
Joanna Biggs' "A Life of One’s Own"
June 02, 2023 11:49 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBKate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by editor and writer Joanna Biggs, whose new book is called A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Joanna is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, the Financial Times and the Guardian. In her new book, Joanna is attempting to recalibrate her life after a divorce. She turns to literature and specifially, to nine different women writers and philosophers, ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft to Syl...
Gary Indiana's "Do Everything In The Dark"
May 26, 2023 12:16 - 51 minutes - 70.4 MBKate Wolf is joined by author, critic, and artist Gary Indiana to speak about the recent reissue of his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark. Told on the heels of the aftershock of AIDS and the coming catastrophe of 9/11, alongside an ever-increasing globalization, Do Everything in the Dark centers on a group of friends, who, as Indiana writes in a new introduction, are “experiencing crises in their personal or professional lives, having committed themselves to relationships and careers tha...
Publishing in Peril? Lisa Lucas and Christian Lorentzen
May 19, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 94.1 MBWriter and veteran book critic Christian Lorentzen and Pantheon publisher and editor Lisa Lucas join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about recent shake-ups in the publishing industry. The guests discuss the closure of Bookforum and a spate of other small magazines and websites, changes to social media, the DOJ's decision to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster, and their hope despite the difficulties. Are we at an inflection point for American publishing? Can the indu...