LA Review of Books

The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics. The Los Angeles Review of Books seeks to revive and reinvent the book review for the internet age, and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.

Episodes

Special Show: Jenny Slate and Sarah Manguso

December 26, 2025 • 36 mins

Today’s episode features a live recording from a LARB Luminary Dinner honoring writer, performer and actor Jenny Slate. Author Sarah Manguso sits down with Slate for an intimate conversation exploring the complexities of balancing artistic practice with the demands of parenthood and the ways personal transformation shapes creative expression.

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Tales from Two Critics: A.S. Hamrah and Melissa Anderson on the Year in Film

December 19, 2025 • 75 mins

Kate Wolf is joined by two of today's finest film critics to discuss the current state of Hollywood—including the sale of Warner Brothers Discovery—the art of writing about movies, and some of the year's best films. Up first is critic A.S. Hamrah, author of two new books: "Last Week In End Times Cinema," which compiles the relentless follies of the film industry from March of 2024 to 2025 in an annals of ever-winnowing corporate co...

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LARB Best of 2025

December 12, 2025 • 54 mins

It's that time of the year again! Hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman look back on some of the bright lights from a pretty dark year with a rundown of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, and scandals from 2025. For a full list of this year's picks, visit lareviewofbooks.org/podcasts/larb-radio-hour/

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Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends"

December 5, 2025 • 55 mins

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with director Julia Loktev about her new documentary "My Undesirable Friends." Filmed in 2021, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the five-hour epic follows independent journalists at TV Rain as they navigate escalating government repression and the “foreign agent” laws designed to silence dissent. The film is a moving, unsettling portrait of resilience and a stark reminder of the global st...

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Robin Coste Lewis's "Archive of Desire"

November 28, 2025 • 45 mins

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Robin Coste Lewis about her new poetry collection, "Archive of Desire." The four part collection emerged out of a collaboration with other artists commissioned by the Onassis Foundation to celebrate the 160th birthday of poet Constantin Cavafy, exploring Lewis's encounters with Cavafy's life, work, and sexual history. Lewis discusses her experience poring over the materials from Cavafy's archive...

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Brandon Taylor's "Minor Black Figures"

November 21, 2025 • 72 mins

Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, “Minor Black Figures.” It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career of a forgotten Black artist from th...

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Sarah Schulman's "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity"

November 14, 2025 • 50 mins

This week we are listening back to an episode from earlier this year. Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Sarah Schulman about her latest book, "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity." With a focus on practical politics, Schulman explores both how we imagine solidarity and what the work of solidarity requires. Rather than a horizontal movement, the book focuses on the ways achieving today’s most pressing political goals—from Pal...

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Angela Flournoy's "The Wilderness"

November 7, 2025 • 60 mins

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Angela Flournoy about her novel, "The Wilderness." Moving back and forth from the early 2000s to the present, the novel looks at the stories of five women living in New York and Los Angeles, capturing the mess and power of their deep, complicated friendships as they navigate love, motherhood, careers, and everything in between. Angela discusses how she developed these characters, how she works w...

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The S**t Show

October 31, 2025 • 62 mins

In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss how Big Tech dreams – from iPhones to social media to AI – have become nightmares. How did these decade-defining innovations end up making modern life feel sadder, lonelier, and scarier? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Using two recent books — Cory Doctorow's "Ensh*ttification" and Paul Kingsnorth's "Against the Machine" — as reference points...

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Kelly Reichardt's "Mastermind"

October 24, 2025 • 41 mins

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her new movie, "The Mastermind," out in theaters now. Josh O’Connor stars as an unemployed carpenter named JB, who hatches a plan to rob the museum in his small Massachusetts town of its collection of Arthur Dove paintings. JB soon he finds himself on the run, leaving his young family behind for a Greyhound tour of 1970s America, a country torn apart by the w...

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Grace Byron's "Herculine"

October 17, 2025 • 55 mins

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with writer Grace Byron about her debut novel, "Herculine." Set between the freelance rat race of New York and an equally cutthroat commune for trans women in rural Indiana, "Herculine" follows a narrator trying to put her life together. Featuring demons, conversion therapy, and blood rites, the novel is part horror part coming-of-age tale. Byron discusses how the book emerged from a memoir pro...

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Chris Kraus's "The Four Spent the Day Together"

October 10, 2025 • 60 mins

Chris Kraus joins Kate Wolf to talk about her new novel, "The Four Spent the Day Together." Organized into three linked sections, the book begins with a portrait of Kraus’s avatar, Catt Greene, and her family, as they struggle to overcome the isolation of the suburbs after moving into their first home in Milford, Connecticut, in the late 1950s. The book’s second part takes place many decades later: Catt is now a well-known novelist...

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J. Hoberman's "Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde"

October 3, 2025 • 67 mins

Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, "Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde." It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era's cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musici...

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Alejandro Varela's "Middle Spoon"

September 26, 2025 • 54 mins

Eric Newman speaks to Alejandro Varela about his latest novel, "Middle Spoon." Told in epistolary form through the narrator's unsent emails, the novel opens in the immediate aftermath of a devastating breakup. The breakup, like the relationship, was complicated. It was the narrator's first experience with polyamory, and his now ex-boyfriend ended things because the narrator refused to leave his husband and two children. As it grapp...

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Sally Mann's "Art Work: On the Creative Life"

September 19, 2025 • 46 mins

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to the photographer and writer Sally Mann about her new book, "Art Work: On the Creative Life." In describing her path to becoming an artist, Mann provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes selections from Mann’s rich archive of ph...

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Where Have All the Cowboys Gone: Are Literary Men in Crisis?

September 12, 2025 • 65 mins

In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the "crisis" du jour in American publishing: the erosion of male literary stars and their readers across the landscape of contemporary fiction. Is this even happening—and if so, why? Tackling cultural anxieties about the waning centrality of the straight, white male author alongside spurious statistics and questions about the material realities of publi...

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Fara Dabhoiwala's "What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea"

September 5, 2025 • 66 mins

Kate Wolf speaks with historian Fara Dabhoiwala about his new book, "What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea." A foundational aspect of the U.S. Constitution, free speech is a relatively recent invention and one rooted less in democratic ideals than first may be clear. Tracking its evolution from the pre-modern age through the Enlightenment to our present day, Dabhoiwala explores how free speech and freedom of the pres...

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Mosab Abu Toha's "Forest of Noise"

August 29, 2025 • 52 mins

This week we're listening back to Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher's interview with the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. Abu Toha is the author of the award-winning collection of poetry, "Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear," as well as the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to one day rebuild. In 2025, Toha was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his series of essays about Gaza in th...

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Nicholas Boggs's "James Baldwin: A Love Story"

August 22, 2025 • 52 mins

Eric Newman speaks with Nicholas Boggs about his monumental new biography, "James Baldwin: A Love Story." Drawing on fresh archival research and interviews, Boggs offers an intimate portrait of the literary legend anchored by the romances that shaped his life, writing, and political vision. Spanning Baldwin’s formative mentorship under artist Beauford Delaney, his romance with Lucien Happersberger, and lesser-known relationships wi...

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Nathan Kernan's "Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler"

August 15, 2025 • 41 mins

Kate Wolf speaks with Nathan Kernan about his new biography, "A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler." It’s an intimate look at the great poet who was born in 1923 and would become one of the original members of the so-called New York School along with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbra Guest. With the restraint, precision and wry humor of one of Schuyler’s own poems, Kernan’s biography delves into Schuyl...

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LA Review of Books

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Special Show: Jenny Slate and Sarah Manguso

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Tales from Two Critics: A.S. Hamrah and Melissa Anderson on the Year in Film

LARB Best of 2025

Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends"

Robin Coste Lewis's "Archive of Desire"

Brandon Taylor's "Minor Black Figures"

Sarah Schulman's "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity"

Angela Flournoy's "The Wilderness"

The S**t Show

Kelly Reichardt's "Mastermind"

Grace Byron's "Herculine"

Chris Kraus's "The Four Spent the Day Together"

J. Hoberman's "Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde"

Alejandro Varela's "Middle Spoon"

Sally Mann's "Art Work: On the Creative Life"

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone: Are Literary Men in Crisis?

Fara Dabhoiwala's "What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea"

Mosab Abu Toha's "Forest of Noise"

Nicholas Boggs's "James Baldwin: A Love Story"

Nathan Kernan's "Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler"

Popular Podcasts

Special Show: Jenny Slate and Sarah Manguso

Tales from Two Critics: A.S. Hamrah and Melissa Anderson on the Year in Film