LARB Radio Hour

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by photographer Reynaldo Rivera, whose work is featured on the cover of the LARB Quarterly's spring issue, which celebrates 15 years of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rivera discusses his latest photobook, Propiedad Privada. Along with essays and stories by writers such as Constance Debre, Brontez Purnell, Colm Tóibín, and Justin Torres, it showcases images from Rivera's personal collection, most of which he never intended to show publicly. The photos are intimate and erotic, full of longing, vulnerability, and hope. They capture Rivera's friends, lovers, his longtime partner Bianco, and Rivera himself, in ephemeral moments of lust and physical connection. Utilizing the close spaces of bedrooms, bars and alleys as their setting, they document private performances, intense intimacy, and moments of charged reflection. Together with Rivera's first book, Propiedad Privada offers a complex portrait of Latinx queer life in the US, while also taking its place in the timeless archive of desire.

In this special episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the current political quagmire we find ourselves in through the frame of Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics. Moving from the 1990s to the present, Jäger's new book charts how the US has moved away from the mass political movements that defined the early- and mid-twentieth century. Though voter turnout reached a record in 2020, why do so many in the US feel atomized and disconnected, enmeshed in successive waves of political sentiment and agitation that never resolve? Medaya, Kate, and Eric discuss Jäger's argument, if the US's two party system offers any real choice, and if we'll ever move out of this hyperpolitical phase.

Kate Wolf is joined by veteran journalist Jonathan Shainin, who has worked at The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Caravan, among other publications. Most recently, he is one of the founding editors of Equator, a new magazine covering politics, culture and art, launched as a response to what the editors see as the dominant mode of Western media: "boilerplate journalism," "facile binaries" and an "invincible ignorance of other societies and cultures." The magazine's mission feels even more urgent in light of the U.S.'s recent, overt acts of international aggression. Shainin speaks about the war in Iran and Lebanon, and how that conflict is being covered by the press.

In this special episode, host Eric Newman is joined by LARB Film Editors Annie Berke and Elizabeth Alsop and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a look back at the year in film and the current crop of Oscar nominees ahead of this year's awards.

Kate Wolf speaks to Vigdis Hjorth about her latest novel, Repetition. In the book, the narrator, a novelist in her 60s, returns with an almost trancelike intensity to an episode from her youth in which she had her first sexual experience. Leading up to her encounter with the young man she loses her virginity to, she is subjected to extreme scrutiny by her mother, who questions her daughter's every move, tracking her whereabouts, and later, even reading her diary. As the narrator unfolds the events of her past further, the true reasons for her mother's attention comes to light, and the power of retelling and rexaming stories we think we know becomes even more clear. A novel about the power of memory, as well as writing, empathy, and imagination, Repetition enacts the kind of reckoning with our past selves that we might have should we be brave enough to return to them.

Eric Newman speaks with Lauren Groff about her latest story collection, "Brawler," an intimate and tender exploration of the all-too-human struggle to balance a life between compassion and hatred, love and vengeance. Groff shares her approach to writing stories, from the inception of a gossamer idea or mood through to the editorial grunt work of arranging and sharpening characters and sentences, all while trying to let the work emerge organically. Groff also discusses Flannery O'Connor, the possibility of redemption, the importance of avoiding a moral judgment on your characters, and how she tries to balance the lightness and darkness of life on the page.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the novelist and critic Namwali Serpell to discuss her latest book, On Morrison. Through close readings of Toni Morrison's many novels, as well as her plays, short stories, and early work as a book editor, Serpell's book appraises how critics, scholars, and the public received Morrison across her career and beyond. The book rigorously examines Morrison's writing from a plenitude of contexts and angles, including Black aesthetics, history, literature, race, gender, philosophy, and craft. Though Morrsion has long been considered a titan of American literature, and was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, On Morrison proves that there is still plenty more to be gleaned from the complexity and achievement of her work. Serpell discusses what makes Morrison a difficult writer, how she is often misread, and why her books speak, as ever, to the present moment.

Richard Hell joins Kate Wolf to speak about the reissue of his novel, Godlike. Originally published in 2005, Godlike transposes the relationship of the 19th century poets Arthur Rimabaud and Paul Verlaine to 1970s New York. Told from the hospital room of poet Paul Vaughn, the story centers on his meeting of a wily and charismatic 16-year-old punk named R.T. Wode decades earlier. Their attraction is instant, and it becomes a kind obsession for Paul that is as clarifying and creatively fruitful as it is deluding. The novel is steeped in the poetry of the New York School and captures the scene around St. Mark's Church that Hell came to know when he was just a teenager himself. An anti-nostalgic remembrance, the book reflects on aging, death, belief, and the power of the word to transform the detritus of the everyday into something holy and lasting.