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.

In this week's episode from the archives, Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her 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 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.

A double header show on sculpture, public art, communal space, and gaps and omissions in American history. First, Kate Wolf speaks to Hamza Walker, co-curator of "Monuments," an exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and The Brick. The show presents a series of decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities across the US alongside contemporary pieces by Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kara Walker, Julie Dash and more. Next, Kate is joined by legendary artist Senga Nengudi to discuss a new career-spanning book of her work, "Populated Air." Published in conjunction with Nengudi's exhibition at Dia Beacon, the book charts the many forms of her practice, including performance, sculpture, dance, and poetry. Nengudi talks about collaboration and her role in the Studio Z collective; being someone who relishes in "thinking" things rather than "making" them; organizing a performance under an LA freeway; and following her own intuition. She is joined by the curator of the Dia exhibition, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer Lauren Rothery to discuss her novel Television, which follows an aging movie star named Verity, his on and off lover Helen, and Phoebe a screenwriter and filmmaker. One day, on a whim, Verity decides to hold a lottery, giving away his earnings from a massive superhero movie to one lucky filmgoer. Rothery discusses the relationship between failure and success, the current state of Hollywood and why she thinks television is a good metaphor for romance.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Caroline Fraser about her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Taking an ecological approach to true crime, the book explores how decades of industrial pollution from large smelting plants in the Pacific Northwest may have shaped the social and environmental conditions that coincided with an unusually high number of serial killers in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, including Ted Bundy, Randall Woodfield, and others. Fraser discusses how she came to draw connections between environmental contamination and these terrifying killers, while also considering the wider human costs of unchecked corporate power and deregulation on vulnerable communities.

Medaya Ocher is joined by writer and author Susan Orlean, whose latest book is Joyride: A Memoir. In Joyride, Orlean recounts how she became a writer: the strokes of luck, as well as the ambition and talent that led her from alt-weeklies to Esquire, Vogue and The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992. Orlean has written essays and books that have since become classics of contemporary narrative nonfiction like The Orchid Thief (which inspired the film Adaptation), Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, The Library Book as well as many others. Here she discusses her life and career, her curiosity, her approach to change and opportunity, as well as the state of journalism today.

This week, we are revisiting our episode with photographer and writer Sally Mann about her book, Art Work: On the Creative Life. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Mann, whose book describes her path to becoming an artist and 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 photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann's advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it's a job like any other: you have to work at it.

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.

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 conglomeration and AI speculation, and Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2019-2025. Next, Melissa Anderson discusses her latest book, The Hunger: Film Writing 2012-2024. A self-proclaimed "acteurist" whose attention often centers on a film's star rather than its plot, Anderson's criticism engages with movies on an affective level, charting her own pleasure, desire, and occasional disgust. Here she talks about grounding her writing in queer and feminist politics and how her ardent cinephilia is born of a sense of open-minded curiosity, hopefulness, and the willingness to be transported.

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/

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 stakes of Russia's suppression of independent media. Medaya and Eric talk to Julia about her experience filming the documentary in a moment of intense political upheaval, as well as what the disturbing parallels between the campaign against the press in Russia and the United States.

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 archives in Athens, how his poetry still speaks to us so profoundly more than a century later, and their queer kinship.

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 the 1970s. He also finds himself entangled in a romance with a former seminarian whose views on art and faith challenge and inspire him amid the humid swirl of summer in New York. Taylor discusses the novel's origins, the white gaze and the struggles faced by Black artists, and how to write a good sex scene.

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 Palestine's self-determination to immigration reform and protecting LBGTQ rights—requires working across various levels of individual privilege and power. With both historical and present day examples, Schulman presents a clear-eyed, long-term vision of a life in activism, laying out stumbling blocks and failures alongside meaningful progress, and the steps it takes to get there.

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 with scenes and dialog, and why she wanted to write about Black female friendship.

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, the hosts discuss labor practices, government regulation, the place of spirituality and religion, cottagecore fantasies, and how they personally navigate unplugging from the machine.

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 war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Reichardt talks about her own childhood, her obsession with art heists and how we all, ultimately, get caught up in the sweep of history.

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 project, as well as the joys and struggles of making community and a life as a trans woman. Byron is also a critic and essayist, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and other publications.

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 grappling with sudden fame and her failing marriage to an alcoholic ex-con named Paul Garcia with whom she lives part time in the woods of Minnesota. The final section finds Catt investigating a crime that has taken place near her home with Paul, in the neighboring town of Harding, when three teenagers senselessly murder a man after spending a full 24-hours together. What binds the stories together is alienation, chance, the acceleration of history and the spoils of late capitalism, the devastation of addiction, and an attempt to reconcile something even darker and more ineffable about the American project as it exists today.

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 musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.

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 grapples with the self-shattering experience of heartbreak, Middle Spoon explores how we think about love beyond the romantic couple, and how we navigate the faultines of intimacy, desire, race, and class. Eric and Alejandro dive into the cultural discourse around polyamory—why it seems to be more visible in recent years and what's driving the backlash to it–as well as how capitalism shapes modern love. They also discuss the challenges of thinking and writing through heartbreak, and how grief and love can make us unreliable narrators.

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 photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann's advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it's a job like any other: you have to work at it.

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 publishing in the 21st century, the hosts break down the forces they see lurking behind the discourse. Links: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/opinion/men-fiction-novels.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/ https://www.vox.com/culture/392971/men-reading-fiction-statistics-fact-checked https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/emily-witt/do-you-feel-like-a-failure https://theconversation.com/a-new-publisher-will-focus-on-books-by-men-are-male-writers-and-readers-under-threat-255874 https://defector.com/the-plight-of-the-white-male-novelist

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 press initially served imperial and corporate interests rather than those of common citizens. His book also examines the counterintuitive ways free speech continues to be an engine for questionable ends today, benefitting tech companies and upholding misogyny and racism. But while it has never been equally distributed, free speech has also resulted, at times, in more freedom rather than less, so what are we to do with this abiding concept and how might we modify its absolutism to better serve those it claims to protect?

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 the New Yorker and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. This conversation took place in 2024 when Forest of Noise, a collection of poems, grappling with Abu Toha's memories, experiences, and many losses was published. Last week the UN officially declared a famine in Gaza for the first time since the beginning of the war.

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 with Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and French artist Yoran Cazac, the book explores how these relationships, alongside periods of isolation, served as the engines of Baldwin's literary production. Arriving amid a renaissance of interest in Baldwin's life and work, Boggs' biography offers a fresh perspective on the iconic writer for longtime fans and younger generations who may be encountering him for the first time.

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 Schuyler's tumultuous upbringing in the midwest and Washington DC, his early years in 1940s New York City where he became close with and worked as the secretary to the poet W.H. Auden, his fateful meeting of Ashbery and O'Hara, which led to the composition of his first poems, and his many struggles with mental illness. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his collection, The Morning of the Poem, Schuyler's decades of instability began to ease only by his later years, but the lucid observation and "inspired utterance" of his work remained a constant throughout his life.

Eric Newman speaks with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their new documentary Heightened Scrutiny. The film follows ACLU attorney Chase Strangio's journey to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, which sought to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Alongside Strangio's work on the case, interviews with journalists, activists, and others reveal how media coverage of trans issues by publications including the New York Times have fueled legislative attacks against trans people as well as a burgeoning anti-trans cultural turn fed by disinformation. Feder and Scholder's documentary offers a sobering look at the current assault on trans rights.

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, Pan. It captures the frenetic mind of a 15-year old boy named Nicholas as he undergoes his first panic attacks. Trapped in suburban Illinois in a time before the internet, Nicholas has little basis to understand what is happening to him. His search to understand his panic leads him to the condition's namesake, the Greek god Pan, and a series of strange rituals Nicholas will go on to perform that involve him with a group of close friends. But the presence of Pan in the book also underscores an even more fateful aspect of Nicholas's awakening: the connection between feeling, language, and literature, and anxiety as the catalyst for spirituality, insight, and criticism.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor Sebastian Castillo whose new novel Fresh, Green Life is the LARB Book Club pick for the summer. Fresh, Green Life follows a narrator, also named Sebastian Castillo, who has resolved to spend a year alone, exercising, watching self-improvement videos and thinking about how he has arrived at this particular point in his life: a lapsed adjunct philosophy professor, obsessed with a former classmate named Maria, but disconnected from everyone around him. Castillo discusses a certain type of lost literary man, the creation of art, and the why it may or may not all be worth it.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with writer Catherine Lacey, author of the novels Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, and a short story collection, Certain American States. Her most recent work is The Möbius Book, which is split in two — one half is fiction and the other memoir. The novel tells the story of two friends, catching up on a grim Christmas Eve. The memoir is about Catherine herself, set adrift after a brutal breakup. Lacey discusses new beginnings, the formal experiment in the book, the connection between memory and storytelling.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Traci Thomas, host of the "The Stacks" podcast. They discuss the impact of social media on publishing, the content creator life, and the way readers discover books today. At the end of the episode, Medaya, Eric, and Traci offer readers a rundown of recommendations for the books getting us through 2025.

For Independence Day, we dive into the archives to bring you an episode that still feels timely. Ruth Wilson Gilmore joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to talk about her collection, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, which covers three decades of her thinking about abolition, activism, scholarship, the carceral system, the political economy of racism, and much more. For Gilmore, these are not siloed issues; rather, they are braided effects of an unjust political, economic, and cultural system that must be dismantled in order for liberation to take place. Gilmore reminds us that we must look for connections beyond the academy, where theory meets praxis, where the vulnerable are not an abstraction but a concrete human reality. Her thought and work are a much needed shot in the arm for a political and intellectual culture that has, in the view of many, atrophied or been co-opted by the extractive loops of late capitalism.

Susan Choi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new novel, Flashlight. An epic story that spans multiple generations of a single family, the book is an astute exploration of identity, migration, memory, kinship and the irrepressibility of the past. It begins in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of a young academic named Serk. An ethnic Korean, who was raised in Japan and decided to continue his studies there when his family returned to Korea after WWII, Serk later moves to the US and marries Anne, who is also estranged from her family and has her own secrets. Their daughter, Louisa, is with her father on the night of his disappearance, from a beach back in Japan, where the family has come for Serk's year-long academic appointment. Washing up on the shore in the morning, Louisa has little memory of what has taken place, and it will take her many decades, and the course of the novel, to discover the truth.

In this double episode celebrating pride month, Kate Wolf speaks with the critic Vince Aletti about his new book, Physique, an assortment of hundreds of physique photos from Aletti's own personal collection. The images in the book represent a time when homosexual life in the US was illegal, existed mostly underground, and was by necessity furtive and coded. Yet throughout the country there were photo studios producing erotic and often very beautiful photographs of barely clothed men, and distributing them through mail order catalogues and small magazines. Aletti revisits these images and their quiet revolution in his book; post-Stonewall physique photos may have appeared timid or kitsch but today they point to a largely unknown story and genre of imagery that is worthy of reconsideration as well as enjoyment. Then Milo Todd discusses his novel The Lilac People with Eric Newman. Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Lilac People follows three queer Holocaust survivors—Bertie, a trans man; his girlfriend, Sofie; and a young trans man named Karl—as they attempt to flee a hostile postwar Germany. As they evade Allied forces who are re-imprisoning queer and trans survivors, they must also navigate betrayal, suspicion, and the ongoing threat of violence from neighbors and hidden Nazis alike. Todd's debut shines a light on a buried chapter of Holocaust history, one in which the queer and trans people, who were among the Reich's first victims, became victims anew after its fall.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Alison Bechdel about her new graphic novel, Spent. Bechdel is the author of "Essential Dykes to Watch Out For," "Fun Home," and "Are You My Mother?" Spent fictionalizes Bechdel's life with her wife Holly on their pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont. The comic chronicles political and local dramas, generational shifts, experiments with polyamory, and navigating the relationship between success and art. In conversation, Alison shares her struggles with fame, success, and the Trump era with a view toward the steadying forces of our relationships with others.

In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman wrestle with the question: What are we to do about shame? Using Frédéric Gros's recent book, A Philosophy of Shame, as a guidepost, they discuss shame's place in culture, politics, and our personal lives. Are there social benefits to feeling shame? And what are the repercussions of trying to avoid it? The hosts debate the possibility of a post-shame society and share personal stories about what they feel most ashamed of.