Afleveringen
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Dan Nadel joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his new biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life. The book traces the life and art of Robert Crumb, arguably the most influential cartoonist of the last half century. Crumb emerged from the world of underground comics that he helped create in the late 1960s to both mainstream fame and commercial success. But he was a reticent celebrity who often felt at odds with the hippie culture that he became so identified with. Nadel sifts through the aspects of American culture that did inspire Crumbâfrom Disney cartoons to pre-war comic books to old blues 78sâ and also looks closely at his troubled early life and complicated family. The book also faces the misogyny and racism in much of Crumbâs work and explores his long marriage to his wife and frequent collaborator, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
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Eric Newman speaks with journalist and author Vauhini Vara about her new book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. The book hybrid blend of memoir and modern tech history explore how the internet, AI, and the corporate tech giants behind them have shaped the way we see ourselves and connect with others. Through Varaâs personal anecdotes and digital history deep divesâincluding a nostalgic look at AOL chat rooms, a rundown of her Google search history and prolific Amazon product reviews, and her reporting on the rise of AI and how an early version of ChatGPT helped her write an essay about her sisterâs deathâSearches shows how our search for meaning and identity online defines life in the digital age in ways both fascinating and concerning.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Eric Newman speaks with Jon Hickey about his debut novel Big Chief. The book is a gripping political thriller about the struggle for power, belonging, and destiny set against a tribal election campaign on a fictional reservation. It follows the story of Mitch Caddo and his childhood friend Max Beck, who is seeking reelection as the tribal president of the Passage Rouge Nation. As Maxâs reelection turns ruthless and agitated protesters turn out in force, Mitch is caught between loyalty, love, and his own conflicted sense of purposeânot least because Max's opponent, Gloria Hawkins, is backed by his estranged sister Layla, Mitchâs former love. When a tragic plane crash reveals a political and financial bombshell, Mitch and the tribeâs future hangs in the balance. Eric and Jon discuss the many meaty questions that suffuse Big Chief, including tribal identity and the long legacies of historical trauma the US government has inflicted on Native Americans.
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Medaya Ocher is joined by TV writer, memoirist and librettist Sarah Labrie, author of the book No One Gets to Fall Apart. The book is a memoir of LaBrieâs fraught relationship with her mother, who suffers a psychotic break in 2017 and is found on the side of a freeway, convinced that she is being followed by FBI agents. LaBrie is then forced to confront the difficulties and mysteries of her childhood, the way her family dealt with mental illness, and the many questions we all face around fate and inheritance.
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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 goalsâfrom Palestine's self-determination to immigration reform and protecting LBGTQ rightsârequires 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.
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Maggie Nelson joins Kate Wolf to discuss her new book Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth. It is at once a compressed record of her long struggle with chronic pain and a document of the boundless blur of the pandemic era. It combines vignettes of daily life and doctorâs visits with dreams and memories, pushing at the partition between interior and exterior, symptom and experience, containment and surrender. Nelson depicts the mysteries of pain and the vulnerability of the human body with both humor and pathos, as well as the connections that are possible even in a moment of extreme isolation.
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Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with writer Katie Kitamura about her recent novel, "Audition," which explores a tense, complex relationship between a middle-aged actress and a young man who may or may not be her son. The book raises questions about the roles we play, the stories we inhabit, and the many choices we make. âAuditionâ is LARBâs Book Club pick this month. Join in on the conversation at https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/larb-book-club-discussion-audition-by-katie-kitamura/
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Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Andrea Long Chu about Authority a collection of previously published and new essays and criticism. Authority interrogates what it means to be a critic today, analyzing the work that the critic does in interpreting a book, film, or TV show for us as well as how the status of the critic has developed from antiquity to the present. Andrea, Medaya, and Eric talk about finding one's voice as a critic, how the critic approaches an object of analysis, and the increasingly siloed role of the full-time critic in an era of tectonic shifts in the media landscape.
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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Lynne Tillman about her latest book, Thrilled to Death, a collection of short stories selected from over four decades of her work. The stories in Thrilled to Death attest to Tillmanâs range as a writer and stylist, showcasing her frenetic humor, deep psychological insight, and her innovation of the form. Ever playful and perverse, these stories cover terrains of urban existence, romantic obsession, familial entanglement, the interplay between cultureâparticularly filmâand experience, along with the carnivalesque of American life in all of its absurdity.
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The writer Pankaj Mishra joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his new book, The World After Gaza: A History. It probes how the legacy of the Holocaust has shaped the contemporary world order, including how it has shaped the government of Israel, and the current war in Gaza. The book grapples with how, within the relentless violence of the 20th century, trauma can lead to nationalism, and also how one genocide can lead to another.
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Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins's book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" reckonâor fail to reckonâwith atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or normalizing its horrors.
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Eric Newman speaks with Torrey Peters about her new story collection, Stag Dance, which spans genre, time, and place to explore the shifting sands of gender, sex, desire, and identity. From a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is trans to a pirate logging camp in the early 1900s where desire and gender explode in surprising ways, the stories in Stag Dance plumb the murky and often ugly feelings that contradict the âgood politicsâ narrative of the transgender experience. Eric and Torrey discuss how our desires and identities often remain unintelligible to us, how the materialist force of capitalism shapes those desires and our relationships with others, and what history might tell us about todayâs unprecedented assault on trans rights and lives.
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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to writer Haley Mlotek about No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce and Romance. The book blends the history of divorce law and custom in North America over the last century with cultural criticism on the way divorce has been portrayed in literature, film, and online. Mlotek also records her own experience of ending a marriage, and the front row seat she had growing up to the dissolution of many other unions through her motherâs work as a divorce mediator. At a time when itâs easier than ever before to access divorce, No Fault looks at the many questions that still persist around âwhat divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power.â
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In this special episode, host Eric Newman joins LARB senior editor Paul Thompson and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a look at this yearâs Oscar nominees ahead of this weekendâs award ceremony. Surveying this rather strange year in film, the gang discusses the gory camp of The Substance, the omnipresence of Wicked, the multi-genre madness of Emilia PĂ©rez, and much more.
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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the art critic and historian Hal Foster to speak about his latest book, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics. A collection of essays that brings together over three decades of Fosterâs work, the book exhibits a rigorous philosophical and political engagement with a celebrated group of critics and artists who span the 1960s to the present. Foster digs deep into the work of Pop masters, Minimalists, and the Pictures Generation, as well as contemporary artists, always splaying open the vein of his critique to make it resonant beyond the confines of the art world, and in broader conversation with history and culture. In addition to writers like TJ Clark and Rosalind Kraus, in Fail Better he also reflects on his own work as a critic, and the changes that have occurred in the landscape between his emergence in the 1980s and now.
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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker and host of The New Yorkerâs Fiction podcast. Deborah is the editor of a new anthology of short stories, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, which features some of the incredible writers that The New Yorker has published over the past 100 years. There are stories by J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Gaitskill, Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith and many, many more. Deborah discusses how she put the collection together and how she thinks about the short story as a form.
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Eric Newman speaks with Colette Shade about her book âY2K: How the 2000s Became Everything.â Revisiting the strange hallmarks of that eraâremember inflatable furniture and phones without touch screens?âColetteâs essays explore the social and political antecedents that formed the fashion, culture, and style of the millennial turn. With a sharp eye to the neoliberal forces that shaped the tech-fueled utopianism of the era and its aftermath, Coletteâs writing brings into focus the promises of Y2K against the considerably less hopeful reality weâre living two decades on.
"Is the Media Alright" event tickets: https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/is-the-media-all-right-larb-radio-hour-live/
Become a member of LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/
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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and poet Aria Aber to discuss her first novel, Good Girl. Aber is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Good Girl follows 19-year old Nila, whoâs trying to make sense of her familyâs history in Afghanistan and their expectations for her own life in Germany. Nila attends university and lives with her widowed father in a housing project in Berlin, where she escapes into the cityâs nightlife and a love affair with an older American writer. The novel probes identity, history, shame, racism, and desire, along with real life political events in Germany over the last decade.
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In this weekâs episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributor Gideon Jacobs for a discussion about the power of images in the era of Trump. Recorded in the hours after Trump's inauguration, Gideon and the hosts talk about how Trump and his associates use images and spectacle, the flattening and coarsening of our politics, and the possibilities for counter-imaging in dark times. You can read Gideon's essay, âTrump LâOeil,â here at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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In this weekâs episode, we are talking about the wildfires that have ravaged L.A. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to author David L. Ulin about Los Angeles as a place forged in precarity and grit, as well as some of the local literature of disaster, and what it means to accept the city as somewhere catastrophe can strike in an instant. Next they speak with Adrian Scott Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, about some of the historic structures that have been lost in the fire, historical and cultural memory, and how to honor the history of the city. Please find a full list of resources from Mutual Aid LA here. The Los Angeles Review of Books is hoping for collective safety and looking forward to a communal recovery.
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