LARB Radio Hour

By: Los Angeles Review of Books
  • Summary

  • The 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
  • Edwin Frank's "Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel"
    Nov 22 2024

    Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the editorial director of the New York Review of Books and the founder of the NYRB classic series, Edwin Frank, to discuss his first work of nonfiction, the book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel. Taking the novel as the preeminent art form of the last century, Frank’s book charts its winding path of development, beginning with Fyodor Dostoevskey’s Notes from the Underground, published in 1864, and ending with W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz which arrived more than a 100 years later. Along the way, Frank looks at the many different forms and categories great 20th century novels take, from the distinctly modern and popular science fiction of H.G. Wells to the “minorness” of Franz Kafka; the historical precision of Thomas Mann to Gerturde Stein’s stress on sentence itself, and James Joyce’s stress on words. The book connects an eclectic collection of authors by way of style, sensibility, reception, temporality, and perhaps most importantly the influence of cataclysmic world events on their work and the shaping of their work on the world.

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    52 mins
  • Politics on the Couch: Psychoanalysis and the Presidency
    Nov 19 2024

    In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman are joined by writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster to talk about the role of psychoanalysis in politics. Their discussion emerges from Webster's essay, “Freudulence,” published in the latest issue LARB Quarterly Journal, which reassesses a controversial book co-authored by Sigmund Freud that gives a psychoanalytic reading of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, including his disastrous handling of the Treaty of Versailles. Taking the recent election into account, the panel debates if psychoanalysis indeed belongs in politics. Could it help the electorate as a tool for making wiser decisions or understanding why we’re attracted to certain leaders? How much does self-knowledge, or lack thereof, tip the scales of history?

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    48 mins
  • Mosab Abu Toha's "Forest of Noise"
    Nov 15 2024

    Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. He 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 rebuild. Toha recently published a 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. His new book is Forest of Noise, a collection of poems, grappling with his memories, experiences, and many, many losses.
    Also, Forrest Gander, author of Mojave Ghost returns to recommend Liontaming in America by Elizabeth Willis.

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    52 mins

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