La Review Of Books

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 a

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-25587

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 girlfri

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.

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 Crumb—from Disney cartoons to pre-war comic books to old blues 78s— and also looks closely at his troubled early life and complicated family. The book also faces the misogyny and racism in much of Crumb’s work and explores his long marriage to his wife and frequent collaborator, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.