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.