LARB Radio Hour

Harriet Clark joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut novel, The Hill, which mirrors Clark's own life story. It follows a young girl named Suzanna whose mother is a political radical and was incarcerated for a bank robbery gone wrong when her daughter was only a year old. Suzanna is eight as the novel opens and is being raised by her grandparents. But after the death of her grandfather, her grandmother, a former radical herself, refuses to bring her to visit her mother, and she must find other ways to see her. The book charts Suzanna's intertwined desire to both remain near her mother for the rest of her life while also honoring her autonomy, her family history, and her own future.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to journalist and music critic Barry Walters about Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000. Spanning three decades of pop, disco, rock, funk, folk, and much more, Mighty Real looks at the power of popular music to challenge sexual norms and gender categories in ways both coded and overt. Covering headliners such as David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Motown, Nirvana and Judas Priest, to more obscure players like Lavender Country and the lesbian label, Olivia Records, Walters shows how queerness is encoded in the very DNA of some of our most beloved songs and albums. Mighty Real also testifies to how music both reflects the reality of gay culture and, subversively, brings it into the mainstream.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Andrew Durbin about his new biography, The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. A joint portrait of two influential yet under-sung American artists, the book follows Thek and Hujar's romance and deep friendship as it parallels their artistic formation. Both New York natives, the two men met in the 1950s, became lovers in the early 1960s, and sustained a complicated relationship until they succumbed to AIDS in the late 1980s. Uncompromising about their work, they have received growing critical interest in recent years: Hujar for his photographs of downtown artists and intellectuals and Thek for his sculptures and installations. But the core of Durbin's book traces a shaky period where each struggled to move forward as an artist while also experiencing aesthetic breakthroughs, travel, and sexual liberation.

In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss the "honesty crisis" facing contemporary culture. Using a recent book by the philosopher Christian Miller for reference, the hosts examine the internet as an engine for dishonesty, fueling everything from deepfakes to infidelity, AI cheating, political manipulation, and influencer peddling. Is dishonesty just part of the human condition, and perhaps even the social contract? What would a culture of radical honesty — or radical transparency — look like, and is that what we want?

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.

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.

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.