LARB Radio Hour

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 Vara’s personal anecdotes and digital history deep dives—including 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 sister’s death—Searches shows how our search for meaning and identity online defines life in the digital age in ways both fascinating and concerning.

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 Max’s reelection turns ruthless and agitated protesters turn out in force, Mitch is caught between loyalty, love, and his own conflicted sense of purpose—not least because Max's opponent, Gloria Hawkins, is backed by his estranged sister Layla, Mitch’s former love. When a tragic plane crash reveals a political and financial bombshell, Mitch and the tribe’s 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. 

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 LaBrie’s 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. 

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.

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 doctor’s 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.

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. “Audition” is  LARB’s Book Club pick this month. Join in on the conversation at https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/larb-book-club-discussion-audition-by-katie-kitamura/

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. 

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 Tillman’s 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 culture—particularly film—and experience, along with the carnivalesque of American life in all of its absurdity.

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.

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" reckon–or fail to reckon–with atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or normalizing its horrors.