LARB Radio Hour

Writer and longtime TLS editor Thea Lenarduzzi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut book Dandelions, a winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. Weaving together memoir, history, and criticism, Dandelions explores the life of Lenarduzzi’s grandmother, Dirce, a totemic figure in her family who was born almost a century ago into Mussolini’s Italy. Political and economic circumstances, as well as personal tragedy, force Dirce to leave Italy for England, first as a child and later as an adult. Migration becomes one of the central realities of her life, and subsequently the life of her son and then Lenarduzzi herself. But even as the conditions of these moves between countries grow less critical, the difficulties of immigrating remain, complicating and splintering a sense of identity and home, foregrounding difference, and calling belonging into question. Lenarduzzi portrays the gravity of what for so many across the world is still the most dire of decisions, tracing the effect emigrating can have over multiple generations, while also finding inspiration in her family’s resiliency and the stories they leave behind. Also, Colin Dickey, author of Under the Eye of Power, returns to recommend Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young.

Colin Dickey joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to discuss his latest book, Under the Eye of Power, in which he charts the history of America through its fear of secret societies, like the Illuminati and the Freemasons, as well as the enduring cultures of conspiracy theories that spring up around these shadowy clubs. Colin posits that our national belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial is the slave we reach for in view of the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling fortunes of Americans, and the messiness of our democracy. Only by seeing the cyclical nature of our national obsession with secret societies and conspiracies–one that no doubt resounds for many listeners right now–can we break its grip on our society, politics, and culture. Also, Maya Binyam, author of Hangman, returns to recommend The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon.

Writer Maya Binyam joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut novel Hangman. The book begins with a man who finds himself returning to his home country somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in 26 years. But the places, customs, and traditions he encounters there have become foreign or burdensome to him, and the people he meets, even members of his own family, strange and unrecognizable. Somewhere in the country his brother lays dying, but his journey to be by his side is marked by a series of losses—of money, clothes, and passport. Along the way, he’s forced to rely on the stories and experiences of the strangers he meets and speaks with at length to make sense of things, even as he sees himself as disinterested or apart from them. Working against more typical narratives of homecoming and migration, the novel pushes deeper into questions about the essentialism and continuity of self, the individual versus the abstract, the obligation of kinship and the necessity of faith, as well as the possibility of political change. Also, Prudence Peiffer, author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, returns to recommend two books The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity by Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower, as well as My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.

Writer, editor, and art historian Prudence Peiffer joins Kate Wolf to speak about her first book, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. The book is a group biography of a collection of luminous American artists including Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman, as well as his wife, the French actress and filmmaker, Delphine Seyrig. From the late 1950s to the middle of the 1960s, all of them happened to live in the same place: a collection of former sail-making warehouses on Coenties Slip, a dead end street in one of the oldest sections of Manhattan, right next to the river. Rather than jostle their work into well-established art historical movements and categories, Peiffer’s book asserts place as the generative frame from which to understand these artists and the connections and influence between them. Though the community was short-lived, their support of one another, the collective solitude they found, even their rivalry, takes shape as integral to their development, and at least one of the reasons that their work survives today. Also, Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind, returns to recommend Darryl by Jackie Ess.

Andrew Leland joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about his first book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. The book recounts Leland’s experience of gradually losing his vision due to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually results in blindness. The knowledge that it’s not a question of if, but when he will become blind, leads him to a deeper investigation of blindness itself: how it is represented in literature, language, and media; what its political and racial dimensions are; the connection it has to technology and innovation; how it can both shape identity and also feel incidental to it. Most importantly, Leland relates the ways blindness is actually experienced by the many people he meets and writes about in his book. Their testimonies help him reckon with the two worlds he finds himself in—the blind and the sighted—and close the gap between them. Also, Heidi Julavits, author of Directions To Myself, returns to recommend David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration.

In this special edition LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara talks with Koritha Mitchell, editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Michelle Lanier, professor and public historian in North Carolina. The two recount Lanier’s invitation to Mitchell to visit Edenton, North Carolina, the hometown of Harriet Jacobs. By visiting the historic site at the culmination of her project, out now by Broadview Press, Mitchell embraced the practice of embodied knowledge—connecting her physical experience in Edenton to the legacy of Jacobs’s escape from enslavement and creativity in survival. By combining their intellectual knowledge with Jacobs and physical embodiment of her hometown, Mitchell and Lanier connect their own work as descending from the legacy of Harriet Jacobs as an activist, scholar, mother, and writer.

A LARB Radio Hour double feature. In the first half of the show Eric Newman speaks to D. Smith about her new documentary—and directorial debut—Kokomo City. The film turns an intimate lens onto the lives of four Black transgender sex workers in Atlanta and New York, revealing their everyday experience alongside probing conversations about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race as they struggle to survive and find acceptance within the Black community and a world at large that too often confronts them with derision, shame, and violence. Then, in the second half of the show, Kate Wolf is joined by filmmaker Claire Simon to discuss her new documentary, Our Body, which is shot entirely in the gynecology unit of a public hospital in Paris. Simon shows the many patients within at every stage of life: they manage unexpected pregnancies, transitioning genders, endometriosis, infertility, breast and reproductive cancer, birth, and death. The film lends itself to looking at individual bodies as part of a bigger organism—both within the hospital and society at large—and it gently questions the limits of autonomy, the power differential between doctors and patients, the hopes we have for our futures, and the fears and comfort we find when facing the end.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by author Heidi Julavits, whose new book is called "Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years." Heidi Julavits is also the author of The Folded Clock: A Diary as well as four novels. She is an associate professor at Columbia University. In Directions to Myself, Heidi returns to her own life, specifically her relationship to her pre-adolescent son, whose childhood is nearly at an end. After a student at her university accuses another of rape, she begins to wonder about how a mother should steer her son as he grows into a man. How can a parent guide and form who their child becomes? How much of our personhood is nature, nurture, or culture? She looks back at her own childhood, growing up in Maine, and the lessons and stories she heard from her own parents. The book works through Julavits’s own private thoughts and heartaches, but always leads back to bigger questions about the time we live in, the way we think about justice and punishment, and how we form ourselves as people. Also, John Yau, author of Please Wait By the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, returns to recommend Ghost Music by An Yu.

Kate Wolf is joined by filmmaker Wes Anderson and film programmer and distributor Jake Perlin to discuss Do Not Detonate Without Presidential Approval, an anthology inspired by Anderson's latest, Asteroid City, which is out in theaters now. The book, edited by Perlin, interprets different aspects of Asteroid City, including its setting, which is the American West (in a small town in the 1950s hosting a Junior Stargazers award ceremony) as well as it’s parallel existence as a televised stage play—another theme is the Broadway stage—and of course the movies themselves with the theme of mid-century cinema. Like Anderson’s film, the collection reveals an interwoven lattice of allusion, reference, and history; a deep and sometimes startling connection between American life, politics, and entertainment; the day to day realities of of being part of an ensemble and working on a theatrical production; as well some incredibly incisive film criticism with excellent essays on movies such as Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, and Lewis Allen's Desert Fury. 

The poet and longtime art critic John Yau joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his latest collection of criticism, Please Wait By the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. The book's title comes from an essay Yau wrote in 1988 on reductive readings of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and the unwillingness of art historians and curators to consider Lam’s biracial identity as relevant to his work. In his collection, Yau makes a case for the role identity and cultural background can play in the formation of an artist’s aesthetic choices, and he interrogates standard art historical hierarchies and the supposed objective viewpoint of the avant-garde. While he acknowledges a number of strides in recent decades toward a more inclusive, open version of art history, he also shows how far there is to come, a gap he helps to close through thoughtful pieces on artists such as Ruth Asawa, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Hunt, Jiha Moon, Ed Clark, and many more. Also, Juana María Rodríguez, author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, returns to recommend A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes.