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LARB Radio Hour

Los Angeles Review of Books
LARB Radio Hour
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  • LARB Book Club: Sebastian Castillo
    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.
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  • Catherine Lacey's "The Möbius Book"
    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.
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  • LARB x The Stacks Podcast: Books on the Internet
    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.
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    53:41
  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation”
    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.
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  • Susan Choi's "Flashlight"
    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.
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About LARB Radio Hour

The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.
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