LARB Radio Hour

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer Izabella Scott. Scott is the author of the new book The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Granta, London Review of Books, and on BBC Radio 4's Free Thinking. She was formerly co-editor of The White Review. The Bed Trick recounts the true story of a 2015 trial in the UK, in which a woman accused her best friend of tricking her into a long-term romantic and sexual relationship. Scott talks about the astonishing trial, the laws around "rape by deception," and how to navigate writing nonfiction from dueling points of view.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer Izabella Scott. Scott is the author of the new book The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Granta, London Review of Books, and on BBC Radio 4's Free Thinking. She was formerly co-editor of The White Review. The Bed Trick recounts the true story of a 2015 trial in the UK, in which a woman accused her best friend of tricking her into a long-term romantic and sexual relationship. Scott talks about the astonishing trial, the laws around "rape by deception," and how to navigate writing nonfiction from dueling points of view.

Eric Newman speaks with Marlon James about his latest novel, The Disappearers. Returning to Jamaica as an historical setting for the first time since his Booker-prize winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, James's latest tells a haunting story of violence and recovery against the backdrop of anti-gay violence in the 1980s. The novel follows seven gay men working together on a provocative play about homosexuality in the Jamaican prison system, only to be torn apart when they are brutally attacked by a group of vigilantes. Told from multiple perspectives across the 1990s and 2000s, The Disappearers follows the attack's survivors as they search for justice and try to rebuild themselves in the wake of the violence. James discusses the novel's exploration of homophobia, masculinity, race, belonging, and survival—as well as the complicated question of what it means not simply to survive atrocity, but to sustain and rebuild a life in its wake.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Susan Stryker about her new book Changing Gender. Part cultural history, part grammar lesson, and part memoir, Changing Gender confronts not only the long historical slipperiness of gender and identity in U.S. culture, but also the ways in which the very language we use to describe and understand gender becomes a cultural battleground for meaning and identity. Stryker discusses the relatively recent origins of our thinking about "gender," the ways that thinking has been misunderstood and misappropriated for political skirmishes, and the difficulty of pinning down exactly what we're talking about when we talk about gender.

Eric Newman speaks with Chang-Rae Lee about his latest novel, A Tender Age, a coming-of-age novel centered on Jeon-Gi, the troubled son of hardworking Korean immigrants, who must navigate the meaning of masculinity, desire, and identity as he begins the journey into adulthood. After a violent outburst that lands him in reform school, Jeon-Gi has the opportunity for a reset at a church sleepaway camp, where he develops new, felicitous feelings of belonging and wonder that repair his frayed, isolated sense of self. When an accident during a transformative hiking trip threatens to once again wrench him out of his community, Jeon-Gi's story confronts how circumstance, impulse, and agency shape our lives. Lee discusses the novel's exploration of nostalgia, immigrant family dynamics, masculinity, and learning to take responsibility for oneself.