LARB Radio Hour

Updated: 08 Aug 2025 • 208 episodes
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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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Eric Newman speaks with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their new documentary Heightened Scrutiny. The film follows ACLU attorney Chase Strangio’s journey to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, which sought to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Alongside St

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01 Aug 2025 • EN

Michael Clune's "Pan"

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, Pan. It captures the frenetic mind of a 15-year old boy named Nicholas as he undergoes his first panic attacks. Trapped in suburban Illinois in a time before the internet, Nicholas has little basis to understand what is happen

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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 th

51 min
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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,

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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 g

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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 carcera

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