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.

LARB Radio Hour is a arts podcast hosted by Los Angeles Review of Books, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Los Angeles Review of Books hosts LARB Radio Hour, a arts show with 100 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  LARB Radio Hour

  Claudia Rankine's "Triage"

  Aug 14, 202658 min

  Claudia Rankine joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her new book, Triage. It follows the lifelong friendship between its narrator and someone she refers to as the "theorist." The two meet in college and begin to play a game called "collapse" — they simply fall to the floor whenever they see each other. In this game, Rankine finds an apt metaphor for the ongoing political struggles that the two friends talk, argue, and labor through. How do we deal with the onslaught of tragedy, genocide, climate change, and poverty? In other words, how do we deal with the daily news? What can we do when we are on the brink of collapse? Rankine examines these questions by looking at art — including a variety of sculptures of couches — as well as through the eyes of the theorist and the narrator as they debate what happens after the fall.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  LARB Radio Hour

  Eleni Sikelianos' "Memory Rehearsal"

  Aug 7, 202655 min

  The writer and poet Eleni Sikelianos joins Kate Wolf to discuss Memory Rehearsal , a hybrid-memoir that tracks the history of her great-grandparents, the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and the American actress, writer, and artist Eva Palmer. The book probes ancestry, legacy, ancient history, and queer life at the turn of last century. Using a variety of narrative methods, Sikelianos enacts the long process of discovering who her great-grandparents were, the traces they left on her more immediate family, and the ways their artistic and romantic passions sustained and shaped their lives, as well as her own life.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  LARB Radio Hour

  Erin Maglaque's "Presence"

  Jul 31, 202648 min

  Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body , which interrogates contemporary notions of how women's bodies work. The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work, and sleep. Maglaque contrasts the idea of our bodies as separate from our minds—both optimizable and containable—with a pre-Cartesian conception of them as porous, vulnerable, and infinitely complex, inviting a consideration of some of the freedom of the deeper past and its starkly different ways of being embodied.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  LARB Radio Hour

  Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics

  Jul 24, 202644 min

  Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America . Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's founding to today. Moving from accounts about John Adams and William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Peter Thiel, she traces how these and other influential figures defended hierarchy and sought to normalize inequality as a defining and even necessary feature of the American experiment.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  LARB Radio Hour

  Rachel Aviv's "Strangers to Ourselves"

  Jul 17, 202645 min

  This week we are listening back to Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv as she discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us . The book collects the stories of people whose mental health crises subvert our usual understanding of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. It begins with Aviv herself, who was hospitalized at the age of six for anorexia, before she even knew the term for her illness. Each chapter is then dedicated to a different person: Bapu, an Indian Brahmin woman, who shortly after giving birth dedicates herself to religious asceticism and mysticism; Naomi, a Black woman, who in her psychosis, despairs of the very real racism and generational oppression that surrounds her; and Ray Osheroff and Laura Delano whose chapters both show the ways in which psychiatry is still grappling with medication and biology. Aviv explores how mental illness can defy psychiatric explanation, requiring a broader view of the economic, social and lived realities of the people who experience it.

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on LARB Radio Hour. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.