Lydia Kiesling's "Mobility"

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with megawatt mystery maven Tana French about her latest novel, The Hunter. Set in the fictional rural Irish town of Ardnakelty, The Hunter is a dark, slow-burning story of the ties that knit together small communities–and the animosities that tear them apart. French talks about how American Westerns influenced the tone and texture of her latest novels, where she gets the ideas for her dark stories, and how her globe-hopping childhood made her the mystery writer she is today.
Also, Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, returns to recommend Eliza Barry Callahan's The Hearing Test: A Novel, as well as Emmeline Clein's Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.

In this special episode, Eric Newman chats with LARB Film & TV editor Annie Berke and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a preview of this year's Academy Awards. Breaking down the top Oscar contenders, the group talks the best and worst of the year in movies, from Barbie to Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, Maestro, and more. If you loved–or hated!–the year in film, this episode is for you.

Eric Newman speaks with Phillip B. Williams about his debut novel, Ours. A surrealist epic largely set in the American midwest both pre- and post-emancipation, the book tells the story of Saint, a conjure woman who uses her supernatural powers to liberate slaves and keep them safe in a magically secluded town near St. Louis. But as Saint's magic begins to falter and newcomers appear in the town, the residents chafe at her power over them, eager for a freedom, identity, and community forged on their own terms. In the interview, Williams discusses his novel's blend of diasporic traditions and spirituality, how his characters repair themselves and each other, and what it means to read–and write–with love.
Also, Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, returns to recommend April Ashley's Odyssey by Duncan Fallowell and April Ashley.

Kate Wolf speaks to cultural critic and historian Lucy Sante about her latest book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. It is the story of how as living as Luc for almost the entirety of her life, three years ago, she became Lucy. The book begins with the letter she sent her closest friends with the "bombshell" confession that the image of herself as a woman had been “the consuming furnace at the center” of her life, but that she had repressed it with almost equal force. Sante goes on to reflect back on that life, from her time growing up in Belgium as the only child of emotionally distant working class parents, to her adolescence as an immigrant in suburban New Jersey, and finally her nascent adult years as a punk and budding writer in a pre-corporatized New York City. Intercutting this past with the practical steps and transcendent emotions that accompany her first few months of transitioning, Sante explores the ways she contorted herself to fit into her male identity and the great unhappiness it caused, as well as the path to finally unburdening herself of her secret and emerging as Lucy.
Also, Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, returns to recommend Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience.

Adam Shatz speaks with Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. The book is both a biography of Fanon— one of the most important thinkers on race and colonialism of the last century— as well as an intellectual history that looks closely at his most seminal texts. Shatz uncovers the events that led to the writing of books such as Black Skin, White Masks and the Wretched of the Earth by following Fanon from his birth in Martinique (then a French colony), to his time serving in World War II, his studies in Lyon, his innovative work as a psychiatrist in France and Algeria, as well as his pivotal decision to join in the fight for Algerian independence and become a part of the FLN. Though Fanon died at only 36, in 1961, Shatz also explores the many afterlives of his work, from his embrace by the Black Panthers and his influence on filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann and Ousmane Sembene to echoes of his thought in the continued movements for Black liberation and decolonization today.
Also, E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators, returns to recommend The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Writer Nathan Thrall joins Kate Wolf to talk about his recent book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was published last October and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic and the Financial Times. It is an account of a horrific accident that took place in the outskirts of Jerusalem on a rainy day in 2012, when a school bus full of kindergarten students on their way to a class trip collided with a semi-trailer and caught on fire. Thrall follows the lives of a number of people who were directly impacted by the tragedy, delving into their pasts and the ways in which the decades-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has indelibly shaped their trajectories. Chief among them is Abed Salama, a Palestinian, and father of five-year-old Milad, who was a passenger on the bus. In looking closely at the material conditions of Salama’s life, and the way they play out within the worst circumstances imaginable, Thrall evinces the toll of occupation in the most human of terms.
Also, Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, returns to recommend Naomi Klein's No Logo.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by E.J. Koh to discuss her debut novel, The Liberators, LARB Book Club's pick for Winter 2024. Widely acclaimed by critics, The Liberators tells the story of two families as they navigate love and survival from the Korean dictatorship of the early 1980s through the Sewol Ferry sinking of 2014. Between those bookending events lie a fraught terrain of marriage, birth, death, love, hope, and disappointment that unfurls itself across Korea and the United States. Moving from questions of form and diaspora to the relics that secure our belonging to places and people, the discussion explores how history both makes and unmakes us.
Also, Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn, returns to recommend To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Herve Guibert.

The Liberators is the Winter 2024 selection for the LARB Book Club. The Book Club is one of many perks offered to our wonderful supporting members. To learn more about our membership program, check out lareviewofbooks.org/membership/

The philosopher Kohei Saito speaks to Eric Newman and Kate Wolf about his book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. A critique of our insufficient response to the climate crisis, Slow Down aptly points to capitalism—its race for profits and endlessly expansive production— as the chief cause of our present emergency. The cure is not a green capitalism (such as what we see in proposals for a Green New Deal here in the United States) but rather degrowth: a vision for reorganizing labor, production, and consumption in ways that Saito argues are the only sustainable future. Drawing on previously unpublished work by Karl Marx, Saito argues that degrowth may help thread the needle between the horrors of Soviet-style socialism and the insufficiency of green Keynesianism, or techno-optimism, to help foster a world and community in which we can all thrive.
Also, Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required, returns to recommend two books: Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work by Diana Garvin; and National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by Anya con Bremzen.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman are joined by author Lexi Freiman to discuss her latest novel, The Book of Ayn. A punchy satire of contemporary life, the story centers on Anna, a writer reeling from being cancelled after the New York Times dubs her novel classist. When Anna happens upon a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, she takes a shine to Rand's philosophy and biography, seeking to reorient her life around Rand's ideal of "rational selfishness." Across Anna's existential journey through Los Angeles and the Greek island of Lesbos, Freiman's by turns hilarious and poignant novel skewers and reckons with the politics and cultural currents that shape contemporary life.
Also, Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, returns to recommend two books: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever, and I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante.