LARB Radio Hour

Kate Wolf speaks to Vigdis Hjorth about her latest novel, Repetition. In the book, the narrator, a novelist in her 60s, returns with an almost trancelike intensity to an episode from her youth in which she had her first sexual experience. Leading up to her encounter with the young man she loses her virginity to, she is subjected to extreme scrutiny by her mother, who questions her daughter's every move, tracking her whereabouts, and later, even reading her diary. As the narrator unfolds the events of her past further, the true reasons for her mother's attention comes to light, and the power of retelling and rexaming stories we think we know becomes even more clear. A novel about the power of memory, as well as writing, empathy, and imagination, Repetition enacts the kind of reckoning with our past selves that we might have should we be brave enough to return to them.

Eric Newman speaks with Lauren Groff about her latest story collection, "Brawler," an intimate and tender exploration of the all-too-human struggle to balance a life between compassion and hatred, love and vengeance. Groff shares her approach to writing stories, from the inception of a gossamer idea or mood through to the editorial grunt work of arranging and sharpening characters and sentences, all while trying to let the work emerge organically. Groff also discusses Flannery O'Connor, the possibility of redemption, the importance of avoiding a moral judgment on your characters, and how she tries to balance the lightness and darkness of life on the page.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the novelist and critic Namwali Serpell to discuss her latest book, On Morrison. Through close readings of Toni Morrison's many novels, as well as her plays, short stories, and early work as a book editor, Serpell's book appraises how critics, scholars, and the public received Morrison across her career and beyond. The book rigorously examines Morrison's writing from a plenitude of contexts and angles, including Black aesthetics, history, literature, race, gender, philosophy, and craft. Though Morrsion has long been considered a titan of American literature, and was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, On Morrison proves that there is still plenty more to be gleaned from the complexity and achievement of her work. Serpell discusses what makes Morrison a difficult writer, how she is often misread, and why her books speak, as ever, to the present moment.

Richard Hell joins Kate Wolf to speak about the reissue of his novel, Godlike. Originally published in 2005, Godlike transposes the relationship of the 19th century poets Arthur Rimabaud and Paul Verlaine to 1970s New York. Told from the hospital room of poet Paul Vaughn, the story centers on his meeting of a wily and charismatic 16-year-old punk named R.T. Wode decades earlier. Their attraction is instant, and it becomes a kind obsession for Paul that is as clarifying and creatively fruitful as it is deluding. The novel is steeped in the poetry of the New York School and captures the scene around St. Mark's Church that Hell came to know when he was just a teenager himself. An anti-nostalgic remembrance, the book reflects on aging, death, belief, and the power of the word to transform the detritus of the everyday into something holy and lasting.

In this week's episode from the archives, Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross's writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.