On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I talk with Mona Simpson, author of the novels Anywhere But Here, Off Keck Road and My Hollywood. Her latest is Casebook, a story of marriage, divorce, boyhood and surveillance, told as a text within a text and set in this most suitable city for detective stories, Los […]
I talk with Jim Ruland, founder of the Southern California-based reading series Vermin on the Mount and a columnist at Razorcake and San Diego CityBeat. He is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and the new novel Forest of Fortune, the story of three haunted souls — an alcoholic, an epileptic, and a gambling […]
I have an in-depth talk with author Jonathan Lethem, author of novels like Gun, with Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn, and The Fortress of Solitude, along with non-fiction collections, monographs on works such as John Carpenter’s film They Live, and several short story collections. Lethem’s latest project is the forthcoming short story collection, Lucky Alan and Other Stories. You can stream the conversation just […]
I talk with Sean Wilsey, author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All, and co-editor of the collections The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup and State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. In his new volume of essays, More Curious, Wilsey investigates the artistic and social realms of Marfa, Texas, compulsively buys precision-engineered German appliances on […]
I talk with Edan Lepucki, staff writer at The Millions, founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and author of California, a mid-21st century domestic relationship novel set somewhere outside Los Angeles after the whole country suffers a long, gradual apocalypse. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
I talk in Seoul, Korea with Krys Lee, author of the acclaimed short story collection Drifting House. We discuss her obsessions with violence and religion, “Koreanness” as an accidental unifier of her stories, her life between Korea, America, and England, and her next novel, which deals with the lives of North Korean refugees. You can listen to the […]
I talk with Lisa See, author of novels at the intersection of Chinese history, American history, and women’s history. Her novels include Peony in Love, Snow Flower and Secret Fan, Shanghai Girls, Dreams of Joy. Her latest is China Dolls, a story of the Chinese nightclubs of wartime America that takes place in the Chinatowns of both San Francisco […]
I talk to to journalist and poet Dana Goodyear who, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, has profiled such subjects as Japanese cellphone novels, filmmaker James Cameron, Los Angeles restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and “Two-Buck Chuck”, the budget wine at Trader Joe’s. Her latest book is Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a […]
I talk with Michelle Huneven, author of Round Rock, Jamesland, and Blame. In her latest novel Off Course, set in the early 1980s, a 28-year-old economics graduate student from Pasadena sequesters herself in dissertation-writing exile up in the Sierras — with no small amount of romantic intrigue. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
I talk with David Grand, author of Louse, The Disappearing Body, and now Mount Terminus, a novel eleven years in the making whose mythic prose tells a story at the intersection of two births: the birth of cinema, and the birth of modern Los Angeles. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.