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Category Archives: Los Angeles Review of Books

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Leslie Jamison

I talk with Leslie Jamison, author of the novel The Gin Closet and the new essay collection The Empathy Exams, which features pieces on her experiences acting out disease symptoms for medical students to diagnose, watching the Paradise Lost documentaries, assembling a “grand unified theory of female pain,” and getting mugged in Nicaragua. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

The Consummate Writer of Place: Christopher Rand in Los Angeles, China, and Beyond, 1943-1968

“LOS ANGELES may be the ultimate city of our age.” So begins the 20th century’s most unjustly forgotten book on Los Angeles, written by one of its most unjustly forgotten writers of place. Christopher Rand’s Los Angeles: The Ultimate City appeared in 1967, published by Oxford University Press and built upon a trilogy of articles TheNew Yorker ran in […]

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Mimi Pond

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I talk with comic artist Mimi Pond, author of a variety of books from The Valley Girl’s Guide to Life to the new Over Easy, a graphic novel based on her waitressing days in late-1970s Oakland. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Sandra Tsing Loh

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I talk with Sandra Tsing Loh, author of books of Southern California satire like Depth Takes a Holiday, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, and A Year in Van Nuys, and now the memoir The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s […]

Outsider: Donald Richie in Japan, 1947-2013

PITY THE WESTERN JAPANOPHILE who longs to become Japanese. He either takes on every trapping he can manage of what he imagines as the Japanese existence, going as native as possible and in the process turning into a grotesque, or, having collided with one too many of the invisible barriers honeycombing his adopted homeland, throws […]

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Winter 2014 Quarterly Journal special

The latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, a special on the second issue of their quarterly print journal, features a conversation between me and The Lost Art of Walking author Geoff Nicholson about his piece on travel writing without traveling and a reading by Colin Dickey from his piece on the arctic. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, […]

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Attica Locke

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation with Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season, thrillers set in 1981 Houston and a modern-day Louisiana plantation in which converge various charged threads of American history and society. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Percival Everett

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation with the prolific and philosophical novelist Percival Everett, author of books like Erasure, Assumption, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and the newly reissued Glyph. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: A. Scott Berg

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation with A. Scott Berg, author of books on Max Perkins, Charles Lindbergh, Samuel Goldwyn, Katharine Hepburn, and now, with Wilson, on the 28th president of the United States. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

The Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Jerry Stahl

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation with Jerry Stahl, author of books like Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty as well as two new novels just this year, Bad Sex on Speed and Happy Mutant Baby Pills. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.