Books, art, and culture in deep context.
LA Review of Books is an interview-driven literary and cultural program built around books, artists, critics, and the ideas surrounding their work. Its conversations take time with craft, context, and consequence, whether the subject is a novel, a memoir, an exhibition, or a political documentary.
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LA Review of Books is a measured, interview-centered program about literature, art, politics, and the cultural weather around them. It is built for listeners who enjoy the long approach. Episodes often begin with a book, then widen into the conditions that made it possible: biography, place, history, institutions, influence, and the private logic of craft. The show’s strength is its patience. A conversation with Richard Hell about Godlike becomes less a promotional stop than a meditation on poetry as a way of life, narrative frames, aging, youth, and the uses of invention. Kristin Ross’s The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life gives the program room to trace Americanization, consumer goods, decolonization, and May 1968 through the ordinary habits of postwar France. The art episodes are equally expansive. Hamza Walker’s Monuments interview considers Confederate monuments not only as objects but as carriers of public memory, popular culture, power, and display. Senga Nengudi’s work enters through a more intimate register, with attention to artistic truth and personal demand. The literary episodes keep returning to how artists survive their own conditions. Lauren Rothery’s Television leads toward Hollywood, self-awareness, dignity, and the peculiar meanings gathered by a title. Susan Orlean’s Joyride becomes a conversation about luck, preparation, ambition, and the sudden collapse of confidence that can follow a professional setback. Sally Mann’s Art Work: On the Creative Life brings perseverance, doubt, rural life, and artistic drive into the foreground. The show also takes on darker civic material. Caroline Fraser’s Murderland connects serial killings in the Pacific Northwest to environmental poisoning and social violence, while Heightened Scrutiny places documentary work inside the legal and political backlash against trans youth and gender-affirming care. Across these subjects, the program favors context over velocity. It is polished, sometimes dry, often warm, and consistently more interested in how ideas are made than in reducing them to a headline.
Made for: For readers, writers, artists, critics, and intellectually patient podcast listeners who want author interviews to reach beyond publicity. It especially suits people drawn to literary craft, political history, contemporary art, and cultural argument.
What sets it apart: The show’s interviews are framed like compact critical essays, giving guests space to connect a single work to larger histories and pressures. It feels closer to a serious magazine conversation than a conventional book-tour podcast.
The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts.The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics. The Los Angeles Review of Books seeks to revive and reinvent the book review for the internet age, and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Books become entry points into candid conversations about creative practice, public culture, artistic confidence, and the institutions that shape a career.
Kate Wolfe, Eric Newman, and Medea Ocher conduct interviews that treat a new book as the start of an inquiry rather than a cue for promotion. Conversations with Sally Mann, Susan Orlean, Hal Foster, Kristin Ross, and Richard Hell move from creative decisions into the conditions…
A curator puts Confederate monuments beside contemporary responses, and your next museum label may look less settled.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful conversation about Richard Hell's shift from music to writing, and a book shaped by aging, memory, and invention.
Richard Hell comes through as an artist taking stock of one life in order to make room for another. In conversation with Kate Wolfe, he traces the move away from music and toward writing, while unpacking a book built from overlapping times, notebooks, first-person passages, and…
A measured conversation that makes everyday life feel historically charged.
The conversation with Kristin Ross keeps circling back to how ordinary life gets pulled into history, especially through postwar France, American mass culture, decolonization, and the upheaval of May 1968.
A museum show about Confederate monuments and a closing conversation about persona, naming, and meaning.
LA Review of Books Radio Hour opens with Hamza Walker and Monuments, the exhibition at MoCA and The Brick built from Confederate monuments taken down in U.S. cities starting in 2015 and paired with contemporary responses by mostly Black artists.
A steady conversation about luck, preparation, and a memoirist's writing life.
Susan Orlean's Joyride anchors a LARB Radio Hour conversation about a life shaped by ambition, talent, and luck. Medea Ocher, on her own, follows Orlean from alt-weeklies to Esquire, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and the segment settles into a plainspoken look at preparation,…
Sally Mann traces an artistic life shaped by rural place, practical work, doubt, and perseverance.
Sally Mann reflects on the creative life through perseverance, doubt, hardship, and the stubborn need to stay faithful to an artistic drive. Kate Wolfe and Medea Ocher shape the episode around Mann's book, Artwork on the Creative Life, and draw out her account of learning…
A careful conversation about how fiction lets memory change shape without losing its charge.
Richard Hell's novel anchors a thoughtful discussion of lived memory, literary invention, and the uneasy work of turning experience into fiction.
Hal Foster traces how art criticism moved from New York's margins into institutions shaped by the art market.
Hal Foster's Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics gives the LARB Radio Hour a sharp, contained frame for a larger question: what happens to criticism when the art world is pulled toward the art market.
Tough love for literature.
Oz fandom with feeling and footnotes.
This episode features an interview with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their documentary 'Heightened Scrutiny,' which follows ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio's Supreme Court case against Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Art Week sets the table.
Richard Hell does not settle into a tidy legend.
This episode features a recorded panel discussion titled 'Writing Climate Futures' with distinguished writers and academics exploring diverse approaches to addressing climate change through literature, journalism, and research.
This episode features a conversation with poet Ariana Reines about her new book 'Wave of Blood', which addresses the genocide in Gaza and her personal grief following her mother's death.
This episode features a conversation with writer Michael Clune about his debut novel 'Pan', which explores anxiety from the perspective of an adolescent boy.
Richard Hell resists the rock-star label, and Kate Wolfe does not try to pin it back on him.
Ross begins with everyday life, and the episode stays there.
A double episode begins with public memory.
This episode features an interview with author Lauren Rothery about her debut novel 'Television', discussing her experiences in Hollywood, themes of dignity and self-awareness, and her move to France.
This episode features an interview with writer Caroline Fraser about her book 'Murderland,' which explores the connection between industrial pollution in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s-80s and the rise of serial killers like Ted Bundy.
Medea Ocher introduces Susan Orlean on her own, setting up Orlean as a writer Los Angeles is about to celebrate before easing into Joyride as memoir.
Perseverance is the thread.
This episode features an interview with director Sam Feder and producer Amy Scholder about their documentary 'Heightened Scrutiny,' which follows ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio's Supreme Court case against Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth.