Rank #1: Radio Hour: Lesley MM Blume on Ernest Hemingway, Laura Albert recommends, and Janet Fitch reads

Sep 15 2016
34mins
Rank #2: Best Foreign Films of 2016; Awards Season; Tom Lutz on TC Boyle & DH Lawrence

Jan 27 2017
37mins
Rank #3: Natasha Stagg's Fashionworld Phantasmagoria

Also, Ariana Reines, author of the A Sand Book, returns to recommend two exceptional works of poetry, one old, one new: James Merrill's National Book Award winning epic from the late 70s, The Changing Light at Sandover; and Edgar Garcia's Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography.
Nov 02 2019
48mins
Rank #4: Sally Rooney: Great Expectations

Also, William E. Jones returns to recommend The Imposter byJavier Cercas, which tells the story of Spaniard Enric Marco, who was a national hero until he was exposed as a fraud in 2005.
May 03 2019
39mins
Rank #5: The Delightful Rage of Fran Lebowitz

Also, Eric recommends classicist Madeline Miller's novel, The Song of Achilles, that brings to life the love affair between Patroclus and Homeric Greece's greatest warrior.
Sep 28 2018
46mins
Rank #6: Leo Braudy Haunted in Trump's America; plus Michael Morpurgo, and Dorothy Parker's Love Song

Dec 01 2016
33mins
Rank #7: LARB Radio: Simon Reynolds' Glam Rock History Shock and Awe + Denise Levertov & Hortense Powdermaker

Nov 10 2016
35mins
Rank #8: Laura Albert on the Documentary "Author: The JT Leroy Story"

Sep 08 2016
50mins
Rank #9: Director Bong Joon Ho Talks Parasite

Also, Sarah M Broom, author of The Yellow House, returns to recommend The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald.
Oct 18 2019
33mins
Rank #10: Taschen's Dian Hanson on Bob Mizer; plus The Seventh Fire Documents Gangland on the Reservation

Jan 06 2017
46mins
Rank #11: Among the Believers: Ammon Bundy and America's Armed Libertarian Right-Wing

Also, Lyra Kilston returns to recommend Laila Lalami's heralded 2014 novel, The Moor's Account.
Aug 16 2019
41mins
Rank #12: Leslie Jamison on Everything

Also, Jenny Odell returns to recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
Oct 25 2019
50mins
Rank #13: Lovers and Liars

Jan 26 2018
37mins
Rank #14: Carmen Maria Machado and Jenny Zhang

Jun 08 2018
45mins
Rank #15: La Resistance Holiday Gift Show with the ACLU, EFF, and Earth Justice

Dec 22 2016
47mins
Rank #16: Our Homes, Ourselves: Reading Interiors with Lydia Millet

Also, author Jervey Tervalon pays tribute to his friend, legendary food critic and Los Angeleno Jonathan Gold, with some epic verse: Adventures in Life and Food with J Gold.
Aug 03 2018
52mins
Rank #17: At the Movies with Geoff Dyer

Also, Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck is My Duck, returns to recommend a classic of Chinese Literature from the 18th Century: Cao Xueqin's five volume The Story of the Stone.
Mar 22 2019
39mins
Rank #18: Chiara Barzini's Los Angeles Before the Earthquake; plus, Play Dead by Francine Harris

Sep 28 2017
29mins
Rank #19: John Waters: Holding Court with the King of Filth

Jun 14 2019
38mins
Rank #20: Trump’s “Empire of Disorientation”: Philosopher Hans Sluga on Donald Trump

The public discourse is heated, the language inflammatory. Philosopher Hans Sluga of the University of California, Berkeley, brings a cool head and rational thinking to his interview about our 45th president, Donald Trump, with Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison.
Trump has been a real estate developer, a reality TV star, a prolific tweeter, a politician, and has changed his party affiliation seven or eight times. Is he a fascist? Sluga, author of Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s Crisis, warns against easy tags: “We’ve drained this word of much of its specific meaning.” Fascism, he says, “is a form of statism quite different from what we have in America today.”
Is he a populist? That’s not clear, either.
“Plutocrat,” the term Aristotle used to describe the rule of the rich, might be a more precise characterization. Sluga says we might turn to the world of real estate to understand Trump’s worldview.
Sep 08 2017
1hr 6mins