LARB Radio Hour

Kate Wolf speaks to filmmaker Raoul Peck about his latest documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, out in theaters now. The film excavates the life and work of Ernest Cole, the South African photographer, using his own writing and a recently rediscovered archive of his photographs. Cole was one of the first people to capture the brutal realities of the apartheid regime on film. After escaping South Africa for the United States, he published his landmark book on apartheid, House of Bondage (1967). Years later, his career languished, and he became homeless and died of cancer in 1990. Peck’s film looks closely at the conditions that thwarted Cole’s promise as an artist, the legacies of racial segregation, and the devastating ways they still play out today. Also, Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF), returns to recommend The Long Form by Kate Brigg. Plus Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America (and producer of our show) stops by to talk about the fate of progressive activism under the incoming Trump administration

Sofia Samatar speaks with Kate Wolf about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Opacities is addressed to a fellow writer, Samatar’s close friend Kate Zambreno, and considers both the process of composing a book—the wellspring of inspiration, wishes and anxieties that accompany it— as well as the distance between a work and its author. Samatar explores how to stay alive as a writer through things such as community, extensive reading, and research alongside the dissonant ways writers are often asked to codify their identities and constantly promote themselves. Drawing on the words of writers like Eduard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot, Clarice Lispector, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Opacities is at heart a book about the furnace of creativity, and the fuel that keeps it burning despite its many trials, risks, and disappointments. Also, Eugene Lim, author of Fog and Car, returns to recommend Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by the Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha. He is the author of the award-winning collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, as well as the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. Toha recently published a series of essays about Gaza in the New Yorker and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His new book is Forest of Noise, a collection of poems, grappling with his memories, experiences, and many, many losses. Also, Forrest Gander, author of Mojave Ghost returns to recommend Liontaming in America by Elizabeth Willis.

This week it's a doubleheader. First, Eric and Medaya, speak with Taylor Renee Aldridge, the Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager at the California Afrcian-American Museum, about a new exhibit Enunciated Life that centers around notions of surrender in Black Spiritual Life - inspired, in part, by the work of Ashon Crawley. Then, LARB contributor Patricia Mattew, Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, joins us to talk about her recent article on the new Netflix hit series Bridgerton, Shondaland's Regency.

A LARB Radio double header on two mavericks of independent cinema. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Joyce Chopra to discuss her new memoir, Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond. The book traces Chopra's earliest inspirations as a young girl growing up near Coney Island to the projects that launched her storied career across TV news, documentaries and feature films, including the feminist classics Joyce at 34 and Smooth Talk. The memoir also engages larger questions about how women combatted sexism in the entertainment industry before the #MeToo movement and in its wake. Chopra's story offers a path for women in film and beyond to find creative achievement, and that moving target we call happiness. Next, Kate Wolf speaks with Chris Smith about his most recent movie, Sr. It documents the career of the American underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who’s best known for his 1969 farce Putney Swope, about an advertising agency in New York City. Downey made over a dozen other films, such as Greaser’s Palace, Chafed Elbows, and Hugo Pool, which stars his son, the actor Robert Downey Jr., who made his debut in another film of his father’s, Pound, when he was only five years old. In Sr. Smith follows Robert Downey Jr.'s experience of reckoning with his father’s wildly creative and unconventional life, his complicated parenting, and his painful decline as he struggles with Parkinsons, all while celebrating the work of a true iconoclast.