LA Review of Books

On this week’s show, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin joins to talk about his latest book Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, the artifice and authenticity of the popular entertainment complex The Grove, and the urban qualities of New York compared with Los Angeles. Featuring Tom Lutz, Laurie Winer, and Seth Greenland. Produced by Jerry Gorin. The LARB Radio Hour airs Thursdays at 2:30pm on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.

Colin Marshall talks with Farley Elliott, senior editor at Eater Los Angeles and author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History from Tamaleros to Taco Trucks, a hybrid history of and guide to everything one can buy and eat on a sidewalk in this city, from taquitos on Olvera Street to illegal backyard Burmese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley to new-wave fusion food trucks of the likes pioneered by Roy Choi's Korean-Mexican Kogi fleet.

Colin Marshall talks with Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, Threats, and the new short story collection Gutshot, which showcases her writing at its most grotesque, its most hypernormal, its most speculative, and its most darkly funny. The book offers a portrait of her very own America, a country populated by Greyhound bus riders, compulsive vomiters, Camaro IROC-Z drivers, cruelly fetishistic conscious-consuming vegans, and victims of every sort of personality disorder.

Colin Marshall talks with James Sie, voice actor, onscreen actor, and author of a new debut novel, Still Life Las Vegas. This alienated young artist's coming-of-age story in the decidedly non-glamorous part of Sin City weaves together Greek myth, family myth, and Liberace, doing so with not just text but graphic-novel sections as well. Sungyoon Choi, the artist behind those sections, also joins in on the conversation.

Colin Marshall talks to Jay Rubin, Takashima Research Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, translator of such books by internationally beloved Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 (parts one and two), and author most recently of his own debut novel, The Sun Gods, a tale of the love and hatred between Japanese and Americans in postwar Seattle.

Colin Marshall talks with two of South Korea's best-known novelists, Bae Suah and Cheon Myeong-kwan, as they visit Los Angeles on a trip with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Bae's 'Nowhere to Be Found' and Cheon's 'Modern Family' have both recently appeared in English translations. Colin also speaks with Institute president Kim Seong-kon, who gives us an introduction to these writers and places their themes in the context of modern Korean literature.

Colin Marshall talks with Oliver Wang, a DJ, an associate professor of sociology at CSU Long Beach, and also a former producer of the Los Angeles Review of Books podcast. He's a writer on topics from Asian American hip-hop, retro soul music, the critical geography of the Kogi truck, and the nature of Universal CityWalk, and his new book is Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area.

**NOTE** The LARB Radio Hour can now be downloaded as a separate podcast. It will no longer appear on the LA Review of Books podcast. This week’s show features crime and mystery writer Gary Phillips, who discusses the changing publishing landscape in genre fiction, diversity in genre fiction, and the 'Black Pulp' and soon to be released 'Asian Pulp' anthologies that he created. Also, television writer and producer Betsy Borns talks about the success of comedian Amy Schumer, Russian studies professor Boris Dralyuk talks about one of his favorite Ukrainian crime writers, and writer Meri Nana-Ama Danquah reads a poem by Kenyan-born poet Warsan Shire.

Colin Marshall talks with Sam Sweet, who has written on a variety of subjects, especially ones having to do with Los Angeles, in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Stop Smiling. He's currently writing and publishing All Night Menu, a series of five 64-page books on "the lost heroes and miniature histories of Los Angeles."

**NOTE** The LARB Radio Hour can now be downloaded as a separate podcast. It will no longer appear on the LA Review of Books podcast. On this week's show, Tom, Laurie, and Seth interview Michael Silverblatt, the host of Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio show featuring interviews with the world's best writers of literary fiction and poetry. Silverblatt talks about conceiving a show where "the author finally talks to someone who has read their work," and talks about his rigorous interviewing style and process, shares stories of some of his favorite guests — like David Foster Wallace and Joy Williams — and also talks about his childhood and his early love of musicals.

LARB's law editor Don Franzen interviews Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Among the topics discussed is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit's recent decision that the NSA’s telephone records program went beyond its authorization under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Conceptual Poet Vanessa Place has ruffled some feathers in the literary world as a growing number of people have taken notice of her latest project, in which she has been tweeting the entirety of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind juxtaposed with provocative images of mammy characters. Place says her goal is to point to the racism in the text, but a Change.org petition rallied together many voices who found the project itself to be "at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist." Recently the Assn. of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) removed her from the selection committee for next year's annual meeting, and this year's Berkeley Poetry Conference, where she was scheduled to speak, has been cancelled in response to protests. On our program this week we try to make sense of what we feel is a very complicated issue. Does the racism lie in Mitchell's original work, or in Vanessa Place's re-creation? What responsibilities, if any, does one have to contextualize their art or make it more sensitive? Does the fact of her being white make the project more insensitive? And how do we think about her dismissal from the AWP and the canceling of the Berkeley Poetry Conference, which this year was celebrating a 50-year anniversary of the Free Speech Movement? We'll hear from Vanessa Place to try to better understand her meaning, and we'll also hear from two writers, Matthew Shenoda and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, both of whom are critical of Place's work. *NOTE: The LARB Radio Hour can now be downloaded as a separate podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/larb-radio-hour/id998390884?mt=2). After a few weeks the LARB Radio Hour will no longer appear on this LA Review of Books podcast*

Naomi Hirahara is the author of the Mas Arai and Ellie Rush mystery series', and co-writer of a new nonfiction book, "Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor". Other topics on this week's show include the usefulness of critical theory's role in literature, and how to deal with article pitches from publishers and writers seeking press for their new books. *NOTE for our podcast listeners, the LARB Radio Hour can now be downloaded as a separate podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/larb-radio-hour/id998390884?mt=2). After a few weeks the the LARB Radio Hour will no longer appear on this LA Review of Books podcast*

Colin Marshall talks with Patricia Wakida, editor of Heyday Books' new LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas, a collection of cartographically organized essays on the real Los Angeles from such contributors as David L. Ulin, Glen Creason, Laura Pulido, Lynell George, and Josh Kun.

On this week's show Tom, Laurie and Seth talk about McSweeney's campaign to raise $150,000 on Kickstarter and what it means for the publishing world. Also Tom Teicholz, the columnist behind Tommywood at the Jewish Journal, joins to discuss self-publishing and his belief that Los Angeles is the greatest Jewish city in America.