LARB Radio Hour

Kate Wolf speaks to the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Suzy Hansen about her new book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. It centers on Istanbul's neighborhood of Karagümrük, which Hansen first began reporting on in 2015. She writes about the influx of Syrian immigrants, the constant new construction, the conflicts between residents, and local muhtar's role in resolving them. Both a record of place and refraction of the global forces shaping Turkey today—not least the consolidation of power by president Erdogan—From Life Itself explores the ways that small lives become intruded on by the larger world. Hansen discusses her work as a foreign correspondent, Turkey's history, and its outsized role in current international conflicts from the war in Ukraine to Gaza and Iran.

Acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel joins Kate Wolf to discuss her documentary Nuestra Tierra, which follows a 2018 trial in Argentina over a crime in the remote northwestern region of Tucaman. In a showdown between a local landowner and the indigenous people of the area, a man named Javier Chacobar was shot and killed and two other community members were severely wounded; the crime footage was captured on video and shared widely on the internet. The trial's larger subtext was the rights of indigenous communities to their own land. Using drone shots as well as more intimate camera work and archival photographs, Martel presents a survey of this land, its people, and its history from colonialism to the present, portraying the often unspoken conflicts that have plagued Argentina since its founding and which reverberate throughout the Americas to this day.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by French writer Ann Scott, whose cult novel, Superstars, was just translated into English. Superstars depicts Paris' queer techno scene—the music, the fashion, the drugs, as well as the passionate love affairs. Scott talks about that era and how she turned heartbreak into art. In the second half of our show, Eric Newman speaks with queer historian Hugh Ryan about his new memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond. Eric and Hugh discuss queer representation in mainstream media and why we're all feeling nostalgic for those analog, offline times.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by investigative journalist and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, to discuss his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. The book begins with the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London, a tragedy that soon reveals a web of deception, wealth, and hidden influence. Keefe traces Zac's life and the shadowy figures around him, drawing a larger portrait of London reshaped by global capital and restless ambition. Medaya and Eric speak with Patrick about how he first became interested in the case, how he investigated it, and the broader questions it raises about globalization, masculinity, and the pursuit of wealth at any cost.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Karan Mahajan about his latest novel, The Complex. Taking its name from the collection of buildings that patriarch SP Chopra built for his family in Delhi amid the fallout of the 1947 partition crisis, the novel explores how Chopra's descendants struggle to escape the pull of an overbearing family and the long shadow cast by their storied ancestor. As they seek to wrest the lives they want from their surroundings, buried secrets and the tectonic forces of a rising Hindu nationalist movement threaten to tear them all apart. Medaya, Eric, and Karan discuss the transformation of India from the 1970s through the 1990s, the flight from family as both opportunity and wound, and what it means to live with and through buried family secrets.