On this week's show, author Diana Wagman talks about her new novel Life #6 and the Robert Stone interview that changed her life, Laurie reports back from her interview with The Look of Silence director Joshua Oppenheimer, and Tom, Laurie, and Seth talk about a recent petition calling for the Los Angeles Unified School District to change the name of a middle school that's currently named for the influential film director and infamous racist D.W. Griffith.

This week marks the release of Harper Lee's new book Go Set a Watchman, her first novel to be published in 55 years. Based on the discarded first draft of her only other novel, 1960's Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, the story focuses on the same protagonist, Scout Finch, who is decades older than her character in To Kill a Mockingbird, lives in New York, and travels home to face her racist father, Atticus (no longer a beacon of tolerance and justice). Also on this week's show, John Powers, film critic at Vogue magazine and NPR's Fresh Air, joins your hosts to talk about the relentless positivity of American film, TV, and book reviews.

On this week's show, Mark Haskell Smith discusses research for his new book Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist's Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World, writer and producer Betsy Borns talks about the struggles women have faced breaking into TV writing, Dinah Lenney talks about Helen Macdonald's award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk, and Tom Lutz and Seth Greenland try to make sense of the crisis in Greece through the eyes of recently resigned Greek finance minister and LARB contributor Yanis Varoufakis.

This week we present the second half of our interview with Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW's nationally syndicated literary show Bookworm. Silverblatt explains his 100-page rule for reading, how old-school writers shared a kind of magician's code, and how he relates his Jewish grandmother to the novels of Samuel Beckett.

Featuring Tom Lutz, Laurie Winer, and Seth Greenland. Produced by Jerry Gorin.

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 joins to talk 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.

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.

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. 

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.

What does McSweeney's new campaign to raise $150,000 on Kickstarter mean for the publishing world? Also Tom Teicholz, the columnist behind Tommywood at the Jewish Journal, talks about self-publishing and his belief that L.A. is the greatest Jewish city in America.