Michael Clune’s “Pan”

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, “Pan.”

By LARB Radio HourAugust 1, 2025

Subscribe on Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud

Do you love listening to the LARB Radio Hour? Support the production of this weekly podcast on books, art, and culture. Donate today.

Writer and scholar Michael Clune joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his debut novel, Pan. It captures the frenetic mind of a 15-year old boy named Nicholas as he undergoes his first panic attacks. Trapped in suburban Illinois in a time before the internet, Nicholas has little basis to understand what is happening to him. His search to understand his panic leads him to the condition’s namesake, the Greek god Pan, and a series of strange rituals Nicholas will go on to perform that involve him with a group of close friends. But the presence of Pan in the book also underscores an even more fateful aspect of Nicholas’s awakening: the connection between feeling, language, and literature, and anxiety as the catalyst for spirituality, insight, and criticism.