Radio Hour: Despina Stratigakos's "Hitler at Home" & Nicholson Baker on Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

October 13, 2016

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Despina Stratigakos, author of Hitler at Home, joins Laurie and co-host Boris Dralyuk for a wide-ranging discussion about how tasteful interior design operated as propaganda in the Third Reich. They discuss the powerful woman at the heart of that effort, Gerdy Troost, and the lessons learned for our own celebrity-saturated politics.

Also, Nicholson Baker, author of Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids, returns to recommend Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.

Produced by Alan Minsky

Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk is the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a literary translator and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He has also taught at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Granta, World Literature Today, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, Jewish Quarterly, and other journals. He is the author of Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012) and translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018), Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016), Maxim Osipov’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories (NYRB Classics, 2019, with Alex Fleming and Anne Marie Jackson), and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (MacLehose Press, 2020). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). His website is bdralyuk.wordpress.com. On Twitter @BorisDralyuk. (Photograph by Jennifer Croft.)

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Laurie Winer

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold (Vintage, 2002), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His other novels include: The Mezzanine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), Room Temperature (Grove Press, 1990), U and I: A True Story (Random House, 1991), Vox (Vintage, 1993), The Fermata (Vintage, 1995), The Everlasting Story of Nory (Vintage, 1998), A Box of Matches (Vintage, 2003), Checkpoint (Vintage, 2004), Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2008), The Anthologist ((Simon & Schuster, 2009), and Traveling Sprinkler (2013). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He received the International Hermann Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. Nicholson Baker lives in Maine with his family. (Photo: © Margaret Brentano)

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Despina Stratigakos

A historian and writer interested in the intersections of architecture and power, Despina Stratigakos's latest book, Hitler at Home (Yale University Press, 2015), investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. She has also published widely on issues of diversity in architecture, including the award-winning A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Her forthcoming book, Where Are the Women Architects?, will be released in spring 2016 by Princeton University Press.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR