Essayist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker José Vadi joins Eric Newman to discuss his debut essay collection, Inter State. José’s first play, a eulogy for three, was the winner of the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award. He is also the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems that spring from the San Francisco neighborhood of the same name, and his writing has been featured in a number of publications, including Catapult, McSweeney’s, New Life Quarterly, and our own Los Angeles Review of Books. The essays in Inter State move across a California that is at once family home and site of alienation, humming with possibility and on the brink of disaster, energetic and decayed.
Also, Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness, returns to recommend Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph and Other Stories.

José Vadi’s “Inter State: Essays from California”

I love Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature, History, Politics, Nature, Music and Cinema. 

The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts.

The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics. The Los Angeles Review of Books seeks to revive and reinvent the book review for the internet age, and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.

José Vadi’s “Inter State: Essays from California”

LA Review of Books