LA Review of Books

Latest Episodes:

LARB Radio Hour x Film Comment 2025 Oscars Preview Feb 26, 2025

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In this special episode, host Eric Newman joins LARB senior editor Paul Thompson and Film Comment co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a look at this year’s Oscar nominees ahead of this weekend’s award ceremony. Surveying this rather strange year in film, the gang discusses the gory camp of The Substance, the omnipresence of Wicked, the multi-genre madness of Emilia Pérez, and much more.

Hal Foster's "Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics" Feb 19, 2025

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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the art critic and historian Hal Foster to speak about his latest book, "Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics." A collection of essays that brings together over three decades of Foster’s work, the book exhibits a rigorous philosophical and political engagement with a celebrated group of critics and artists who span the 1960s to the present. Foster digs deep into the work of Pop masters, Minimalists, and the Pictures Generation, as well as contemporary artists, always splaying open the vein of his critique to make it resonant beyond the confines of the art world, and in broader conversation with history and culture. In addition to writers like TJ Clark and Rosalind Kraus, in "Fail Better" he also reflects on his own work as a critic, and the changes that have occurred in the landscape between his emergence in the 1980s and now.

Deborah Treisman's "A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker" Feb 13, 2025

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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker’s Fiction podcast. Deborah is the editor of a new anthology of short stories, "A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925-2025," which features some of the incredible writers that The New Yorker has published over the past 100 years. There are stories by J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Gaitskill, Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith and many, many more. Deborah discusses how she put the collection together and how she thinks about the short story as a form.

Colette Shade's "Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything" Feb 06, 2025

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Eric Newman speaks with Colette Shade about her book “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything.” Revisiting the strange hallmarks of that era–remember inflatable furniture and phones without touch screens?–Colette’s essays explore the social and political antecedents that formed the fashion, culture, and style of the millennial turn. With a sharp eye to the neoliberal forces that shaped the tech-fueled utopianism of the era and its aftermath, Colette’s writing brings into focus the promises of Y2K against the considerably less hopeful reality we’re living two decades on.

Aria Aber’s “Good Girl” Jan 31, 2025

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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and poet Aria Aber to discuss her first novel, Good Girl. Aber is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Good Girl follows 19-year old Nila, who’s trying to make sense of her family’s history in Afghanistan and their expectations for her own life in Germany. Nila attends university and lives with her widowed father in a housing project in Berlin, where she escapes into the city’s nightlife and a love affair with an older American writer. The novel probes identity, history, shame, racism, and desire, along with real life political events in Germany over the last decade.

Trump L’Oeil: Spectacle in the Age of Trump Jan 24, 2025

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In this week’s episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributor Gideon Jacobs for a discussion about the power of images in the era of Trump. Recorded in the hours after Trump's inauguration, Gideon and the hosts talk about how Trump and his associates use images and spectacle, the flattening and coarsening of our politics, and the possibilities for counter-imaging in dark times. You can read Gideon's essay, “Trump L’Oeil,” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The LA Fires Jan 15, 2025

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In this week’s episode, we are talking about the wildfires that have ravaged LA. Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to author David L. Ulin about Los Angeles as a place forged in precarity and grit, as well as some of the local literature of disaster, and what it means to accept the city as somewhere catastrophe can strike in an instant. Next they speak with Adrian Scott Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, about some of the historic structures that have been lost in the fire, historical and cultural memory, and how to honor the history of the city. Please find a full list of resources from Mutual Aid LA on lareviewofbooks.org. The Los Angeles Review of Books is hoping for collective safety and looking forward to a communal recovery.

Writing Climate Futures Jan 10, 2025

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On July 18th, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Berggruen Institute hosted a panel discussion titled "Writing Climate Futures," featuring David Wallace-Wells, Jenny Offill, Bharat Venkat, and Jonathan Blake. As our planet faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency by the day. Through education, envisioning fictitious new worlds, and pushing forward the public discourse, writing holds the power to move the conversation we have around the future of our planet. LARB and The Berggruen Institute convened exciting voices in the climate movement from across genres to discuss how writing can enact change. David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Penguin Random House, 2019), which argues that the state of the world, environmentally speaking, is “worse, much worse, than you think.” He is a weekly columnist and staff writer for the New York Times, deputy editor of New York Magazine, and he was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology. Jenny Offill is the author of three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and most recently, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She teaches at Bard College and lives in upstate New York. Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His forthcoming title—tentatively titled Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. Dr. Venkat is the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab, which investigates thermal inequality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from biology and history to anthropology and urban planning. Jonathan Blake directs the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute. He is the coauthor, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises and author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland.

On Giving Up Jan 01, 2025

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In this encore special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the case for and against giving up—on life, vices, dreams, creative pursuits, jobs, relationships, exercise, and work. Their conversation is inspired by Adam Phillips’s recent book On Giving Up, in which the psychoanalyst observes that “we give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” The hosts discuss what is acceptable to give up, their own fears of failure, both fictional and real-life inspirational quitters, and whether Bartleby was onto something when he said he’d prefer not to.

Ariana Reines' ''Wave of Blood'' Dec 27, 2024

Show notes

In our last episode of the year, Kate Wolf speaks with the poet, playwright, and performance artist Ariana Reines about her latest book, Wave of Blood. A hybrid text that includes poems, diary entries in verse, and various forms of public address, Wave of Blood spans the six month period between October 2023, after the outbreak of war in Gaza, and April 2024. In it, Reines wrestles with the genocide and what she calls “the mind of war,” as well her own ancestry as the descendant of Holocaust survivors, her late mother, and a contemporary culture steeped in violence, shame, and anxiety. Searching for power within a moment of seeming powerlessness, and for words in a time of unspeakable tragedy, the writing in the book seeks to address the recent past with deep introspection and personal responsibility, while also upholding poetry as a way to “open the space of the miraculous—and keep it open. Forever.” Also, Kathryn Davis, author of Versailles, returns to recommend Thursbitch by Alan Garner.

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