LA Review of Books

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to Lynne Tillman about her latest book, "Thrilled to Death," a collection of short stories selected from over four decades of her work. The stories in "Thrilled to Death" attest to Tillman’s range as a writer and stylist, showcasing her frenetic humor, deep psychological insight, and her innovation of the form. Ever playful and perverse, these stories cover terrains of urban existence, romantic obsession, familial entanglement, the interplay between culture—particularly film—and experience, along with the carnivalesque of American life in all of its absurdity.

The writer Pankaj Mishra joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss his new book, "The World After Gaza: A History." It probes how the legacy of the Holocaust has shaped the contemporary world order, including how it has shaped the government of Israel, and the current war in Gaza. The book grapples with how, within the relentless violence of the 20th century, trauma can lead to nationalism, and also how one genocide can lead to another.

Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, "Atrocity: A Literary History," which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins's book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" reckon–or fail to reckon–with atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or normalizing its horrors.

Eric Newman speaks with Torrey Peters about her new story collection, "Stag Dance," which spans genre, time, and place to explore the shifting sands of gender, sex, desire, and identity. From a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is trans to a pirate logging camp in the early 1900s where desire and gender explode in surprising ways, the stories in "Stag Dance" plumb the murky and often ugly feelings that contradict the “good politics” narrative of the transgender experience. Eric and Torrey discuss how our desires and identities often remain unintelligible to us, how the materialist force of capitalism shapes those desires and our relationships with others, and what history might tell us about today’s unprecedented assault on trans rights and lives.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak to writer Haley Mlotek about "No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce and Romance." The book blends the history of divorce law and custom in North America over the last century with cultural criticism on the way divorce has been portrayed in literature, film, and online. Mlotek also records her own experience of ending a marriage, and the front row seat she had growing up to the dissolution of many other unions through her mother’s work as a divorce mediator. At a time when it’s easier than ever before to access divorce, "No Fault" looks at the many questions that still persist around “what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power.”

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, an esteemed art critic and historian from Princeton, shares insights from his book, 'Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics.' He discusses the intriguing link between failure and artistic growth. The conversation dives into the evolution of art criticism, highlighting its interplay with Los Angeles's vibrant art community. Foster also reflects on the historical shifts in the art world since the 1980s, spotlighting how contemporary voices challenge traditional narratives and shape the future of critique.

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.

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.

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.