The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-...
Haley Mlotek's "No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce and Romance"
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.”
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LARB Radio Hour x Film Comment 2025 Oscars Preview
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.
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46:06
Hal Foster's "Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics"
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.
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Deborah Treisman's "A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker"
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.
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Colette Shade's "Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything"
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. "Is the Media Alright" event tickets: https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/is-the-media-all-right-larb-radio-hour-live/ Become a member of LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/
The Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings and discussions about all things literary. Hosted by LARB Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman.