LA Review of Books
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This Week in Short Fiction
There’s a chance you’ll hear Peter Ho Davies read the first sentence of his story “Chance” and you’ll be hooked. There’s also a chance you won’t, but either way, it’s worth a visit to Drum, the “literary magazine for your…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The Los Angeles Review of Books enlisted Kayla Williams, a veteran sergeant and Arabic linguist, to compile a list of war narratives by women for Memorial Day. Williams, herself an accomplished writer of two memoirs on her war experience and…
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Elizabeth Bishop’s Favorite Island
We know Bishop primarily as the eager traveler who wrote of distant, tropical locations and lived for many years as an expat in Brazil. She was that, of course, but she was also an aficionado of her native landscape and…
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Gregor Samsa Dreams of RoboCop
Susan Bernofsky, in the introduction to her new translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, compares Gregor Samsa to famed American literary character Willy Loman. Over at the LA Review of Books, David Burr Gerrard praises the translation but disagrees that this is…
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Think you know The Night Before Christmas? Think Again.
Alexandra Socarides gives a clear warning at the beginning of this article that she doesn’t want to ruin anyone’s Christmas, but you should probably read the original poem one last time before reading her breakdown at the Los Angeles Review…
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Brazilian Poetry Takes a Weird Turn for the Normal
Brazil has a nearly two-hundred-year-old poetic history, during which various poets have fought to define Brazilian identity, criticize the injustices of capitalism, and catalog “the joys and miseries of being young in a military dictatorship.” Now that Brazil has become…
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Country Music’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriends
Why is it that despite country music’s overall conservatism and exaltation of rural, small-town culture, female country artists routinely write songs that would make a simple country farmer’s eyes bug out? Why do the men sing about inoffensive, patriotic good…
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Ed Hardy: Way Cooler than You Knew
Did you know Ed Hardy is not just a brand name, but an actual person? And that after becoming “the first Westerner to work with a traditional Japanese master” of tattoo art, he led the “current tattoo renaissance” with an…
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Tom Lutz on the Missing Generation of Journalists
Tom Lutz’s recent essay for the LA Review of Books discusses the missing generation of journalists, the layoffs that have forced out some of the greatest book reviewers from their staff positions on newspaper mastheads and the diminishing of the…
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Who Do We Invite To The Orgy?
Tom Lutz at the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Elizabeth Gumport’s essay in n+1 called “Against Reviews.” Lutz writes “Taste cultures do have something to do with circles of intimates, and the explosion of book clubs in recent years…
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MFAs, for Better or for Worse
Creative programs are increasingly common and so are their criticisms. The difficulty with pinpointing creativity to an academic institution or justifying a trend where tuition money and literary prowess are both major contributing factors to success make MFA programs a…