This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: LARB
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...moreInvestigating the Network Form
At the Los Angeles Review Of Books, Mary Pappalardo reviews Patrick Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics, an examination of networked art from Syriana to alternate reality games: Networked narrative forms—the novel, the film, the television drama—represent and help to create our sense of the network, without which more participatory forms, particularly games that facilitate affective encounters with […]
...moreThe Ordinary Extraordinary
In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and inspiration of traditions of thought exemplified by Susan Sontag and Stanley Cavell, the latter whose […]
...moreA Cri de Coeur
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, J.T. Price reflects on the 40th anniversary of the film, Network, and the responsibility of the news media. “Who are we, after all, to judge the substance of what media conglomerates present to us?” Price asks. “Only the rightful owners of the airwaves,” he writes.
...moreHands Off
Writer-actor-comedian Phoebe Robinson’s debut essay collection is You Can’t Touch My Hair: and Other Things I Still Have to Explain. As Janice Roshalle Littlejohn writes for the LARB blog, “Her writing is relatable and woke, confronting racism and how to cope with white guilt, feminism and female issues, and America’s problematic relationship with black hair.” Robinson […]
...moreThe Poet and the City
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Kessler takes us through a pantheon of his favorite Los Angeles landmarks. He writes: Buildings are constructed and routinely erased, yet they remain implanted in the native’s mind like seeds of some vaguely remembered myth. Structures I frequented in formative days at times return, as here, to […]
...moreProfiling the Princess of Darkness
The four books Gaitskill produced over the next two decades, all of them rife with sexual violence and self-destruction, cemented her reputation as the “Princess of Darkness”—as did her much-discussed past. Gaitskill, who was born in Kentucky and raised in Michigan, ran away as a teenager, was briefly institutionalized, worked as a stripper and call […]
...moreDon’t Look Away
Leah Mirakhor interviews Homegoing author Yaa Gyasi for the Los Angeles Review of Books. On her novel and Ness, a primary character, Gyasi says: This novel was an attempt for me to say: We cannot look away when something like this is happening. We can’t look away. We don’t get to. Because Ness doesn’t get […]
...moreHow Albert Camus Wrote a French Classic
Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation catapulted Albert Camus’s The Stranger into the center of conversation in many literary circles. After helping get Camus’s Algerian Chronicles published in English in 2013, Alice Kaplan’s latest effort, Looking For The Stranger, explains how the book came to be. Camus expert and Los Angeles Review of Books History Editor […]
...moreThe Queer History of Children Books
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kelly Blewett retraces a fragment of the long-needed queer history of children books: Nordstrom was also queer. Although it seems she rarely mixed her private life with her professional one, a number of the most famous writers whom she published were queer, too, including Brown, Fitzhugh, and […]
...moreCook the Books
Cook’s portraits are usually accompanied by texts distilled from interviews she conducts with her subjects (afterward, she says, because she prefers the shoot itself to remain as meditative as possible). This provides her, and her audience, with a verbal layer of insight not normally accessible to photographers. In the Los Angeles Review Of Books, Michael Kurcfeld […]
...moreCruel Summers
We both survived; we both grew up and made lives for ourselves. But I still can’t bear to think about that summer. We could have died so many times. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Briallen Hopper recalls a wild summer spent in her late teens while reviewing Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire.
...moreBorn of a Limitless Imagination
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ilana Teitelbaum writes a glowing review of Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, praising Oyeyemi’s singular voice. Teitelbaum writes: “The dazzle of Oyeyemi’s technique fully engages the reader’s mind; the heart is undisturbed. … Oyeyemi’s infinitely nested stories seem an end […]
...moreGhost in the Machine
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Professor Ted Underwood talks about why Digital Humanities, the new discipline he’s often associated with, doesn’t exist: It’s true that [Digital Humanities] can be aligned with managerial thinking—administrators like it. It can also be hypnotized by shiny pictures and prone to moralistic groupthink on social media. Everything that […]
...moreChris Kraus + Jill Soloway
Chris Kraus’s experimental, cult classic I Love Dick has been adapted for TV by Jill Soloway, and it’s time to revisit and scrutinize Kraus’s use of the slur “kike,” and indeed Kraus’s sense of her own Jewishness. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Sonkin places Kraus in the Jewish literary tradition of her […]
...moreThe Art of Memory
It is optimistic in terms of fiction and young adult fiction to propose a world in which there is healing, and in which healing exists, because complete or perfect healing doesn’t exist in the real world. But there is the idea of making room for new people. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, […]
...moreBaby as Muse
Lucy Ives writes about Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors for the Los Angeles Review of Books: It’s a study of a baby and of babies, of culture and of vulnerability. Most of all, it’s a study of everything one has missed perceiving previous to the arrival of a child. Galchen’s book is an “extended essay vérité,” […]
...moreWhat Do I Know?
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, essayist Patrick Madden discusses why he was drawn to the medium and how he finds his wide-ranging subjects: In terms of art — whether sounded or painted or written — a big part of making it is getting beyond the seeming clarity, or admitting that clarity isn’t possible, seeing things […]
...moreFrom the Italian
The goal is to deliver something from another language into your own language so people will read it and like it. I think sometimes it’s forgotten that you have to be a good writer in your own language. As part of its “Multilingual Wordsmiths” series, the Los Angeles Review of Books features an interview with […]
...moreFeeding Your Head: The History of LARB
Hungry intellectuals are flocking to the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here is the humble story of how LARB came into being in April of 2011. Reader Matthew Weiner (of Mad Men fame) says: It speaks to Los Angeles in that it’s a little bit renegade… It’s got a little bit of ‘f— you.’ It has the highest chance […]
...moreThe Storytelling of :) ;) D:
It’s hard to imagine a book written entirely in emoji that isn’t just about the conceit of writing an entire book in emoji, perhaps marketed as an Urban Outfitters coffee table book for guests to alternately smirk and groan at. And yet, as many digital natives know, emojis can be used in complicated and highly […]
...moreCommon Strange
Ena Brdjanovic describes the commanding, performative, discomfiting, and off-kilter folk tale qualities of Diane Williams’s recent story collection: In sum, the 40 short stories of Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine amount to a collage of beautifully trimmed and perplexing details, of moments that make us feel alien in a world we so readily recognize.
...moreThrilling and Bewildering
Her poems’ shifts from the tactile and concrete to the amorphous and the abstract is simultaneously thrilling and bewildering… In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Noemi Press poetry editor Diana Arterian takes a close look at Sarah Vap’s Viability, a new collection of poems that consider economic and social questions.
...moreTen Times Ten Miller
Ten years after his death in 2005, Arthur Miller’s centenary proved a bumper year for productions of his work, and not all of it the old familiars. The Los Angeles Review of Books shares an adapted essay of a lecture Professor Murray Biggs gave last December to the Baltimore Arts Seminar on Arthur Miller’s centenary.
...moreNational Amnesia
Race is an important and central issue in the United States, but what about abroad? It appears that both the United States and the United Kingdom are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison said in an early interview about Beloved (1987), ‘something that the characters don’t want to remember, I […]
...moreThe Worst Things We Do, We Do To Our Sisters
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Briallen Hopper writes about what it means to be a sister: The five of us live in four states on two coasts, and over the decades we have done devastating and unforgettable things to each other. We’ve professed our dislike for each other; we’ve unfriended and blocked each […]
...moreJohn’s Pixie Dream Girls
Mary Jo Tewes Cramb discusses the perpetuation of the “manic pixie dream girl” stereotype in John Green’s novels: In Green’s novels, there is considerable tension between the potent appeal of his manic pixie characters, the excitement and fun they bring into the narrators’ lives, and the messages these characters impart about their own lives and identities. […]
...moreThe Lives of Unfamous Women
Anne Boyd Rioux reviews a new biography on the wife of Lord Byron, Anne Isabella Milbanke. In her review, Rioux evaluates the still-too-high standard set for women’s biographies, particularly when those women lived in the shadow of famous men: Insisting that the female relatives of famous men be accomplished players on the world stage in […]
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