LARB
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The Middle East in Writing
Increasingly, a writer needs an access point, a micro-focus, a close-up lens—even a gimmick: one small story through which larger historical truths can be elucidated anew. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, N.S. Morris writes about how journalism inform stories…
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1984 or 2016?
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Rohde gives a thorough and chilling analyzation of our current socio-political climate which highlights just how closely our world parallels the one that George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984: No one…
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Reviewing the Literary Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the Los Angeles Review of Book‘s new model for the literary review: LARB beckons a new model of a literary review, not tied to a newspaper or based in a university but creating its…
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Recipes for a New Life
I subsisted on Cliff bars, Cuban coffee, and Trader Joe’s wine. The only real habit of my old life that made it over to my new life was reading. In fact I became even more alive with reading than I…
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Marginalia’s Moment
At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, S. Brent Plate discusses the place of book marginalia as we go forth into the digital age: what will happen to our…
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The New Teeth of Mexican Literature
While reviewing Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aaron Bady considers the rise of Mexican literature post-Roberto Bolaño: Roberto Bolaño’s popularity in English over the last decade or so has had a…
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Your Brain on History
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Larry S. McGrath writes about the growing role of neuroscience in writing new historical narratives. McGrath frames this discussion in a review of historian Lynn Hunt’s Writing History in the Global Era, looking…
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Never Protest the Same Way Twice
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Justin Campbell interviewed Micah White about founding Adbusters, his struggle growing up biracial, and how one should never protest the same way twice.
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Writing Realness
I took the part of me that was the most sensitive, and I asked what it would be like to be the most raw version of myself, in a world that is actually pushing in on me. In an interview…
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On Birds in the Wild
In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world: In grief, what I found: birds…
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Don’t (Blurb) Speak
Wallace coined the helpful term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about…