Los Angeles Review of Books
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A 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…
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The 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…
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Profiling 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…
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Don’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…
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How 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…
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The 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…
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Cook 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…
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Cruel 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…
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Born 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…
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Ghost 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…
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Chris 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…