I love the English language. I know some people go into translating because they love foreign languages, but I love English above all, and I enjoy translating these foreign texts into my beloved English. In the first of six-part interview series with literary translators, the Los Angeles Review of Books features a conversation with Lydia […]
...moreHungry 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 […]
...moreIt’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 […]
...moreOver at Los Angeles Review of Books, Leah Mirakhor engages poet Robin Coste Lewis, 2015 National Book Award winner of Voyage of the Sable Venus, in deep and generous conversation about writing and life. Coste Lewis remembers Audre Lorde as a poet who “refused to condescend to her readers,” and who was a great inspiration to […]
...moreEna 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.
...moreHer 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 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.
...moreRace 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 […]
...moreFor 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 […]
...moreMary 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. […]
...moreAnne 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 […]
...moreIncreasingly, 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 being written about the Middle East, exploring the various shapes nonfiction takes in the process […]
...moreFor 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 aware of post-9/11 society in the United States, England, Europe, and elsewhere can fail to […]
...moreI 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 had before. Taking myself out on reading dates. Spending entire days in bed with a […]
...moreAt 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 annotations, Counting Crows lyrics and otherwise?
...moreWhile 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 profound effect on publishers. “The Story of My Teeth” takes part in this renaissance, but […]
...moreThe Offing is a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices. It’s only been around since March, but The Offing has already published over 150 writers and artists and has a staff that is one of the most diverse in publishing. Now, The Offing is hosting its first-ever fundraiser, with hopes that […]
...moreFor 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 particularly at her claim of a “biochemical revolution” in shaping the modern consciousness.
...moreAt 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.
...moreI 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 with the Los Angeles Review of Books, debut novelist Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too […]
...moreRadio is undergoing the sort of DIY revolution that journalism faced with the advent of blogs. If ‘Out on the Wire’ helps convince the legions of amateur podcasters that good radio is far more than recording hour upon hour of unedited gabbing, it will be not only useful and fun but that much rarer thing: […]
...moreIn 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 reassure. Birds as representatives of a universe that will go on with or without us. […]
...moreWallace 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 them, they’re literally meaningless.” Though David Foster Wallace was somewhat skeptical about book blurbs, he […]
...moreHe is one of the only artists … who actually seemed to enjoy his journey, both spiritual and musical. Plus, he seemed to learn something profound with each step of his way, until completely formed as an artist. In a critique of composer Philip Glass’s memoir Words Without Music, the Los Angeles Review of Books […]
...moreOver at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Casey Michael Henry considers Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly a new bid to revive a “Black Postmodernism”: Not only does the album fulfill many specific qualities of postmodernism, and postmodernism specifically shaped by black experience, but also does so within a form traditionally consigned to canonical, usually […]
...moreTo form secrets with a city is to treat it like a lover, to imagine you know it better than anyone, but to still expect it to surprise you for years to come. It is the secret to all rewarding travel and to inspired living. In “Re-defining Travel, Re-experiencing Paris,” Los Angeles Review of Books […]
...moreI’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more defined and governed by race, class, gender, and the changing climate. I might feel differently […]
...moreWriters, Sontag believed, if they are any good at all, are obliged to try to understand the forces that shape us. They seek to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we inhabit…They write to help us understand what, for many, eludes understanding. Steve Wasserman remembers Susan […]
...moreDoes perception provide us with an accurate picture of reality? To what extent is our environment a reflection of our psychological state? UCLA Philosophy Professor Josh Armstrong examines all sorts of thought-provoking questions in his critique of John Searle’s Seeing Things As They Are in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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