Los Angeles Review of Books
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Never Change
The LA Review of Books talks with Meghan Daum about her wildly successful new essay collection, The Unspeakable, catharsis, and redemption (or the lack thereof): I think what tends to be truly unspeakable in our current culture is not when…
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Always Read the Comments
Art isn’t just for fans, which means that it’s not just for the knowledgeable, but for passersby as well. Expertise, then, seems an excuse to make everyone talk about the same things in the same way. For the LA Review…
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Joan Didion and Me
All of that is to say that because Tom Wolfe and because James Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, but because Didion most of all, an American essay today without the sudden and revelatory personal aside is hardly…
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Ourselves and Our World
Sensational headlines declaiming the death of the humanities often misunderstand what the humanities actually are. Paul A. Kottman explains that the practice of analyzing texts doesn’t just teach us how to think; it creates new ways of thinking: Whatever we…
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Open Window
Jessica Gross riffs on Matteo Pericoli for the LARB, where she stands in support of the cosmopolitan. Her essay ruminates on place in art, foreign inspiration, and the mystique underlying location: The obvious motive — to discover how artists work,…
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Native Transplant
Rumpus contributor J. Ryan Stradal edited the recently published California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Gold State, Number 2. The anthology’s goal? To find the best new practitioners of Californian prose. Down at LARB, Dinah Lenney quizzes Stradal on just how…
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Figuring 101 Two-Letter Words
Stephin Merritt, besides being the lead singer/songwriter in beloved indie band Magnetic Fields, is a talented poet. His latest collection of short poems is a trip into the world of two-letter words allowed on Scrabble. Merritt shares the stories behind…
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A Losing Game
I imagined if I had been writing in the 1950s and 1960s, I, too, may have been writing for the pulps. I got the sense that [Jim] saw me as a kindred spirit, that I reminded him of himself as…
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Remembering Galway Kinnell
Poet Galway Kinnell sadly passed away a few days ago. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books a group of authors—including, among others, Dana Levin and Natalie Diaz—pay homage to his great life and career, and recollect how his poetry influenced…
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A Play on a Painting
Take a trip to the Los Angeles Review of Books to find out how Chagall inspired the longest-running show on Broadway.
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Fame and Literature, Irreconcilable Enemies
Reflecting on what might become of Roberto Bolaño, and his fame, John Yargo covers two biographies of the Chilean writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noting that these scholars had to “face a unique problem”: The seductive popular…
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Daniel Alarcòn Interviewed
[O]ne of the benefits of not having studied literature in a traditional sense is that my relationship with the canon is not, um, a tight relationship, not an embrace. Daniel Alarcòn sits down with Los Angeles Review of Books Editor in Chief…