Los Angeles Review of Books
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Women Writing Weird Words
Somewhere between its Kmart and hysterical phases, literary realism got shaken up, when a group of young women writers began crafting a spectral brand of fantastical, strange fiction….Permeating the stories is a sense of omnipresent strangeness made visible. The Los Angeles…
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Brave New World & California
It’s often said “The Sixties” officially began with the death of JFK and America’s “loss of innocence.” But without the dedicated and well-documented cosmic explorations of Aldous Huxley and his cohorts, the decade would have looked very different. Steffie Nelson…
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On Transgender Poetry
At the Los Angeles Review of Books this week, Stephen Burt reviews the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and discusses how poetry allows us, reader and author alike, to inhabit a body or being better or…
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Tales from the Shanghai Book Fair
If the expo serves as any indication, Shanghai has considerably more book enthusiasts than I had suspected, even though just a couple of days earlier The Atlantic had published an article about the decline of reading in China. For the LA…
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“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she…
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Cool SXSW Panel Needs Votes
Three of our favorite publications—the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, and the New Inquiry—are joining forces to create a SXSW panel. Titled “Rebooting Cultural Criticism on the Web,” the panel hopes to address questions like: “How do we make literary…
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Which Do You Spend More Money On: Ebooks or Lattes?
In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called “Books vs. Cigarettes,” trying to figure out which habit cost him more and whether books were simply out of some people’s financial reach. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç updates…
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Discussing Zealot without Zealotry
You may have seen, over the weekend, an exceedingly squirm-worthy video in which a Fox News correspondent grills religious historian and scholar Reza Aslan about why he’s written a book about Jesus despite being Muslim (completely ignoring his credentials, not…
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LARB vs. NYRB
The East Coast and the West Coast have had their spats, but in the end, our respective lit scenes form one big, happy, bicoastal family, right? Right?! That might not seem like the case if you’re following the events outlined…
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“Words for Remembering”
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rumpus contributor Lauren Eggert-Crowe reviews columnist and Book Club author Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love. “…All the love that permeates the story is alight with shame, as if shame is…
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In Which Dead Things Live
“What Kafka is to imprisonment and Beckett is to waiting, Schulz is to trash. Not just trash, but stuff — detritus, objects, substances, matter in all its welter and confusion. The whole spectrum of useless, obsolete junk that fills every…
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Ellen Willis Came Up with the Term Pro-Sex Feminism
It seemed to me that most contemporary rock magazines were propagating an artless scorecard-genealogy version of criticism, treating music in isolation from other art, culture, and political realities. And I had certainly never read Bangs, whose irascible, rambling rock-crit from…