November 2011
55 posts
3 tags
Making Sense of Protest: A Reading List for Kids
Suffragist rally, undated. On the morning after Occupy LA’s eviction, LARB Young Adult Fiction Editor Cecil Castellucci provides a reading list for the kids. Out of town on my book tour I’ve been watching as much Ustream of the Occupy movement as I can. In recent days, my absence from home heightened my anxiety about the rumored booting of the LA occupiers. Now it’s done. They’re gone....
21 tags
Citizen Kael, Part I
RICHARD SCHICKEL
on the life and work of Pauline Kael.
[For Part II, by Laurie Winer, click here.] Pauline Kael © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. All rights reserved. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org Brian Kellow Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
Viking Adult, October 2011. 432 pp. RICHARD SCHICKEL Hell to Sit Next To Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark is a very good biography: well-written,...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Tuesday, November 29th: Miranda July in conversation with writer Joshuah Bearman at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm. Nelson George discusses and signs The Plot Against Hip Hop at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm. Thursday, December 1st: Luis Alberto Urrea in conversation with...
3 tags
On Not Rolling the Log
Image: ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com Today The Dial is in the hands of novelist Glen David Gold, who explores the prickliness of literary sociality, the loneliness of an aging William Faulkner, and other tribulations that flesh is heir to.
— Tom Lutz
GLEN DAVID GOLD Transactions along the Mississippi Delta
Recently, I spoke to a group of MFA students at the University of British Columbia...
Radar LARB
William Deresiewicz on the writers who misread Obama: “These people were supposed to be good at reading character; how could they have missed the fact that Obama’s whole strategy — those very ‘voices’ his ability to impersonate they were so enamored of — consisted of appearing to be all things to all people? He could talk Harvard and say ‘yo mama’ — yes, and be a...
12 tags
Grief and Solemnity
COLIN DICKEY
on the American way of death. © Greg Colson 2010 Elliptical Models (Flea) Courtesy of the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran Michael Kammen Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials
University of Chicago Press, 2010. 272 pp. David Shields and Bradford Morrow, eds. The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death
Norton, 2011. 336 pp.
At the scene...
16 tags
Margaret Atwood and the S and F Words
JOHN CLUTE
on Margaret Atwood’s infamous ambivalence about squids in space. Elevator Girl House F1 ©
Miwa Yanagi 1997 Margaret Atwood In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
New York: Doubleday/Nan A Talese, 2011. 255 pp.
There are a few problems here, which may take a few minutes to sort through before we can get down to the gist of this slender volume.
Many of her...
15 tags
Deconstructing Wendy
Photo: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com Today The Dial is an experiment in theatrical criticism. Joy Horowitz (who last reviewed for us Leo Braudy’s book about the Hollywood Sign and Kevin Starr’s about the Golden Gate Bridge) and Deborah Frost discuss Wendy Wasserstein, prompted by reading Julie Salamon’s biography, Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein,...
I'd Like to Buy the World a Book
Image: Clara Bow reading at home. This Black Friday the Los Angeles Review of Books urges you to stay at home: Don’t go out shopping! Avoid trampling deaths! And peruse our staff’s gift recommendations… Buying books by clicking through Los Angeles Review of Books helps support LARB. Going through our site pays us a royalty on any item you buy, whether the books below or any...
30 tags
I’d Like to Buy the World a Book
This Black Friday the Los Angeles Review of Books urges you to stay at home:
Don’t go out shopping! Avoid trampling deaths! And peruse our staff’s gift recommendations… Buying books by clicking on the icons below helps support the Los Angeles Review of Books. Clicking through pays us a royalty on any item you buy, whether the books below or any other merchandise. Julie Cline, Senior...
7 tags
My Dinner with Marianne
The sixth installment of our Writers On Teachers: Jeffrey Kindley remembers Marianne Moore. Find the whole series in one convenient sidebar at the top of the blog. I was watching a new friend make cocoa in her kitchen. She boiled water while the chocolate was melting on a separate burner, poured the water into two teacups and allowed them to sit while the milk began to simmer in another pan....
9 tags
Memory May Not Sustain
DEAN RADER
on Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Blood Run. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Blood Run
Salt Publishing, November 2007. 120 pp.
Located in Eastern South Dakota and Western Iowa, Blood Run is a series of 176 well-constructed ceremonial mounds built by the Oneonta. The site is over 8,000 years old, but archeologists believe it saw its peak population between 1675 and 1705, when some 10,000...
17 tags
A Serious Man Whose Love Will Last
BRUCE WHITEMAN
on two new classical translations by David R. Slavitt. Collage by Lisa Jane Persky Ovid Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid
Translated by David R. Slavitt
Harvard University Press, May 2011. 352 pp. Virgil The Gnat and Other Minor Poems of Virgil
Translated by David R. Slavitt
University of California Press, July 2011. xviii, 68 pp.
In 1958 when Ezra Pound was...
13 tags
Zimbabwe and the Politics of Impunity
ALEX LICHTENSTEIN
on human rights in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Disputed seats ©
Misheck Masamvu 2008 Peter Godwin The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe
Little, Brown and Co., March 2011. 384 pp. Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands
Columbia University Press, June 2008....
18 tags
Celebrity Politicians
ELBERT VENTURA
argues with Steven J. Ross about Hollywood’s impact on American politics. Steven J. Ross Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics
Oxford University Press, September 2011. 512 pp.
A few days before the October 2003 recall election to oust California Governor Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger staged a campaign event in Orange County. Speaking...
5 tags
The Reader Learns the Rules of the Game
An interview with HELEN DEWITT and two reviews of her latest book. HELEN DEWITT interviewed by LEE KONSTANTINOU “It’s Good to be Pragmatic,” a review by SCOTT ESPOSITO LEE KONSTANTINOU on “Hurricane Helen”
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The LARB Interview: Helen DeWitt
Prose and Poetry Journeys
© Brian Dettmer 2011 Courtesy of the Artist and Black Rat Projects
Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, Your Name Here, and Lightning Rods, which I reviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books here [link]. She also maintains a blog at paperpools.blogspot.com.
We conducted this interview over email last month (as the inserted images probably make...
6 tags
Hurricane Helen
LEE KONSTANTINOU Prose and Poetry Journeys © Brian Dettmer 2011 Courtesy of the Artist and Black Rat Projects Helen DeWitt Lightning Rods
New Directions, October 2011. 192 pp.
Helen DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000 to almost universally rapturous praise. It sold a hundred thousand copies in English. If literary publishing were a rational enterprise, even along...
7 tags
It’s Good to Be Pragmatic
SCOTT ESPOSITO Prose and Poetry Journeys © Brian Dettmer 2011 Courtesy of the Artist and Black Rat Projects Helen DeWitt Lightning Rods
New Directions, 2011. 272 pp.
After a ten-year hiatus — not counting her 2007, PDF-only second book, Your Name Here — Helen DeWitt is back. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s taken so long. Her only previously published novel, The Last Samurai, was...
Radar LARB
Please say you’ve seen it: The Golden Age Stories truck (southbound on the 101). Returns among the clutter: Michael Idov on “The Movie Set that Ate Itself”: “Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and...
18 tags
Antoine Wilson's Notes on "Hack"
Photo: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com
The Dial is an occasional column that on some days will serve as my soapbox, but more often it will feature guests whose work is either closely personal, experimental, or otherwise off our usual diet of book reviews and review essays. H.L. Mencken once said that “a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas,” and I suppose the same goes...
16 tags
Three Novels
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
on novels by Lily Tuck, Michael Cunningham, and Maile Meloy.
Lily Tuck I Married You for Happiness
Atlantic Monthly Press, September 2011. 208 pp.
You suspect it’s true: what we remember at life’s end are the vacations, the concerts, the dinners with friends. In one of the most beautiful love songs in novel form you’ll ever read, Nina...
13 tags
The Things We Carry
JOCELYN HEANEY on teaching in a community college and the talk about higher education. Soldier Reading a Book © JoAnn S. Makinano Marjorie Garber The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon Books, 2011. 283 pp. Geoffrey Galt Harpham The Humanities and the Dream of America
University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp.
Mike wouldn’t sit with his back to the door: “I can never be sure who is on the...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, November 18th: West Hollywood Lecture Series presents The Art of Cruelty featuring Maggie Nelson at the West Hollywood Library beginning at 7:00 pm. The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading by poet Tony Trigilio at the PRB @ the Public School...
5 tags
Puns, Games, and Mathemagic
CHELSEY PHILPOT
on the enduring magic of The Phantom Tollbooth. Norton Juster (Author), Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) The Phantom Tollbooth 50th Anniversary Edition
Knopf Books for Young Readers, October 2011. 288 pp.
In her August 2004 article for the New York Times, “Why Teachers Love Depressing Books,” writer and critic Laura Miller wrote, “I decided that there were two types of...
4 tags
The Books That Made Us: The Phantom Tollbooth
The Phantom Tollbooth’s 1961 cover image by Jules Feiffer. Whenever I am in the company of any person on the planet, and I mention that I mostly write for young people, that person without fail will offer up, unsolicited, their favorite book from childhood. Usually their face will light up. They can remember details. They say things that make me think that, somehow, that book helped form...
22 tags
2050 or Bust
FREDERICK DEKNATEL on urban planning in the Egyptian desert. Pipes being installed in Dar es Salam neighborhood of Cairo, January 2011 © Meredith
Hutchison. Courtesy of the Photographer and CairoFromBelow.org David Sims Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control
The American University in Cairo Press, 2011, 335 pp.
This past August in Heliopolis, the Cairo suburb built over...
8 tags
The Educational Lottery
STEVEN BRINT
on the four kinds of heretics attacking the gospel of education. Felicity Allen, ed. Education
Whitechapel/MIT Press (Documents of Contemporary Art), August 2011. 240 pp. Philip W. Jackson What Is Education?
University of Chicago Press, December 2011. 136 pp. John Marsh Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality
Monthly Review Press, July 2011....
Radar LARB
Now back to the blips: “Inside Occupy Wall Street” by Jeff Sharlet: “It started with a Tweet – ‘Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule’ – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture....
7 tags
Our Zombies, Ourselves
ALIX OHLIN
on Colson Whitehead and the undead. Reclaimed Sewer Pipe ©
Kelly Barrie 2010. Digital C-Print Courtesy of the artist and Maloney Fine Art. Colson Whitehead Zone One
Doubleday, October 2011. 272 pp.
In Zuccotti Park on Halloween, protesters dressed up as zombies in suits, eyes vacant and deranged, fake blood and money dripping from their lips. A directive had been sent from...
6 tags
This weekend, responses from six LARB contributors
to the continuing Occupy movement. Image: GStrike Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND info@gstrike.org Today:
JOSHUA CLOVER on Occupy Cal and the fight over California education; MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI on Occupy Harvard;
and JOSHUA HARDINA on Occupy Riverside. ¤
Yesterday: DAVID LAU on Occupy Oakland, before and after last week’s general...
6 tags
Seize the Ponies
JOSHUA CLOVER
on Occupy Cal and the fight over public education in California. Police try to stop Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement from speaking at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. AP file photo 1964 Protester brought to the ground by police in front of Sproul Hall, November 9, 2011.
The actions this Wednesday on the UC Berkeley campus under the banner “Occupy Cal” were the...
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Crimson Front
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
on Occupy Harvard. Photo: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
On Wednesday, November 9, Occupy Harvard began. The university is frequently accused of being an “academic gatekeeper,” but the administration and police response to the nascent protest movement has made this gatekeeping uncomfortably literal: Harvard Yard has been placed on indefinite “lockdown,” meaning two-level...
4 tags
The Battle of the People's Kitchen
JOSHUA HARDINA
on Occupy Riverside. Image Source: http://on.fb.me/tjNPj7
In early October, about a month after the original Wall Street occupation had begun in New York’s Zuccotti Park and inspired offshoot occupations around the world, people began to stage their own general assembly meetings in Riverside, California.
I moved from Seattle to Riverside in 2003 to attend graduate school at...
6 tags
Big Tent
SONALI KOLHATKAR
on the strange bedfellows of Occupy Los Angeles. Photo: Sonali Kolhatkar
It took Los Angeles exactly 15 days to spawn a solidarity protest after New Yorkers began camping out in Zuccotti Park in mid-September. Within a month, Occupy L.A. quadrupled its presence on the grassy lawns surrounding City Hall. Despite complaints about damaged grass and expenditures on police...
6 tags
People's Libraries
JASON BOOG
on the return of the thirties.
In the spring of 1935, the famous novelist Maxwell Bodenheim crashed the New York City welfare office and begged for relief after five years of the Great Depression. His career had stalled, and Bodenheim hadn’t earned a dime since his final novels had flopped. He was working on a manuscript called Clear Deep Fusion, but he would never finish it. His...
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Letter from Oakland
DAVID LAU
reports from the Bay Area, before and after the general strike. Photo: David Lau PART 1: Impressions on October 30, 2011 Occupy Everything, Liberate Oakland!
Late last Tuesday night, October 25th, social media feeds buzzed with the story of a two-tour Marine veteran of Iraq, Scott Olsen, struck by a police projectile fired at close range and left unconscious with a fractured skull....
16 tags
Another L.A. Look
PETER PLAGENS
on Pacific Standard Time and the story of Los Angeles art. Hegemann Wedge Courtesy of and © Ed Moses 1971 Collection of Phyllis & John Kleinberg
Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980
Getty Research Institute, October 2011. 352 pp.
As all the world knows — especially that part of the world that runs from the eastern borders of San Bernardino, Riverside, and...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, November 10th: Slake presents Slake After Dark: Héctor Tobar and RT’N the 44s, a night of readings and music at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm. Michael Gross discusses and signs Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles at Book Soup...
11 tags
Real Penguins in Imaginary Apartments
ANTHONY OLCOTT
on Andrey Kurkov’s oddball Russian crime fiction. Burning Man with Penguin © Joseph Draye Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin
Melville House, June 2011. 240 pp. Andrey Kurkov Penguin Lost
Melville House, September 2011. 240 pp.
There are three comparisons that reviewers unfamiliar with Russian literature will make when describing works translated from Russian: If the...
29 tags
Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead
LAURIE WINER
on the dismantling of a once great newspaper. © Nick Georgiou James O’Shea The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers
PublicAffairs Books, June 2011. 416 pp.
Since it seemed it couldn’t get much worse, Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief James O’Shea decided to look on the bright side. It was 2007, and the newspaper had a new owner. He was...
4 tags
Letter from Oakland: Part 2
The second installment of David Lau’s Letter from Oakland.Read Part 1 here. Only One Side Is Armed The fine tooth combs continue to run over Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Wednesday, November 2nd, its sequence of marches, port shutdown, and building occupation. News, however, is just now trickling out about military veteran Kayvan Sabehgi (two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan),...
16 tags
Patience and Virtue
KATE WOLF and MATTHEW SPECKTOR
on Lydia Davis and her latest book, The Cows. Cows 1 from The Cows by Lydia Davis © Theo Cote Lydia Davis The Cows
Sarabande Books, March 2011. 32 pp. A brief review by MATTHEW SPECKTOR
By Lydia Davis’s fabled standards of brevity, The Cows is an epic. Clocking in at thirty pages (admittedly, most interrupted by photographs), the book is a novella, or at...
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Radar LARB
Walt Whitman (1954) Blips: Ken Baumann on Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm: “precursor…I have to use numbers for this review. The accumulative force in The Marbled Swarm has made me nervous to write about it. These numbers should help. Related: numbers are very rarely used in the book; we are maybe twice given them as markers, as soft attempts at erasure, but more so as ...
10 tags
My Disappointment Critic
JONATHAN LETHEM
on being reviewed by James Wood. Pore Everything cc Lisa Jane Persky “The job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to, in limited ways and for only a limited period of time … What usually happens is that (the staff critic) writes for some time...
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Letters to the Editors
Jan Reymond, La Thésarbre, photo by timtom.ch. This week, letters from Forrest Hylton, Jon Monday, Srinivas Gandhi, Michael Steinberg, Shalom Freedman, and Jay Farrell. ¤
To the Editors:
The Los Angeles Review of Books has done a great service in reviewing Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana’s Interpreting Ramakrishna. I believe the book will come to be seen as an important marker for...
10 tags
Christa Faust, Ken Bruen, Ed Gorman, Day Keene
Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists John Alton, Cinematographer
The second installment of LARB’s new monthly crime fiction column. Christa Faust Choke Hold
Hard Case Crime, October 2011. 256 pp. Ken Bruen Headstone
Mysterious Press, October 2011. 256 pp. Ed Gorman Bad Moon Rising
Pegasus Books, October 2011. 256 pp. Day Keene Dead Dolls Don’t Talk /Hunt the...
12 tags
The Age of Revolution
JON WIENER
on a lifelong Communist historian’s
reconsideration of the revolutionary project.
Die Passion Eines Menschen [One Man’s Passion] Frans Masereel 1921 Courtesy of Spencer Museum of Art
Eric Hobsbawm How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
Yale University Press, September 2011. 480 pp. He’s Back! cried the headline in The Times of London in fall 2008 as global stock...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, November 3rd: Live Talks LA and KCET present Adam Gopnik in conversation with Ed Zwick, to benefit the Los Angeles Review of Books. At Track 16, Bergamot Station, 8:00 pm (reception 6:30 pm.) Les Figues Press celebrates the publication of Negro Marfil / Ivory Black...
11 tags
Around the Table
THANE TIERNEY
on la vie gourmande. Breakfast in The Studio (Detail) by Ernest-Ange Duez 1874 Courtesy of Mid-Manhattan Library/Picture Collection Adam Gopnik The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 320 pp. Laura Calder Dinner Chez Moi: The Fine Art of Feeding Friends
HarperCollins, September 2011. 354 pp. Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine...
