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”
13 tags
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...
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...
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...
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...
