June 2011
47 posts
7 tags
Glimmers of Family
SEAN SINGER Abstract by Charles Alston Harmony Holiday Negro League Baseball
Fence, July 2011. 88 pp.
In Negro League Baseball, her debut volume of prose poems, Harmony Holiday wrestles with the perplexing question of how a black artist can live and work without drawing attention exclusively toward race, while returning regularly to the death of her father, the soul singer Jimmy...
6 tags
Scrappiness
ERIC GUDAS John Ashbery and James Schuyler Writing “Nest of Ninnies” Fairfield Porter, 1967. Betty Cuningham Gallery James Schuyler Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems
Edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 220 pp.
“Somebody loves us all,” promises Elizabeth Bishop at the conclusion of her poem “Filling Station.” Since his death in 1991 at the age of...
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War Zone
JACOB SILVERMAN The Church of St. Gregory of Tigran, Honents, Turkey (cc) Marko Anastasov [link] Mathias Énard Zone
Translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Introduction by Brian Evenson.
Open Letter, December 2010. 517 pp.
Any consideration of Zone — the first novel by Frenchman Mathias Énard to be translated into English — must contend with one central fact. The novel is,...
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The Ceiling Worker
JEET HEER Illustration by Ben Katchor Ben Katchor The Cardboard Valise
Pantheon, March 2011. 128 pp.
Ben Katchor is the Joseph Mitchell of contemporary comics. Mitchell, along with his close friend A.J. Liebling, was a pivotal early New Yorker reporter who famously made a speciality of describing the peripheral rascals, layabouts, and oddballs of the Big Apple, ranging from the denizens of...
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Yizkor Bukher
LOUISE STEINMAN Spring in Gościeradz by Leon Wyczółkowski [link] Jacob Glatstein The Glatstein Chronicles
Translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman
Edited by Ruth R. Wisse
Yale University Press, November 2010. 432 pp.
On my trip to Poland this past winter, I brought the perfect book as my traveling companion. The Glatstein Chronicles was written in 1934, after the author, celebrated...
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Extremely Short Excerpt: The Eye Drops Aren’t...
@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }It started on the fourth day in Buffalo. I noticed spots out of my left eye that I’d never seen before. I didn’t pay too much attention at first. Either I was more weary...
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Odious and Unpleasant
TOM LUTZ Reading Room, New York Public Library. Glass Slide Image courtesy of NYPL
Yesterday, with great pleasure, I read the epigraph to Elizabeth Gumport’s short essay on book reviews in the already venerable n+1, the literary magazine out of Brooklyn. The epigraph is from an 1807 editorial in the long gone, but once venerable Monthly Anthology and Boston Review:
The office of a reviewer...
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Ball of Fire: Jimmy McDonough
JONATHAN PENNER Jimmy McDonough manning the slate for Andy Milligan’s Monstrosity. Flash frame from dailies, 1987. I’d never heard of him. Found his book, The Ghastly One, on sale at Skylight Books; a whole volume on Andy Milligan, the Staten Island schlockmeister usually referred to as the more prolific, “worse” Ed Wood. I knew enough about Milligan’s awfulness to be...
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Fresh Pulp and Geezer Noir
CULLEN GALLAGHER La Main Dans le Sac (CC) F. Moreno
Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying
Edited by Bill Crider
Busted Flush Press, November 2010. 400 pp. By Hook or By Crook, and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year
Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
Tyrus Books, Novermber 2010. 600 pp. The Best American Noir of the Century
Edited by James Ellroy and...
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Three-Dimensional Wistfulness
DAN FANTE Pink’s Hot Dogs © Kaszeta on flickr
P.G. Sturges Shortcut Man
Scribner, February 2011. 224 pp.
It’s ten thirty in Los Angeles on a Thursday night. Your buddy, who’s been a friend since your Berkeley days and still lives in Oakland, is in for the weekend visiting an old girlfriend. He’s strictly a San Francisco Bay Area cat and has never really been into Los Angeles, and...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, June 23rd:Reading from the new literary journal The Rattling Wall at Skylight Books starting at 7:30. Grace Krilanovich and Wyatt Doyle discuss and sign The Orange Eats Creeps at Vroman’s Bookstore starting at 7:00pm. Friday, June 24th: Lonesome No More! Theatre presents Frank Wedekind’s...
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Today’s article by F.X. Feeney, on the first two entries in Soft Skull Press’s new Deep Focus series, comes with coming attractions. Here’s the 1974 trailer for Death Wish: And one from 1988 for They Live:
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A Wilderness of Contradictions
F.X. FEENEY Christopher Sorrentino Death Wish
Deep Focus/Soft Skull Press, November 2010 Jonathan Lethem They Live
Deep Focus/Soft Skull Press, November 2010
“Is Death Wish a good movie that ultimately fails, or is it a bad movie that succeeds brilliantly from time to time?” Christopher Sorrentino asks this at the outset of his brief study of the 1974 film, before turning to wrestle with a...
Libya, 1931
IBRAHIM N. ABUSHARIF Omar Al-Mukhtar, captured by the Italian forces, September 1931. Omar Al-Mukhtar is celebrated as a resistance hero throughout the Arab world. His final words were the Quranic verse: Innā li-llāhi wa innā ilayHi rāgi ūna (To Allah we belong, and to Allah we return). Many cities throughout the Arab world have a street or a square named after Omar Al-Mokhtar. The Libyan 10...
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Home Pages
ERICA WETTER Tumble ©
Rachel Whiteread, 2007-2008 Meghan Daum Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
Vintage paperback, June 2011 (256 pp.)
For many years, the Google Earth map of Escalada Terrace in Los Angeles included an aerial shot of a small house with an old mattress in the yard. This is LA Times columnist Meghan Daum’s house, and in her wise and funny memoir she recounts...
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Letters to the Editors
The Los Angeles Review of Books will publish letters to the editors on Saturdays. Jan Reymond, La Thésarbre, photo by timtom.ch. This week, letters from David Livingstone Smith and Jon-Christian Suggs. ¤
To the Editors:
It is difficult for an author to respond to a review without sounding churlish, but at the same time, it is incumbent upon an author not to allow misrepresentations of his or...
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Extremely Short Excerpt: Slinkachu and the...
Policeman: Excuse me, sir. Would you mind telling me what you are doing? Slinkachu: Oh. Er… I was just gluing down this little plastic person. Policeman: Eh? Slinkachu: Here, look. It’s an… Er… An art thing. Kind of. I take photos of these little people. Then leave them. Policeman: Oh, ha! Cute! Sorry, I thought you were sniffing glue, what with that super glue. We get a...
12 tags
The Pervert's Point of View
DIANA WAGMAN Day (Truth) , Ferdinand Hodler, 1896-98 Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
Margaux Fragoso Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. 322 pp.
We drive by a car accident and crane our necks. We want to see the worst: the mutilated passenger, the driver crumpled against the wheel. If a director suddenly appeared and shouted, “Cut!” — wouldn’t we all...
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June Gloom on Bloomsday (Lisa Sonne)
LA’s “June Gloom” sent tendrils of mist through the mountains and a canopy of clouds over my early morning walk in the Santa Monica Mountains today — enough Irish-type weather to remind me that June 16th is Bloomsday, the day Leopold Bloom and two other characters meandered through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. With the spin of the earth and time differences, that means pilgrimages have...
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Inside and outside at the same time
For your viewing pleasure, we offer a few additional paintings by Patricia Patterson that we didn’t have room to reproduce alongside Robert Polito’s wonderful essay on the Tumblr today: Mary AloneCóilín Lighting a Pipe A retrospective of her 50-year career, Patricia Patterson: Here and There, Back and Forth is showing at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, CA until...
Keeping the Eye Moving
ROBERT POLITO Cow Shingle Beach ©
Patricia Patterson 1.
Stein & Limits
Gertrude Stein eventually called her lecture Composition as Explanation, but as she worked through the repetitions and variations for the 1926 Cambridge Literary Club audience, “composition” proved the stuff not only of writing and painting but also...
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Whose Hollywood Is It Anyway?
PAUL MANDELBAUM Trust Me (cc) Steve Lambert Mona Simpson My Hollywood
Knopf, 2010. 384 pp.
As storytelling’s lifeblood is compassion, satire feeds off rage. Most Hollywood novels get their sustenance from both, though tend to binge on the latter. There’s a great deal to mock, obviously. It may in fact be so obvious, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. But in case you’re new...
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Egyptian Spring
GRAHAM HARMAN From Tweets from Tahrir © Sarah Carr Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, editors Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded in the Words of the People who Made It
OR Books, 2011. 160 pp.
On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Egyptians were scheduled to enjoy a national holiday: Police Day. But rather than being fêted by a grateful populace, Egypt’s police spent January 25...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Tuesday, June 14th: We Are Here: We Could Be Everywhere: Media, Arts and Activism in Los Angeles and Beyond. Panel discussion with Aniko Imre, Henry Jenkins, Reed Johnson, and Fabian Wagmister at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library starting at 7:00pm. !Women Art Revolution screening revealing...
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What Is African American Literature? A Symposium...
Part I of a series of pieces responding to Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (Harvard University Press, 2011) Today, essays by Walter Benn Michaels, Erica Edwards, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Phillis Wheatley by Scipio Moorhead (c. 1773)
CLASS
Walter Benn Michaels
One way of understanding Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? is as a book about...
7 tags
The Mysterious Island
HOWARD A. RODMAN
I’m writing this because I just found out that my favorite bookseller in the world, Michel Roethel, is dead. He was mysterious and his bookstore obscure. It was on the Rue Lagrange in Paris. It sold the works of only one author. And its proprietor didn’t like selling books at all: M. Roethel always seemed unhappy when a book managed to leave his shop.
Some...
Always, when a bookseller dies, the books weep.
We were given permission to use more pictures for Howard Rodman’s beautiful memorial to his favorite bookseller than we could use for the story, including this, by the photographer sansplans: Jules Verne Bookshop, March 16, 2011 © sansplans
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Extremely Short Excerpt: Greg Boyle’s War With...
The first wedding I ever did was in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a humble Quechua couple, and the Mass was in the main Jesuit church in the center of town. Standing room only with Quechua Indians in their absolute finest clothes. Quechua cholas in brightly colored hoopy skirts and shawls, with tiny bowler hats perched at a tilt, on top of their pinched-back hair. Men in suits with white collars,...
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Larry Flynt at Home
JEAN STEIN Larry Flynt by © Corey Cooley
Good morning, I am your worst nightmare come true: a fabulously wealthy pornographer with the courage and willingness to spend my last dime to expose how you are perverting the Constitution of this great land. Now let’s get down to business.
— “Larry Flynt for President” campaign ad, Nov. 1983 Dennis Hopper
I decided I was going to blow...
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LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Wednesday, June 8:The writings of Paul Thek as read by Thomas Jane at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00. Thursday, June 9: Hammer Readings: New American Writing with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00. Ramsey McPhillips, Lynelle White, and a special surprise...
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Stars Inside Your Thumb
CHARLES HARPER WEBB Still from Trouble in the Image © Pat O’Neill Bob Hicok Words for Empty and Words for Full
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 96 pp.
Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet — if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative: “there are stars / inside your thumb, your breath, / and how you say yes or no is how they shine / or burn out,” he says near...
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Astounding Cosmic News
SIOBHAN PHILLIPS Photo © Lisa Jane Persky
Matthew Zapruder Come on All You Ghosts
Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 96 pp.
Matthew Zapruder will speak to you. This isn’t a metaphor, or a mere recommendation: it’s a description of method. In “Come On All You Ghosts,” the title poem of his third and latest volume, Zapruder calls directly to whomever might be taking in his lines at that...
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Rock and Roll (Ned Vizzini)
A few years ago I took a MediaBistro crash course in newspaper writing and learned the term “evergreen.” My instructor promised us that our clips were evergreen — that is, if we ever wrote for a paper, it didn’t matter if our piece was a week old or five years old: it could still get us our next job. It turns out that certain topics for newspaper stories are evergreen as well. (The most...
6 tags
Strange Lights
JANE SMILEY Map courtesy of the Library of Virginia
Sheri Holman Witches on the Road Tonight
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2011. 400 pp.
Sheri Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic. It is a strange combination, rather like the flavor of, well, maybe burdock leaves. She has written about the 15th century (in A Stolen Tongue), the 19th...
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Once Children
JESSICA FREEMAN-SLADE Snowy © Dina Goldstein
Kate Bernheimer, editor My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Penguin, 2010. 608 pp.
Adults who were once children tend to agree: we are who we are because of fairy tales. Once upon a time, they were the clearest — and most just-seeming — of all narratives, even if they weren’t entirely real. People got what they...
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Maria Bustillos responds to Sven Birkerts’ “The Room and the Elephant” (an essay which, she nicely says, gives her “a rather Eliza Doolittle-like feeling, like being invited to dance by the prince of Transylvania”) over at The Awl.
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The Room and the Elephant
SVEN BIRKERTS Man with Cuboid, M.C.Escher
Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never...
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The Outsiders (Caissie St. Onge)
In her Wall Street Journal article “Darkness Too Visible,” Meghan Cox Gurdon rails against the scourge of publishers who “use … fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives” through current Young Adult literature. No. Nuh uh. Nope. Let me register my disagreement right here. As Gurdon correctly points out, the YA genre wasn’t fully...
Funhouse Mirrors (Margaret Stohl)
WSJ Newsflash: Some Old People Don’t Like What Some Young People Are Reading! It sounds like an Onion headline. But it’s true; on Saturday afternoon, the WSJ (Media Translation: Old People) published a sweeping, genre-wide condemnation of the YA genre, inked by Meghan Cox Gurdon. By Saturday evening, YA’s unofficial Ambassador @libbabray (among others) took to the...
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Man Is Not Cat Food
BARBARA EHRENREICH Jack Kirby from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957
David Livingstone Smith Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others
St. Martin’s Press, 2011 Dale Peterson The Moral Lives of Animals
Bloomsbury Press, 2011 Paul A. Trout Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination
Prometheus Books, 2011. Jason Hribal Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden...
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Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the...
Here we go again. Every once in a while someone writes an article insinuating that YA Authors are purposefully writing dark books with inappropriate subject matter for teens. On June 4th, 2011 it was the Wall Street Journal that published an article by Meghan Cox Gurdon about the Darkness of YA books. We’ve been down this road before. Every time a book is banned in a library or from a...
Extremely Short Excerpt: Tove Jansson's True...
“I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean.” Let’s be honest, we aren’t totally comfortable with our Declining Empire lifestyle. Life is hard, priorities are changing, the debt ceiling is buckling, or bursting (or whatever), and we have to do something disturbing almost on a daily basis: “face facts.” On the national level, there are a lot of...
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Boiling Point
ROGER LUCKHURST death at the parade © Dan Baldwin 2011 Gary K. Wolfe Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature
Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 280 pp.
For twenty years, Gary K. Wolfe, a Professor at Roosevelt University, has written a monthly column for Locus magazine, in which he reviews a handful of novels or story collections, usually of science fiction, fantasy, or horror....
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Advertising Degree Zero
SHERRYL VINT Golden Calf 1 © Irving Norman, 1957
William Gibson Zero History
Putnam, 2010. 416 pp.
“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed,” is one of William Gibson’s most famous dictums. Zero History, his most recent novel, is perhaps best understood as science fiction of the present, a representation of this hyperreal moment in which we live surrounded by our...
Tall Redhead Syndrome
MILES CORWIN Edward Hopper, Excursion Into Philosophy
James Ellroy The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
Knopf, 2010. 224 pp.
The memoir was once a venerable literary genre — more compelling and immediate than biography, more inclusive than the novel. There was only one requirement for an aspiring memoirist: do something interesting.
Unfortunately, many of my peers violated and...
Every Picture Tells A Story
Have we mentioned we’re on Flickr?
A Reader's Guide to Peter Mountford
An Interview by VANESSA HUA Peter Mountford is a Seattle writer whose debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, was published in April. As a child, Mountford witnessed the outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka and spent holidays in Scotland with his father’s family; later on, he worked at a think tank in Ecuador and lived in Paris and Mexico. His time abroad helped shape his writer’s...
