July 2011
35 posts
4 tags
Why to Take Notes
This post by Kevin Brockmeier is part of The 75th Project, a series of essays by graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. We are printing it on Saturday, the day on which we often publish letters to the editors, in part because it seems to speak to a piece we ran a while back by Mark McGurl, “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About...
A Good Sign
If you sell the books, you don’t have to return them. Empty boxes realized their potential this week, in the window at Skylight Books.
Talking In Circles: Charles Bernstein's Difficult...
A special post from Douglas Messerli, publisher of Green Integer Books, on Mr. Bernstein’s new collection, Attack of the Difficult Poems. “I’m not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way.” - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep as quoted in Attack of the Difficult PoemsI mentioned to a friend the other morning that, except for conservatively...
9 tags
Snappy and Reckless
WOODY HAUT
on why Richard Hallas deserves more respect. Richard Hallas You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
[1938] Black Lizard/Creative Arts and Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986. 213 pp.
In his seminal essay on the Southern California hardboiled school, “The Boys in the Back Room” (1940), Edmund Wilson dismisses it out of hand. In The Dream Endures, California historian Kevin...
LARB Recommends
Supergods by Grant Morrison, featured at July 28th reading at Meltdown Comics Thursday, July 28th: Dana Spiotta reads and signs her novel Stone Arabia at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30pm. Mary Mallory discusses and signs Hollywoodland at Book Soup beginning at 7:00pm. Intimate evening with Grant Morrison for the release of his new book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous...
9 tags
Mapping the Bay Area
NIKIL SAVAL
navigates Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City as it charts the overlapping worlds of San Francisco. Phrenological San Francisco
Concept Paul LaFarge, in collaboration with artist Paz de la Calzada
Rebecca Solnit Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
University of California Press, 2010. 167 pp.
Affection for place runs like a red thread through Rebecca Solnit’s work. ...
5 tags
Delight and Delectation
CLARISSA ROMANO talks to Anne Germanacos about her double life in Greece and California. Creation of The Birds ©
Remedios Varo 1957 I’m a sucker for slim volumes about girls. I picked up Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, based on the shape and the title. What I discovered was a world out of time, a collection of fragments and stories whose narrators...
10 tags
Tiny Books
Diminutive lit, how do we love thee? David Shook measures the pages… Out of Riverside, California, Pat Sweet is publishing miniature (less than three inches in any direction) and micro-miniature (less than one inch!) books. Sweet is the proprietor of Bo Press, whose catalogue is as diverse as any proper wunderkammer — it even includes its own curio-cabinet-in-a-book called Small Wonders. ...
12 tags
Place of Grace
DARCEY STEINKE on Mark Richard’s memoir of elusive redemption. © Giorgio Sommer. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mark Richard House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home
Nan A. Talese, February 2011. 224 pp.
Mark Richard grows up in a Southern town that is timeless, mythic, and strange. Black families get around by mule and wagon. The Ku Klux Klan burns...
Back at the desk we wonder...
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11 tags
The Descalations of Will Self
GEOFF NICHOLSON on model villages, short stories, long novels,
and other miniatures. Overpowered © Slinkachu 2009 Will Self Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall
Grove Press, May 2011. 464 pp. Will Self Scale
Penguin, 1995. 51 pp. Slinkachu Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu
Macmillan, 2009. 128 pp. Books mentioned in passing: David Levinthal,...
2 tags
A Wee Excerpt: "The Great Night" by Chris Adrian
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5 tags
Letters to the Editors
Jan Reymond, La Thésarbre, photo by timtom.ch. This week, letters from Sesshu Foster and Patrick Nathan. ¤
To the Editors:
As a newly christened David Foster Wallace fan, I’d like to thank you
for waiting until just the right moment to post not one but two
ravishing reviews of one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ve
been thinking about them all week, the reviews, mulling them over...
A Bookish Mystery's Afoot in Scotland
A mystery artist is referencing Ian Rankin in their works, left Slinkachu style in the public spaces of Scotland. Save the libraries! Read all about it here and read even more on this lovely blog: Book Patrol, A Haven for Book Culture.Close up (photographer unknown)
11 tags
Summer Shorts
FOUR FAST REVIEWS: Sesshu Foster on Gronk’s emotional special effects. Shelley Salamensky on Marcy Dermansky’s stealth experimentalism. Vanessa Hua on The Visiting Suit, a memoir by Xiaoda Xiao. Charles Whitney on the incompleat cynic, David Rakoff. Seeds of Secrecy
© Gronk Monoprint 2006 Courtesy of Tobey Moss Gallery
DROLL ONTOLOGY
Sesshu Foster Gronk A Giant Claw
What Books...
18 tags
Lighting Darkened Corners
N.S. Morris Graffiti/Egypt cc Mona Sosh Reza Aslan, editor Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East
W.W. Norton and Company, 2010, 657 pp.
Spreading through American living rooms last winter, as live broadcasts streamed from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, was an overdue recognition that Arabs and others in the Middle East were not so different after all, not inhibited by...
6 tags
Aberrant Behavior
Howard Chaykin Image: Alex Toth Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth
IDW Publishing, May, 2011. 328 pp.
I am and have been for many years an avid admirer of the work of Alex Toth. I knew him — not all that well, but well enough to realize at a certain point that avoiding contact with Alex Toth was a positive and healthy lifestyle choice....
9 tags
Sons and Fathers
Joe Carducci Panel from The Dark Knight Strikes Again © Frank Miller
Frank Miller Absolute Dark Knight
DC Comics, 2006. 512 pp.
The American superhero phenomenon was made possible by young sons shamed by immigrant fathers, fathers who couldn’t speak English, worked unheroic yet dangerous jobs, and kept their heads down while bootleggers and white slavers fought for streets in a wide-open...
Autumn of the Empire
Joshua Clover James Joyce by Constantin Brancusi From Three Fragments from Work in Progress by James Joyce (Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929) Giovanni Arrighi The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times
Verso, 2010. 432 pp. Giovanni Arrighi Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
Verso, 2009. 418 pp. Richard Duncan The Dollar Crisis: ...
LARB Recommends
Slake Issue No. 3, War and Peace, featured readings on July 21st and July 24th. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Sunday, July 17th: Paul Malmont discusses and signs The Astounding, The Amazing and The Unknown at Book Soup beginning at 4:00pm. Tuesday, July 19th: Fire Monks: Wildfires in California with Collen Morton Busch and...
15 tags
The Ghost of Wrath
add_book("0873281810", "Ann Condon, ed.", "Architects of Our Fortunes", "Huntington Library Press", "January, 2000", "316");
add_book("0821413813", "Darl Stephenson", "Headquarters In The Brush", "Ohio University Press", "November, 2001", "376");
add_book("1844675688", "Mike Davis", "City of Quartz", "Verso", "September, 2006", "441");
add_book("1844671607", "Mike Davis",...
15 tags
The Time of Our Lives
Leo Braudy Promotional still for The Clock by Christian Marclay Christian Marclay The Clock
Film installation, running time 24:00:00. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The premise of David Thomson’s great novel Suspects (1985) is that all the people in film noir either are related to or know each other. He fills out their otherwise abbreviated lives with what happened before, after, and...
9 tags
Romeo Byron is Dead
Rigoberto González Sunset Time in Greenwich Village © Camille Lacroix Jessica Hagedorn Toxicology: A Novel
Viking, 2011. 225pp.
Though she had been publishing fiction and poetry since the early 1970s through small and independent presses, Jessica Hagedorn’s first career milestone took place with the publication in 1990 of Dogeaters. The first novel written by a Filipino-American...
12 tags
Practicing on Patients
Roxana Badin The Agnew Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1889) Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Photographed by George Bernstein
Siddhartha Mukherjee The Emperor of All Maladies
Scribner, November 2010. 592 pp.
Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cancer with a quote by Susan Sontag, who died of myelogenous leukemia in 2004:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more...
8 tags
Secret Histories
John Rieder The Complete Mechanical Womb © Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich Photo cc by Richard Buck on flickr Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. Steampunk
Tachyon, 2008. 400 pp. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
Tachyon, 2010. 432 pp. Nick Gevers, ed. Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology
Solaris, 2010 (originally published 2008). 496 pp. Mike...
6 tags
Wee Excerpt: "Untold Story" by Monica Ali
“I left my life. I left my children. I left everything…How could I have done that? I could only think of one person. So I left everything but I took that one person with me. I thought I was leaving her behind too.” From cover design to release date, Monica Ali’s resurrection of Princess Diana in Untold Story is a novel with clear poolside ambitions for the summer. With the royal...
8 tags
Theaters of Cruelty
MAGGIE NELSON Spell for Roger Blin, Antonin Artaud, 1939. Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Bequest of Paule Thevenin The following is excerpted from The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, out next week from W.W. Norton & Company.
Antonin Artaud coined the term “theater of cruelty” in his crackling volume of manifestos from the 1930s, The Theater and Its Double. The Theater and Its Double aimed...
7 tags
The Eyes Think
DANA BUNTROCK Untitled from the series Katsura.
Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Japanese, born 1921. Japan, 1953-54
. Gelatin silver print, printed 1980-81
. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Gift of the artist in memory of Ishimoto Shigeru. Yasufumi Nakamori Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture: Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 2010. ...
LARB Recommends
Andy Warhol’s Four Colored Campbell Soup Cans, showing at the MOCA from July 9th through September 9th. Wednesday, July 6th: James Brown, Seth Greenland, Leslie Schwartz, and Diana Wagman discuss fiction and narrative nonfiction moderated by Meghan Daum at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30pm. Friday, July 8th: Tom Neely’s release party for his new graphic novel The Wolf at The Secret...
4 tags
Late Returns
Where was David Foster Wallace going with The Pale King? CORNEL BONCA thinks he was longing to connect; LEE KONSTANTINOU suggests he was trying to transcend his own style. David Foster Wallace The Pale King
Little, Brown, April 2011. 548 pp. BEING BORING
Cornel Bonca
At a memorial gathering held for David Foster Wallace at New York University a couple of months after his suicide in September...
6 tags
Famously Married
KERI WALSH Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. 1980 Photo by Srdja Djukanvic. Antonia Fraser Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter
Nan A. Talese, November 2010. 328 pp.
“I’ll take the dark one,” says Antonia Fraser, singling out the brooding figure at a nearby table. The restaurant is Étoile in London’s Fitzrovia. The time is the mid-1970s, and “the dark one” is Harold...
3 tags
Legacy
LAURIE BENENSON George Bush ©
Hermann Mejia George Bush Decision Points
Crown, November 2010. 512 pp.
It’s only fair to state at the outset that I bow to no one in my disdain for George W. Bush. I was distraught from the moment the Supreme Court handed him the presidency in 2000 until the moment he relinquished the White House to Barack Obama. The entire culture Bush ushered in — the...
6 tags
Extremely Short Excerpt: A first time for...
“….I elected to show the woman my new toothbrush and powder, which I had in my vest pocket. She became excited by the suggestion, for she was also a recent convert to this method, and she hurried to fetch her equipment that we might brush simultaneously.” From The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt It’s time to address that summer reading stack looming on the nightstand, with all of its...
2 tags
LARB Artist Profile: Ed Wexler
Image: Ed Wexler by Ed Wexler Today’s breakdown of the Glenn Beck book canon by Laurie Winer is accompanied by a caricature illustration made especially for LARB by artist/illustrator Ed Wexler. Over the many years I’ve known and worked with Ed, he’s continued to elicit wicked laughter with his confident caricatures. You can see the influence of his favorites David Levine, Al...
16 tags
Magicland
LAURIE WINER Glenn Beck © Ed Wexler 2011 Glenn Beck The Christmas Sweater
Threshold, November, 2008. 284 pp. Glenn Beck The Overton Window
Pocket, Dec 2010. 480 pp. Alexander Zaitchik Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance
Wiley, May, 2010. 288 pp. Dana Milbank Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America
Doubleday, October, 2010. 272 pp. The...
