September 2011
53 posts
LARB Recommends
Art by Mineko Grimmer featured September 3rdSome recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, September 1st: Libros Schmibros at the Hammer presents a poetry reading with writers hailing from the heart of Boyle Heights- Kristy Lovich, Luis Rodriguez, and Abel Salas at the Hammer Museum beginning at 5:30 pm. Book launch of ZERO+...
August 2011
47 posts
18 tags
Perfectly Plausible Worlds
RACHEL GALVIN on GEORGES PEREC’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
and BRIAN FINNEY on the globalist fiction of DAVID MITCHELL. Image Courtesy Anna Miller of the David Rumsey Map Collection GHOSTWRITING THE GLOBE
Brian Finney David Mitchell Ghostwritten
Random House, 1999. 426 pp. Number9Dream
Random House, 2001. 400 pp. Cloud Atlas
Random House, 2004. 509 pp. Black Swan...
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Simulating the Georges Perec Experience
First time in English: Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, from Verso.
Perec’s novels, with their unabashed experimentalism, are easily likened to games or puzzles. The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, out from Verso for the first time in English and reviewed by Rachel Galvin today, is no exception. The Art is a deadpan dissection of the time-honored mental...
9 tags
Illustrated History
BRIAN DOHERTY on the art of curating comics. Image Courtesy of Taschen Publishing Paul Levitz 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking
Taschen, November 2010. 719 pp. Jerry Robinson The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art 1895-2010
Dark Horse Books, March 2011. 394 pp. Brian Walker The Comics: The Complete Collection
Abram Comicarts, April 2011. 672 pp.
The...
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Grand Undertakings
DAVID FREEMAN on JILL CIMENT and JANE GARDAM,
and BROOKS LANDON on KAREN JOY FOWLER Image © Joan Breckwoldt QUOTIDIAN STORIES
David Freeman Jill Ciment Heroic Measures
Pantheon, 2009. 208 pp. Jane Gardam Old Filth
Europa, 2006. 289 pp. Jane Gardam The Man in the Wooden Hat
Europa, 2009. 240 pp.
“What should I read?” It’s a question that anyone with even a modest presence in the...
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Tom Lutz: The LAist Interview
Katherine Manderfield’s thoughtful interview with our own Tom Lutz is at the LAist. It covers a wide range of topics relating to LARB’s existence, relevance and dress code, as per the following snippet:
Manderfield: Kathryn Schulz wrote an article for LARB entitled “Life of the Party,” which ruminates on the contradictory nature of essayist Montaigne, who favored a...
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Artist Profile: Stanford Kay
Richard Rayner’s first regular column for the Los Angeles Review of Books appears today. The painting at the top is the work of artist Stanford Kay.
Just as any reviewer or critic examines what a book is saying, Kay’s paintings are, with profound attention to color and arrangement, saying something about books themselves. As objects existing on a shelf or stacked, Kay’s books become the story,...
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KIPLING'S MAGICAL REALISM
Literary Landscape ©
Stanford Kay
The first installment of RICHARD RAYNER’s monthly column.
Rudyard Kipling Plain Tales from the Hills
Penguin, July 2011. 336 pp. The Man Who Would Be King
Penguin, July 2011. 608pp.
“Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, and, some seventy...
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Language and Monsters
NEIL EASTERBROOK
China Miéville is in it for the monsters,
and for the philosophy of language.
Speak ©
Lisa Jane Persky China Miéville Embassytown
Del Rey, May 2011. 368 pp.
Last month, Mike Cahill’s first feature film, Another Earth, opened in limited release across North America. The notices have been good, identifying it as a measured, contemplative film, which, although featuring...
3 tags
If you do one thing today, LISTEN to Maria Rivera
There they come
the beheaded,
the handless,
the dismembered,
the women whose coccyx were smashed,
the men whose heads were crushed,
the little children crying
between dark walls
of minerals and sand.
Read Maria Rivera’s poem “Los Muertos,” recently translated by Roman Lujan and Jen Hofer. As reported on the Madelaine Brand show yesterday, Rivera resurrected the victims...
LARB Recommends
Slake Magazine’s third issue, “War and Peace,” celebrated this Friday in Atwater Village
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Wednesday, August 24th: Geoffrey Gray discusses and signs Skyjack: The Hunt for DB Cooper at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00pm. Friday, August 26th: Slake Party in Atwater...
19 tags
More Summer Shorts
STAN APPS on the Chinese Notebooks of DEMOSTHENES AGRAFIOTIS.
ERIC SHONKWILER on BRUCE MACHART’s regionalist fiction and Cormac McCarthy’s shadow.
JASON PARHAM on MAT JOHNSON’s sequel to Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym.
SHOLEH WOLPÉ on a memoir by JASMIN DARZNIK, one of a new, fearless generation of Iranian women.
SASKIA VOGEL on why SUSIE BRIGHT needs no prefaces or...
2 tags
The Books That Made Us: Charlotte's Web
Illustration: Garth Williams
To accompany Kerry Madden’s review of Michael Sims’s The Story of Charlotte’s Web today, we asked several writers to tell us about their first experiences with E.B. White’s classic.
CECIL CASTELLUCCI
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...
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The Books That Made Us: Charlotte's Web
KERRY MADDEN
on a new book about E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Meanwhile, on our blog, Cecil Castellucci, Joy Horowitz, Sonya Sones, Sara Zarr, and Marlene Zuk remember reading it. Michael Sims The Story of Charlotte’s Web
Walker & Company, June 2011. 320 pp.
Sometimes a book comes along and you feel so lucky that somebody pressed it into your hands to read that you...
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Still Hungry
DAVID SHIELDS
Two pieces, one a discussion of a novel published today by
BEN LERNER and the other a review of a memoir by FRED MOODY
still in manuscript (yes, that’s right).
Don’t Blink © Terry Strickland PROLOGUE Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station
Coffee House Press, August 2011. 186 pp. All criticism is a form of autobiography.
I’ve never met the poet Ben Lerner,...
Reviewing the Bias: The Truth About Good and Bad
On the same day that one venerable New York publication lauded the appearance of Juliane Maria Lorenz’s essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder (written exclusively for the Los Angeles Review of Books) another, evidently, worried about larger matters. As David Streitfeld reported for the New York Times on Friday:
The boundless demand for positive reviews has made the review system an arms race...
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Soot and Ash
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL
In June, before the riots started, Christopher Merrill was in Norwich and London and sent us this report. Cade’s Rebellion (1450) on the fore edge of a compilation of English statutes (published in 1587), painted by late-nineteenth-century bibliophile and book edge painter John T. Beer. Photo cc Harvard Law School Library.
“Influence” was the theme...
What are the chances?
John Fleck, at his blog, noted the following, vis à vis Emily Green’s piece on plagiarism:
“Green:
Las Vegas lies at the intersection of three deserts. To the west is the Mojave, to the south the Sonoran, and to the north the Great Basin.Prud’homme:
Las Vegas sits at the intersection of three deserts. To the south is the Sonoran, to the west is the Mojave, and to the north lies...
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Cut and Paste and Run
EMILY GREEN
As part of our ongoing inquiry into the future of journalism,
Emily Green talks about finding her research
(and her words) in someone else’s book. Twin Roads No Guitar ©
Andrew Schneider
So, I find myself wondering, what am I going to do about the man who I think plagiarized me?
Sue him? I’ve bleated to a few lawyers. Humiliate him in front of his editor? I’ve...
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Wunderkind
JULIANE MARIA LORENZ on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s unlikely career in television. Juliane Maria Lorenz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder during the filming of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1979 © Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF) Juliane Maria Lorenz is a highly acclaimed film editor who lived and worked with the legendary German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1976 until his death...
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Returning to the Scene
MICHAEL WASHBURN
on Janet Malcolm’s revisitation of the relationship between the journalist and the murderer. Jury Box © Amanda Curreri, 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Romer Young Gallery Janet Malcolm Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Yale University Press, April 2011. 155 pp.
Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, an...
LARB Recommends
Photo from Bike It: Portraits of my Bicipandilla featured on Thursday, August 18th.
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.
Wednesday, August 17th: Hammer Lecture: Making Art Last discussing technical, ethical, and artistic concerns surrounding the preservation of contemporary art works at Hammer Museum beginning at 7:00pm.
...
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Hybrid Memoirs
CHRIS WALLACE interviews GEOFF DYER on the American release (finally) of his The Missing of the Somme. VERONICA GONZALEZ on Francisco Goldman’s memoir/novel of grief and longing. Empty Bed © Helen Masacz, 2011 MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
Veronica Gonzalez Francisco Goldman Say Her Name
Grove, April 2011. 288 pp. Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands
Of the death’s-head shadowing...
One hundred down
L-R: Evan Kindley, managing editor; Tom Lutz, editor in chief
Today’s LARB post — a double shot of Eastern European literature — is the hundredth offering on our humble Tumblr site, which was launched on April 18, 2011. (I’m just going by what it says on the Tumblr dashboard; actually, if you consider all of the posts, like today’s, that have combined reviews by two or sometimes...
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From Ljubljana to Budapest
ADAM Z. LEVY on a new translation of Hungarian Dezső Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti, a little-known 1933 novel that deserves mention with Kafka and Mann.
CASEY O’NEIL on the great Slovenian writer Boris Pahor’s memoir of his visit to the Natzweiler memorial and his 14 months in Nazi prison camps. Shouting
by Hugó Scheiber HUNGARIAN MASKED BALL
Adam Z. Levy Dezső Kosztolányi...
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Time to celebrate...with a brand new LARB t-shirt
Our 100th posting appears on the LARB Tumblr tomorrow. Celebrate the occasion with a visit to the LARB store where you will find the first official LARB t-shirt, designed by Malisa Humphrey, and starring Emily Dickinson. Support the future of book reviewing and help us to move a little closer to the fully operational Los Angeles Review of Books web site, coming soon. (Model: Kate Wolf; Photo:...
13 tags
Even as Everything Melts
JONATHAN FOLTZ
on Malcolm Turvey’s history of avant-garde film in the 1920s.
René Clair, Francis Picabia, and Erik Satie, Entr’ acte (1924) Malcolm Turvey The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s
MIT Press, March 2011. 213 pp. In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.
— Walter Benjamin, on Mickey Mouse
Film has...
2 tags
In the Charles Wright Museum
GARRETT HONGO
remembers the graduate school summer he house-sat for Charles Wright.
Still Life with Red Pears and Knife on a French Cloth ©
Julian Merrow-Smith
In the late spring of 1981, the skies were always a light azure blue in Southern California, cypresses camphored out their scent around the apartment house swimming pool below my living room window, and the soft green prisms of...
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The Intimate Art
NANCY BARNES
on the letters of two quintessential American artists. Georgia O’Keeffe Writing Daily Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, Ghost Ranch House Patio. Photograph by Maria Chabot © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum http://bit.ly/q7lnAr
Sarah Greenough, editor My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915-1933
Yale University Press, June 2011....
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Howler Among the Pros
: Barry Hannah Remembered
Photo courtesy of Lemuria Books
As we launch our new Writers on Teachers series – a semi-regular department featuring guest columnists on the people who have influenced them most – Los Angeles Review of Books editor Clarissa Romano remembers novelist, short story writer and mentor, Barry Hannah.
“Are you above the greed and ambition of the characters in these stories?” 3 pm, Thursday...
LARB Recommends
Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall featured in Drohojowka Philp’s book, Rebels in Paradise
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.
Wednesday, August 10th: Readings from Slake: Los Angeles No 3., War and Peace featuring writers Ben Ehrenreich, Joseph Mattson, Amy Scattergood, Hank Cherry, John Tottenham, and Owen Wiseman at Stories...
5 tags
An Invitation to Forgetting
CASEY WALKER
on Joshua Foer’s memory palaces. Date Mate Sate Grate © Wayne White, courtesy Western Project Joshua Foer Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Penquin, March 2011 320 pp. I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining...
LUC SANTE'S ADVICE FOR WRITERS
Luc Sante in an interview by Karolina Waclawiak on The Days of Yore Any advice for struggling writers? Read. Don’t be afraid to imitate. Develop your ear for rhythm and voice and tone and register. Reread what you’re working on again and again and again. Pay attention to every word and every punctuation mark. Print out what you’ve just written and then retype it, slowly. Don’t let...
6 tags
Year of the Fire Cock
MARK HASKELL SMITH
on Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, published today, and the raunchiness of the Generation of ‘57. Happy War © Kii Arens Nicholson Baker House of Holes: A Book of Raunch
Simon & Schuster, August 2011. 272 pp.
I was born in 1957, the Year of the Fire Cock in Chinese astrology. Cocks (or Roosters as we’re sometimes called) are considered keen...
2 tags
London
It’s a terrible irony that we’re running David Mattin’s letter from London — written and scheduled last week, before the riots began — on the main site today. Right now our collective thoughts are with David, all of our other British contributors and friends, and with the people of England.
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Full Stop Halts the Tumble
With tumbling markets, tumbling credit ratings, and tumbling sanity unspooling from the news aggregators this morning, Alex Shephard’s article at Full Stop was a welcome departure. In our own weekend Tumblr, the Los Angeles Review of Books featured “Future Tense,” an essay by Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz. We’ve received a lot of responses to the piece, which included the...
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Exile on Fleet Street
DAVID MATTIN
on Rupert Murdoch’s beef with the British. The Paper House, Wanted: Peeking Out cc Curious Expeditions
Rupert Murdoch’s strange, covert reign over British public life did not begin all at once. It came about gradually, by accretion, and started with his purchase in 1969 of a dusty old tabloid called The News of the World.
In the same year, the BBC — keen to...
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Future Tense
TOM LUTZ
© Giant Robot
The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last week that it was as dedicated as ever to book coverage — “we have not changed our commitment,” said Vice President of Communications Nancy Sullivan. Sullivan was speaking to Publishers Weekly’s Wendy Werris, explaining that a new round of layoffs in the section and the cutting loose of the book section’s...
Stranded in Miniature
@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;Direct from the Strand Book Store, NYC: Trois Fables de la Fontaine. Los Angeles: [Dawson’s Book Shop], 1965. 35 x 26 mm, bound in vellum. Following Geoff Nicholson’s review on...
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Martin Beck Has A Cold
ROHAN MAITZEN
on The Story of Crime, the ten-volume series of police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö Vintage Swedish Police Toy Car © happee monkee by Mable Tan Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö Roseanna (1965) The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) The Man on the Balcony (1967) The Laughing Policeman (1968) The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969) Murder at the Savoy (1970) The Abominable Man...
Chronicle of Higher Education
The CHE, no relation to Guevara, ran a short piece yesterday on the move of columnists Susan Salter Reynolds (her column is Discoveries) and Richard Rayner (Paperback Writers) from the LA Times to Los Angeles Review of Books. LARB editor Tom Lutz will be posting a piece on corporate culture and independent publishing on our Tumblr on Saturday.
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Ambush Haircuts
GRACE KRILANOVICH
on the problems of framing punk culture. LA Breakdown ©
Ruby Ray, 1977 Dewar MacLeod Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California
University of Oklahoma Press, November 2010. 240 pp.
Rock ‘n’ roll books have their own special set of challenges, the most important being: try not to reduce the wily, ridiculous, vibrant music of rejects and losers...
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Good Germans
MICHAEL WOOD
on the reissue of Heinrich Böll’s novels by Melville House. Modern Book Printing © Scholz and Friends. Photo: CC Erik Weber
Heinrich Böll The Train Was On Time
Translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Melville House, March 2011. 144 pp. Group Portrait with Lady
Translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Melville House, March 2011. 464 pp. The Clown
Translated by Leila Vennewitz....
If You Haven't Already...
(Carl Sagan portrait by Pat Linse)You might want to check out the monthly “Dead Author” series at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, nestled on the Franklin Strip next to Counterpoint Records and Books. The universal mind of Carl Sagan is on the docket for tomorrow night, at 6:30 pm. Interviewed, as always, by H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tompkins), Mr. Sagan will be channeled through...
LARB Recommends
Wednesday, August 3rd: Kenneth Sonny Donato presents and signs A Poet’s Guide to The Bars, at Book Soup beginning 7:00pm. Thursday, August 4th: John Burnham Schwartz presents and signs Northwest Corner: A Novel, at Book Soup beginning 7:00pm. Friday, August 5th: Poets David Meltzer and Julie Rogers read at Beyond Baroque, beginning at 7:30. Melissa Febos discusses and signs Whip Smart: A...
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Elephant Families and Others
JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH on a boy’s love for his disturbed mother in Jennifer Richard Jacobson’s Young Adult novel, Small as an Elephant. METTE IVIE HARRISON on Judy Blundell’s latest, a YA novel about motherless triplets in the 1940s, and the one who, at seventeen, is trying to become a star. Girl in Cafe, or Hopper’s Closer Look (Detail) © Hyeseung Marriage-Song, ...
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Paperback Writers Welcome
Photo © Robert Yager Our press release welcoming Richard Rayner, formerly of the LA Times: Last week the Los Angeles Times times cut Richard Rayner‘s “Paperback Writers” column along with other freelance writers. He will now move his column to the new Los Angeles Review of Books. Rayner had this statement: “It’s a sad indicator of where things stand in the book world that my column ‘Paperback...
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Days of Infamy
ELI JELLY-SCHAPIRO John Dower’s Cultures of War avoids the pitfalls of doing history by analogy. BEFORE AND AFTER PAINTING NO. 1 © Oliver Jeffers John W. Dower Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 596 pp.
On September 12, 2001, newspapers across the United States adorned their front pages with the tall, boldface type reserved...
