July 2011
35 posts
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...
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...
12 tags
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,...
8 tags
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...
14 tags
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...
