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...
@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }Just who sat here over the...
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
@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; } @font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times...
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...
