September 2011
53 posts
2 tags
Getting Banned Part 5: Lauren Myracle Confronts...
Today the LARB Blog concludes its weeklong focus on censorship in the world of young adult and tween lit with the unmistakable voice of Lauren Myracle. Thank you to the remarkable list of writers who joined us, including Ron Koertge, Ellen Hopkins, Susan Patron, and Sonya Sones. As was noted at the beginning of the week: it’s a confidence game. People either have the confidence — in their...
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Counter-Culture Colophon Part II: Grove Press in...
LOREN GLASS
The second installment of Glass’s history of Barney Rosset’s legendary publishing empire. [Read Part I here] Evergreen Review Issue No. 25, Courtesy of Barney Rosset, © Evergreen Review
“You treat Grove as if it was a real publishing company!”
I’m sitting at a coffee shop in the Farragut neighborhood of Brooklyn with Fred Jordan, Barney Rosset’s right hand man...
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Getting Banned Part 4: Sonya Sones' Musings of a...
Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its focus on YA censorship with Sonya Sones, author of the recently published L.A. Times bestselling novel, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus, as well as four award-winning young adult novels: Stop Pretending, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know. The “Getting...
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King of the Contrarians
JOSH LANGHOFF introduces CHUCK EDDY, the man with more voice per square inch than any other rock critic,
and MICHAELANGELO MATOS finds out what makes him tick. Chuck Eddy © Lalena Fisher JOSH LANGHOFF Chuck Eddy Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism
Duke University Press, August 2011. 335 pp.
Rock critic Chuck Eddy is one of the world’s great music fans. For the...
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Other Europes
PIOTR FLORCZYK and JACOB SILVERMAN
on new translations from Central Europe: Andrzej Stasiuk’s travels into the past and Imre Kertész’s pre-Nobel Prize novel of “eternal forgetting.” Babie lato, by Jozef Marian Chelmonski, 1875 National Museum of Warsaw PIOTR FLORCZYK Andrzej Stasiuk On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe
Translated by Michael Kandel...
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Getting Banned Part 3: Susan Patron and the...
Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its series on censorship with Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron. Susan is the author of The Higher Power of Lucky, for which she won the Newbery. It is the first of the Hard Pan Trilogy that also includes Lucky Breaks and Lucky for Good. She is also the author of the ALA Notable book Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe, and a historical...
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Getting Banned Part 2: Ellen Hopkins on...
For Banned Books Week the LARB Blog is featuring banned authors weighing in on the experience of@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }—you guessed it@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”;...
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The Paranoid Style
STEVEN J. ROSS
on J. Hoberman’s history of movies in the age of McCarthy. I Married A Communist, RKO Pictures (1949) Lobby Card J. Hoberman Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
The New Press, March 2011. 432 pp.
In March 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was interviewed by a Fox TV news anchor whose first question was, “Don’t you think...
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Nothing to Say?
SCOTT ESPOSITO
Jesse Ball, publishing dystopia, and the triumph of marketing. The Beginning of the End © Lisa Jane Persky Jesse Ball The Curfew
Vintage, June 2011. 208 pp.
By now, dystopian fiction has been served up just about every way possible. To my knowledge, one of the few ways it hasn’t been attempted — or, at least, well executed — is in the realm of minimalism. That brings us to The...
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Getting Banned: Writers on the World's Oldest...
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Post-Black and Proud: An Interview with Toure
This Thursday, we sat down with Touré before his reading at Book Soup to talk about his newly released Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, which collects interviews with 105 influential African-American thinkers, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Malcolm Gladwell, all examining what it means to be Black and American in the age of Obama.
A veritable polymath, Touré is a music journalist,...
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Loory, Nealon, Lappe, Cole
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay The second installment of SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column.
This week, Ben Loory, Mary Jane Nealon, Frances Moore Lappé, and Henri Cole.
Ben Loory Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day
Penguin, July 2011. 210 pp.
Strange, gorgeous fables — the reader isn’t sure if she has dreamed them or read them. A homesick octopus with a collection of...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, September 23rd: Justin Torres discusses and signs We The Animals at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00pm. Leslie Stein signs and discusses her new graphic novel Eye of the Majestic Creature at Secret Headquarters in Silverlake, beginning at 7:00 pm. Moving Images: A...
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The Last of Summer Shorts
JERVEY TERVALON, SUSAN OLDING, BRIAN ATTEBERY,
RACHEL NEWCOMB, and JAYNA BROWN with short takes on five new books. Image from The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company JERVEY TERVALON Erich Origen and Gan Golan The Adventures of Unemployed Man
Little, Brown, October 2010. 80 pp.
Let me tell you, nothing focuses one’s attention on...
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Dispatch: The Sunset Road Concert
LARB correspondent Kate Wolf reports from this year’s Los Angeles Road Concert. Sunset Boulevard: the most infamous thoroughfare in all Los Angeles? Its 24 miles run from the outer core of downtown head first into the Pacific, passing disparate pockets of poverty and opulence, chintz and trash, from bohemian enclaves to Dianetics’ baby blue hub, from the Dome to the Strip to the towering...
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Sacred Dirt
SUSAN STEWART
on Michel Serres’s ecological philosophy.
It Runs in the Family © 2010 Joshua Dildine Michel Serres Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?
Stanford University Press, September 2010. 104 pp.
If only the magical etiologies of consumerism were true — oranges grow in the produce aisle, milk flows from the dairy case, shirts and shoes emerge online. However, a...
Radar LARB
The Ether is not what it used to be. Our voices often skip state lines and time zones and traverse international waters before they ever encounter a legit conversation back home. For this, the Ether is becoming a congested and busy place with lots of pedestrian traffic (in a non-pejorative sense). Here’s who we’ve bumped into lately: David Bezmozgis “On Literary Love,” an...
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Recidivism
GEORGIA JEFFRIES on Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man
and WILLIAM MARLING on the latest vogue for James M. Cain Hands with Dice © 2010 Emily Eveleth GEORGIA JEFFRIES
Amateurs Luke Rhinehart The Dice Man
Overlook Press 1998 [originally published 1971]. 324 pp. “It’s like being in the middle of a movie I’ve never seen before … where I’m the star.”
⎯ A “dice student” singing the praises of...
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The Los Angeles Review of Books on Twitter
Want to follow the LARB’s proliferating contributors, editors, and contributing editors on Twitter? Here’s a useful, one-stop resource. We’ll be updating this list as our ranks continue to swell, so please bookmark this page and check back frequently. rezaaslan Reza...
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In Limbo
JENNY HENDRIX
on two fictions of excess.
The Ghosts of Liberation © Terry Rodgers 2010 Oil on Linen, All rights reserved Nicholson Baker House of Holes
Simon & Schuster, August 2011. 272 pp. DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland
W.W. Norton & Co, August 2011. 350 pp.
It is a dangerous thing to take up the language of excess. Prose, in its purpling, can draw attention to its...
Mark Hanauer's Personal Nature
Iris I © Mark Hanauer All Rights Reserved L.A. Photographer and LARB contributor Mark Hanauer presents “Personal Nature,” a photography exhibition at the Huntington Botanical Gardens through November 1st. “I love to look inside of things and discover the typically unseen details that comprise the whole. These images are meditations on beauty — a metaphor for how I want to live my life. After...
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Cherry Bomb
SARA MARCUS
on Ellen Willis’s escape from the music ghetto. © Nona Willis Aronowitz 2011 Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press Ellen Willis Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
University of Minnesota Press, May 2011. 272 pp.
For a universal language, music can feel downright limiting sometimes. When I was 26 and reviewing records for Time Out New York (the weekly...
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Hard Stuff
Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists John Alton, Cinematographer
The first installment of LARB’s new monthly crime fiction column. Duane Swierczynski Fun & Games
Mulholland Books, June 2011. 304 pp. Jason Starr The Pack
Ace Books, June 2011. 352 pp. Megan Abbott The End of Everything
Reagan Arthur Books, July 2011. 256 pp. Sara Gran Claire DeWitt and the...
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Pacific Overture
ISTVAN CSICSERY-RONAY
talks to Kim Stanley Robinson about his Three Californias trilogy,
and MARK BOULD reviews Robinson’s latest collection. Storm No. 2 © Ran Ortner 2009 All rights reserved Kim Stanley Robinson is best known for his monumental science fiction trilogies about the terraforming of Mars (1992-95) and reversing the global climate crisis (2004-07), and his most recent,...
LARB Recommends
Art by J. Michael Walker, featured on Thursday, September 15th event Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, September 15th: Alexandra Fuller in conversation with Louise Steinman at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library beginning at 7:00pm. Libros Schmibros – Westwood will host artist J. Michael Walker and Glen...
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Household Saint
DAVID ROTH
on Wilfred Santiago’s life of Roberto Clemente.
Roberto Clemente Topps™ Baseball Card 1971 Wilfred Santiago 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente
Fantagraphics, 2011. 200 pp.
Roberto Clemente died on New Year’s Eve, 1972, when a small plane carrying Clemente, four other men, and 16,000 pounds of aid bound for earthquake-wracked Nicaragua disappeared into the waters off...
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Marvin Mudrick Believes In You, Believe It or Not
Marvin Mudrick in his office in the 1970s. Photo courtesy the Mudrick family. In the third installment of LARB’s Writers on Teachers series, former students Bob Blaisdell and Jervey Tervalon recall the best American literary critic you’ve never heard of, Marvin Mudrick, with some input from the man himself. Marvin Mudrick created the College of Creative Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1967, and...
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Strange Trip
DAVID KIRBY
on Yusef Komunyakaa, chameleon. Stack 52 © Boris Ostrerov http://bit.ly/prtJRM Yusef Komunyakaa The Chameleon Couch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2011. 116 pp.
I won’t lie to you — the day I started reading this book, I was tripping. In Book IV of The Odyssey, as Menelaus and Telemachus weep over their fallen comrades, Helen slips into their wine a drug that undoes “every grief...
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Media Spritz
Selected random clicks for this week: Quinn Latimer conjures “Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters.” From the NatGeo desk: “Extreme Classics: The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time.” Mike Dash asks “Who Was Pablo Fanque?” Rikki Ducornet on “War’s Body.” Rana Mitter reviews The Opium...
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The Last Rant
ALEC ASH
on Ai Weiwei’s electronic provocations. Collage by Lisa Jane Persky includes an image by stunned (CC) Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009
Edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy
MIT Press, April 2011. 241 pp.
On May 28, 2009, the readers of artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s blog — hosted on Sina, a popular Chinese internet portal — logged...
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Great White Shark: Penner on Eastwood
Image (above) courtesy of Darren Allison http://theclinteastwoodarchive.blogspot.com/ A few thoughts on Clint Eastwood’s relentless careerfrom LARB film editor Jonathan Penner.Cool interview on the site today from Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson and Kevin Avery’s new book on Clint Eastwood, a collection of “lost interviews” now found, about starting out as a young actor. Another new...
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Cattle Calls and Contract Players
JONATHAN LETHEM, PAUL NELSON and KEVIN AVERY Still from Revenge of The Creature, Clint Eastwood’s film debut
The following is the foreword and two selections from the first chapter of Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood – 1979-1983, by Kevin Avery, to be published by Continuum on September 22nd, 2011.
I NEVER SAT IN A MOVIE THEATER WITH PAUL NELSON
by...
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An Unfinishable Work
BETH BOYLE MACHLAN
on buildings, plots, and mourning at Ground Zero. Construction Phase 1971 Photo courtesy of Jane Holley Wilson, All Rights Reserved
On Sunday, March 14, 2004, the New York Times ran a story entitled “High Anxiety: Designing the Safest Building in History for the Scariest Address on Earth.” Author James Glanz described in detail the ways in which the Freedom Tower team...
LARB Recommends
Check out this great event happening tonight! The Rumpus Proudly Presents: “It’s About Time” Featuring Joshuah Bearman, Gabrielle Calvocoressl, C-Horse, Naked Kids, and Dylan Trees at Echoplex!
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Surface Tensions
PETE L’OFFICIAL
on José Parlá (now showing at OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles)
and Mark Bradford, two archivists of urban ruins.
Top: Cyclone’s Capsule © José Parlá 2011 Courtesy of © José Parlá Artist Rights Society, NY and OHWOW Gallery
Bottom: The Devil is Beating His Wife © Mark Bradford José Parlá: Walls, Diaries, and Paintings
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. 188 pp. Christopher Bedford...
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Artist Profile: Donald Bracken
Donald Bracken, World on Fire, 1997 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; }Donald Bracken, In Memoriam In 1997, the...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this weekend, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, September 9th: Reading at the Hammer Museum: New American Writing with Leopoldine Core and Dinah Lenney beginning at 7:00pm. Sunday, September 11th: Granta 116 and Pen Center USA present a group event commemorating the 10th anniversary of September 11th at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning...
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The Fire This Time
REZA ASLAN
on the long-term effects of 9/11. World on Fire © Donald Bracken
http://bit.ly/r05Th3
The policewoman who confiscated the unlicensed produce stand of a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi in the tiny Tunisian village of Sidi Bouzid could not have known that her actions would light the fuse of revolution, not just in Tunisia, but across the Arab world. The...
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Be Thou the Voice
DINAH LENNEY
on memoirists, actors, musicians, and other cover artists. Face to Face © Kimia Rahgozar Agora Gallery The difference between classical music and jazz, said the well-known conductor, is that with classical, the music is always greater than the performance. He’d been invited to talk about “Vulgarization” in a lecture series called Categorically Not, and to illustrate his point, he...
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Counter-Culture Colophon
LOREN GLASS
on Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press Grove Cover image by Roy Kuhlman courtesy of Arden Riordan Part 1:
The Fifties, from Beckett to Rechy
On October 4, 2009, I flew from Iowa City to New York to conduct interviews for a history of Grove Press. Everyone I contacted had agreed to meet with me except Barney Rosset. In a series of emails, his fifth wife Astrid Myers...
The Booksellers Are Alright: Present Tense...
Andrew Laties: author of Rebel Bookseller, reissued this June by Seven Stories Press. Andrew Laties (who will be visiting our friends at Skylight Books this Sunday) knows - and I mean really knows - the independent book business. He has launched five bookselling operations over a career spanning thirty years. In 2002, at the behest of the man himself, he opened the museum shop at The Eric Carle...
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"The Prynne and I": Geoff Nicholson on Poet and...
In the next installment of our Writers On Teachers series, Geoff Nicholson recalls the daunting yet illuminating experience of having the famously inscrutable Cambridge poet J. H. Prynne as his Director of Studies. I sometimes say that Jeremy Prynne taught me everything I know about poetry: which is why I know nothing about poetry. It’s not a bad joke, given the received wisdom that Prynne’s...
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Creative Destruction
THOMAS S. HINES
on the architectural legacy of World War II.
Willow Run Bomber Plant, Michigan, ca. 1941; Architect: Albert Kahn Jean-Louis Cohen Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War
Editions Hazan, 2011. 448 pp.
In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism and later supporter of Mussolini, wrote in the Futurist Manifesto, “We want to glorify...
What LARB's been reading...
A roundup of articles, writers and ideas recently catching our attention:
“How To Be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of philosopher Derek Parfit.
Brian Ted Jones’ essay on fiction and Vietnam.
Jeff Martin on the “Modern Steinbecks” chronicling our Great Recession.
Lynx Qualey considers the state of Libyan literature.
Lev Grossman on the evolution of...
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Just Like A Woman
AUDREY BILGER
on Jane Austen’s brand of sentimental education. Les invisibles en tête-à-tête, from the series Le Supreme Bon Ton, No. 16, artist unknown; published by Martinet, Paris, c. 1810-1815 with thanks to Two Nerdy History Girls
Rachel M. Brownstein Why Jane Austen?
Columbia University Press, 2011. 320 pp. William Deresiewicz A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me...
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Lost in the Supermarket
In his second Letter from London, DAVID MATTIN searches for meaning in the London “shopping riots.”
Bicycle Image London Riots 2011 CC Matt Shaw
British metropolitan police move over London in the Eurocopter EC145 helicopter. Two weeks ago, and for three consecutive nights, I was made extremely familiar with its particular, low, insistent thrum: on those three nights from dusk and...
Updated - Artist Profile: Stanford Kay
Susan Salter Reynolds’s regular column, “Discoveries,” appears for the first time today in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The painting at the top is by Stanford Kay, whose work you may recognize in the nameplate image for LARB’s other regular columnist, Richard Rayner.
Just as any reviewer or critic examines what a book is saying, Kay’s paintings are, with...
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Fante, Bainbridge, Fuller
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay The first installment of SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column.
This week, Dan Fante’s memoir, Beryl Bainbridge’s Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, and a further entry in Alexandra Fuller’s account of her African family.
Alexandra Fuller Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Penguin Press, August 23, 2011. 235 pp.
Parents....
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Lit Life: An Interview with GalleyCat’s Jason Boog
In what could be considered high treason among some hard-line publishing circles, Jason Boog, editor at GalleyCat and Mediabistro, has recently moved from his comfortable New York City confines to set up shop in Los Angeles. Last week, he spoke by phone to the Los Angeles Review of Books about the surprising ease of the transition, the state of the “new” publishing industry, and his forthcoming...
Portis Firsts
With compliments to Julie Cline’s essay on the LARB tumblr, two first edition covers from the Portis oeuvre, courtesy Lisa Jane Persky:
True Grit. Cover to the 1968 first edition (cloth) from Simon & Schuster; Portis’ second novel.
Masters of Atlantis. Cover to the 1985 first edition (cloth) from Knopf; Portis’ fourth novel.
