September 2011
53 posts
13 tags
A Portis Reader
JULIE CLINE
checks a great writer’s walking papers. Phan Loc Bayou Lucerne © Cay Sehnert 2005 All Rights Reserved Charles Portis Norwood (1966)
Overlook, August 1999. 272 pp. Charles Portis True Grit (1968) True Grit: Young Readers Edition
Overlook Juvenile, September 2011. 240 pp. Charles Portis The Dog of the South (1979)
Overlook, June 2007. 272 pp. Charles Portis Masters of...
5 tags
Beyond Disbelief
PETER CAMPION on the wages of skepticism
in the work of three young poets. Preserver © Andy Yoder 2009 Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery
Lynn Emanuel Noose and Hook
University of Pittsburgh Press, February 2010. 64 pp. C. Dale Young Torn
Four Way Books, March 2010. 100 pp. Tom Sleigh Army Cats
Graywolf, May 2011. 104 pp.
Even our common use of the word “inspiration” suggests it: some power...
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...
5 tags
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...
12 tags
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...
5 tags
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...
2 tags
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,...
9 tags
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...
5 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
8 tags
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...
15 tags
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...
