March 2012
50 posts
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, March 1st: Group Event celebrating the release of The Rattling Wall, Issue 2 featuring Katie Arnoldi, Helena Lipstadt, Lou Mathews, and Michelle Meyering at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm. Friday, March 2nd: Kent Hartman discusses and signs Wrecking Crew: The...
February 2012
44 posts
13 tags
Finer Dining Through Chemistry
JOHN McINTYRE
on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, and the molecular gastronomy revolution. Galletas de Arroz y Parmesano
by Charles Haynes http://bit.ly/zN9djn (Some rights reserved) Colman Andrews Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food
Gotham Books, October 2010. 301 pp. Ferran Adrià, Albert Adrià, and Juli Soler A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas,...
4 tags
William Gay, 1941 - 2012
Image Courtesy Nashville Arts Magazine Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood, writes to us from Florida about William Gay: “Gay wrote authentic, not putative, put-up horror. Honestly felt, correctly put dark shit, not cornpone in a dark wrapper. Okra, not corn syrup.”From The Tennessean: “It’s going to be one of those old stories of the artist whose true impact is...
7 tags
From Moscow Art Theatre to Catfish Row
KURT JENSEN on Rouben Mamoulian’s contribution to Porgy and Bess. Portrait of John W. Bubbles as Sporting Life in Porgy & Bess by Carl Van Vechten
Over the stage door at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, home to The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, hangs a sign reading, “For Residents of Catfish Row Only!”
Going by the exclamation point, it’s all in good fun: there’s no latter-day Lester Maddox at...
Radar LARB
Image © C.P. Heiser Brett Easton Ellis, fanboy: “CREEPY #97 was great! A fantastic cover! Six superb stories…one of them a masterwork! What more could a fan ask?” Patrick Brown wonders what Hollywood would do without books: “If the publishing industry really does collapse, as some predict it will, it won’t be the big houses or the independent bookstores that will be...
8 tags
Tallying Our Truths
JENNY HENDRIX on Ramona Ausubel,
E.C. McCARTHY on Michael Ondaatje,
and JARDINE LIBAIRE on Dinaw Mengestu. Top Hat ©
Cornel Rubino, 2012 JENNY HENDRIX Lost and Saved Ramona Ausubel No One Is Here Except All of Us
Riverhead, February 2012. 336 pp. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting...
4 tags
LARB Podcast #4: Maggie Nelson
MAGGIE NELSON talks to ARNE DE BOEVER about The Art of Cruelty.
Click here for the fourth episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (also available on iTunes; click here to subscribe). We hope these podcasts will go beyond the standard promotional Q&A pleasantries and promote genuine intellectual and philosophical discussion. Today we present a conversation between Maggie...
15 tags
What's the Matter with Kansas?
Image ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com Ben Lerner and Cyrus Console grew up together in Topeka, Kansas, and became poets. Here the two friends discuss their boyhood bedsheets, corn and irony, fundamentalism and pharmaceuticals, how they came to use words like “metonymic,” “horizontality,” and “syntagmatic,” and why they are in the habit of renouncing poetry. ...
10 tags
Not Pretty
Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago. Jonathan Franzen’s piece on the occasion in the New Yorker got VICTORIA PATTERSON mad. Image ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com Victoria Patterson’s work has often been compared, for good reason, to Edith Wharton’s. This Vacant Paradise, Patterson’s first novel, is a contemporary retelling, quite consciously and intelligently, of The House of...
6 tags
Bringing Up Babies
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS on Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé, Friedrich Delius’s Portrait of a Mother as a Young Woman, and Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild.
Pamela Druckerman Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
The Penguin Press, February 2012. 284 pp.
Is anyone else irritated by our fascination...
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The Exegete
ROB LATHAM
on the career of Philip K. Dick, up to and including The Exegesis. Philip K. Dick © Chuck Hodi http://etsy.me/w3JoRt Philip K. Dick The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2011. 944 pp.
_____. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1964. Mariner, October 2011. 240 pp.
_____. Ubik
1969. Mariner, April 2012. 240...
21 tags
Gospel Writers
BRIALLEN HOPPER on Christianity and homosexuality
and ERICA WETTER on Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die. BRIALLEN HOPPER Strange Bedfellows Dan Savage and Terry Miller, editors It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living
Plume, January 2012. 352 pp. Mark D. Jordan Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk About Homosexuality
University of...
LARB Recommends
Mountain View © Lisa Beebe from Cecil Castelluci’s Literary Diaspora Project. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Wednesday, February 22nd: “Does foodie culture do anyone any good?” A lecture by Adam Gopnik and Jonathan Gold at the Getty beginning at 7:30 pm. Literary Death Match featuring Ned...
10 tags
All Together Now
A bumper crop of poetry reviews:
ADAM PLUNKETT on Hillary Gravendyk and D.A. Powell, SIOBHAN PHILLIPS on Juliana Spahr, and BRIAN REED on Les Murray and John Kinsella. From the series Light Leaks © Andrew George ADAM PLUNKETT Bodies in Pain Hillary Gravendyk Harm
Omnidawn, September 2011. 88 pp. D.A. Powell Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys
Graywolf Press, February 2012. 80 pp.
We...
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Barney Rosset, 1922-2012
Barney Rosset, one of the most significant publishers of the 20th century, editor of Grove Press and The Evergreen Review, who fought censorship in famous legal battles over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, is dead at 89. Rosset introduced American readers to Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Jean Genet, Ismail Kadare and many others,...
24 tags
Tales from the Platinum Triangle
JEFFREY BURBANK
on the great houses of La-La Land. “THE HOUSE THAT JOKES BUILT” Home of Will Rogers, Beverly Hills, California Postcard image courtesy of Time Machine to the Twenties Michael Gross Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
Broadway Books, November 2011. 560 pp.
Every Wednesday evening in wartime Southern California — the early 1940s —...
Radar LARB
Sparrow-headed Girl Shrieking in Delight © Click Mort at clickmort.com Bukowski live at City Lights Poets Theater, San Francisco, September 14, 1973: “Well, just let me sit here and drink beer. What was it I heard Cage one time he got up on stage and then he just stood there and he ate an apple and then he walked off. He got a thousand dollars. I’ll just drink this beer and I’ll...
22 tags
White on White
MICHAEL WOLFE talks to Edmund White
and ALEX GORTMAN reviews his latest book, Jack Holmes and His Friend. Edmund White in his Paris apartment, August 1996 Photo © James Dowell MICHAEL WOLFE Assume the Position Edmund White’s influence on contemporary fiction is formidable. His nonfiction works, including The Joy of Gay Sex and his autobiography My Lives, pierce truths many writers are afraid...
9 tags
An Unknown Man
JEFFREY TAYLER Image ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com Ramón Del Valle-Inclán Autumn & Winter Sonatas: The Memoirs of Marquis of Bradomin
Dedalus, September 1998, 194 pages.
When he died in Madrid at age 67, in 1936, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán was a leading figure in Spanish literature, known as much for his plays and novels as for smoking a cigar while his right arm was being amputated after...
7 tags
The Relentless, Pitiless Georges Simenon
Literary Landscape © Stanford Kay RICHARD RAYNER on the master of the roman policier and the roman dur.
Georges Simenon The Train
Melville House (Neversink Library), July 2011. 144 pp. The President
Melville House (Neversink Library), November 2011. 160 pp. Tropic Moon
New York Review Books Classics, August 2005. 152 pp. Red Lights
New York Review Books Classics, July 2006. 144 pp....
30 tags
Culture War
JOHN ROMANO
on Niall Ferguson’s Civilization. Work in the observatorium of Taqi al-Din (Detail). C. 1574-1595. Wikimedia Commons PD-1923 US. Niall Ferguson Civilization: The West and the Rest
The Penguin Press, November 2011. 402 pp.
A dozen years back, I fell into conversation in a bar room in one of America’s most diverse zip codes (New Orleans) on the subject of diversity. My...
14 tags
Life after Papyrus
SWATI PANDEY
on Stephen Greenblatt’s Lucretius. Ancient iconography (XIV) of Medieval Scribe and Titivillus, literary demon and “patron demon of scribes” Stephen Greenblatt The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
W.W. Norton & Company, September 2011. 356 pp.
Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New...
6 tags
Highly Irregular
LESLIE S. KLINGER
on the cult of Sherlock Holmes. Illustration by Frederick Dorr Steele for “The Empty House” Colliers, October 1908 Michael Dirda On Conan Doyle: or, The Whole Art of Storytelling
Princeton University Press, October 2011. 224 pp.
On a recent short plane flight, I read Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling in one sitting. The effect was like having...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.Thursday, February 16th: Percival Everett will read from his new novel, Assumption, as part of the [ALOUD] Reading Series on Thursday, February 16th at 7:00 PM at the Los Angeles Central Library.Gary Phillips signs and discusses his latest novel Treacherous at Eso Won Bookstore beginning at...
18 tags
Golden Eye
ROSS ANDERSEN on the James Webb Space Telescope. Image courtesy of NASA
The eye has long been thought the jewel of human anatomy. In Mesopotamia, fount of civilization and astronomy, Sumerians worshipped small gods of clay and marble, featureless but for the stare of large eyes. The ancient Egyptians, famous for economy of expression, had seven different hieroglyphs for the eye. In his...
15 tags
The Story of Porno
MICHAELANGELO MATOS on two dirty books. Collage made from photographs found in Taschen’s Big Book of Pussy Happy Valentine’s Day Mike Edison Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers: An American Tale of Sex and Wonder
Soft Skull Press, November 2011. 320 pp. Dian Hanson, ed. The Big Book of Pussy
Taschen, November 2011. 372 pp.
Introducing “The Epiphany,” one of the...
Radar LARB
L.A. River cc M. Goetzman Anne Trubek on a library that bets on future literary greats: “The Ransom Center is on a buying binge, but not with the long-dead titans of literature in mind. Instead, the library is pursuing the private papers of contemporary authors. This fall, the center locked down the papers of the living Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee — spending $1.5 million on more than 160...
9 tags
Satyrs
Three fiction reviews: JAYA ANINDA CHATTERJEE on Alan Hollinghurst, CHRIS KRAUS on Peter Mountford, and LEE POLEVOI on Brian Doyle. JAYA ANINDA CHATTERJEE No One Remembers You at All Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 448 pp.
Alan Hollinghurst’s ambitious, century-spanning saga, The Stranger’s Child, explores the artistic legacy of Cecil Valance, a middling...
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The Marriage Prop
Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com http://bit.ly/rESKHY We wanted to run something on Prop 8, as it’s called, one of the most notorious miscarriages of democracy in the ongoing disaster that is our state’s referendum system. Audrey Bilger, who teaches Victorian literature at Claremont McKenna College and who has closely followed the passage of the proposition and the legal challenges...
13 tags
Image: Strata © Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS on Ramona Ausubel’s No One Is Here Except All Of Us, Lee Stein’s The Fallback Plan, and Gin Phillips’ Come In and Cover Me.
Ramona Ausubel No One Is Here Except All Of Us
Riverhead Books, February 2012. 325 pp.
“Let there be someone, somewhere, to tell his story,” the old man says to his wife before they drown in the...
24 tags
Everywhere and Nowhere
ERIC BEEN on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead
and a conversation with Sullivan by MICHAEL GOETZMAN. Collage Illustration © Lisa Jane Persky John Jeremiah Sullivan Pulphead: Essays
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2011. 369 pp.
In the swirl of commentary surrounding Pulphead, the essay collection by John Jeremiah Sullivan, nothing seems to come up more than the so-called New...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, February 10th: Krys Lee discusses and signs Drifting House at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm. Ramona Ausubel reads and signs her novel No One Is Here Except All of Us at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. Sunday, February 12th: A reading at the...
12 tags
Oppositional Thinking
GARY LACHMAN
on reconciling the two hemispheres of the brain. Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Yale University Press, November 2010. 544 pp.
For millennia it’s been known that the human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, yet exactly why has never been clear. What purpose this division served once...
8 tags
Valediction
G.J. MEYER
on saying farewell to Tony Judt. Chemical Plant, Wyandotte, Michigan, 1943 © Robert Riggs (1869-1970), Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder Thinking the Twentieth Century
Penguin, February 2012. 432 pp.
At the peak of his career and in the full ripeness of his abundant talents, the intellectual historian Tony Judt was struck down by Lou Gehrig’s disease....
4 tags
An Interview with The New Inquiry's Rachel...
What follows is an interview with The New Inquiry’s Editor in Chief Rachel Rosenfelt, conducted over email by Los Angeles Review of Books Managing Editor Evan Kindley — the first in an occasional series on internet little magazines for the LARB blog.¤How, when, and why was The New Inquiry originally founded?I started The New Inquiry with two friends, Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein,...
12 tags
The Symphony of Self
AARON P. BLAISDELL
on Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind. Head and Torso © Lisa Nilsson 2010 http://bit.ly/ylkpHy Photo by John Polak http://bit.ly/wllqit Antonio Damasio Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Pantheon Books, November 2010. 384 pp. Perchance to Dream
You are jolted awake from a terrifying nightmare. Your pulse is rapid, breathing shallow. Beads of...
Radar LARB
From Got Medieval © Carl S. Pyrdum Christopher Glazek on why the crime rate is too low for our own good: “Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are...
14 tags
At Home and Abroad
HEATHER HAVRILESKY, ELIZABETH ROSNER, and ROBIN RUSSIN on new works of fiction by Krys Lee, Susan Sherman, and Allison Burnett. Memory Railroad, Oil on Canvas © Lee Guk Hyun HEATHER HAVRILESKY
Believers Krys Lee Drifting House
Viking Adult, February 2012. 224 pp.
Was it right to leave? Was it wrong to stay? Are we better off here, or there? These are the questions that haunt the denizens of...
9 tags
Disjecta Membra
BENJAMIN BALINT
on the discovery of an inadvertent archive in Egypt. Photograph of Solomon Schechter examining manuscripts from the Cairo geniza. Via Cambridge University Library Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
Nextbook, April 2011. 283 pp.
Guided by Judaism’s reverential regard for — and fidelity to — the dignity of the written word,...
9 tags
Life in Storage
PEGGY KAMUF
on the American culture of accumulation,
and watching A&E’s Storage Wars. Photograph © Lisa Jane Persky
Suppose someone asked you: “I want to keep living, like everyone else. But, tell me, what does that mean, ‘to keep living?’”
How equivocal the phrase is: it can mean to go on living, to let living go on, to keep it (living) alive, but also to keep it as one keeps...
7 tags
Greeneland
JUDITH FREEMAN
on Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head. Voice In My Head © Andy Warde courtesy of the artist and Joshua Levi Galleries Pico Iyer The Man Within My Head
Alfred A. Knopf, January 2012. 256 pp.
Raymond Chandler once said that great writing, whatever else it does, nags at the minds of subsequent writers, who find it sometimes difficult to explain just why they are so haunted...
18 tags
Golden Age
LOREN GLASS
on Richard Seaver’s memoir of the Parisian and American postwar avant-gardes. Richard Seaver The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ‘50s, New York in the ‘60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age
Ed. Jeanette Seaver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2012. 480 pp.
In the preface to this remarkable memoir, Richard Seaver claims that he had never intended to publish it. ...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Wednesday, February 1st: Update: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED and will be rescheduled. An evening with David Milch discussing his writing career and new HBO series Luck at Track 16 beginning at 6:30 pm. David Graeber discusses and signs his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years at Skylight Books...
7 tags
Twentieth Century Stories
JOHN DURHAM PETERS and GLEN ROVEN
on Alex Ross and Louis Menand. “La Valse” For its Composer Maurice Ravel. Painting © Lydia Sopoliga Maxwell Feinstein JOHN DURHAM PETERS
The Wages of Narrative Alex Ross The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2007. 448 pp. Louis Menand The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Farrar,...
