February 2012
44 posts
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...
13 tags
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...
