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...
16 tags
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...
11 tags
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....
