March 2012
50 posts
4 tags
The Lifespan of a Myth
by Jeffrey Wasserstrom Last week was a very good one for a good friend (and one of my favorite China-based journalists), Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, and a lousy one for one of my favorite radio shows, WBEZ’s This American Life. The reason for this is what some on Twitter (e.g., Kaiser Kuo of the Sinica Podcast) have taken to calling L’Affaire Daisey. Here’s a quick recap (that builds...
Radar LARB
LARB’s staff picks for weekly reading: Madeline Lane-McKinley’s politicized reading of Curb Your Enthusiasm: “Larry’s situation in Curb mirrors that from which Adorno produced Minima Moralia — a Jew in exile in Los Angeles — though Larry is escaping from Seinfeld, not the Nazis. To arrive at a politicized reading of Curb, Adorno nevertheless lends an ideal starting point. In...
24 tags
Doing A D’Agata
LEE GUTKIND
on John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact. Blackboard courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard
John D’Agata and Jim Fingal The Lifespan of a Fact
W.W. Norton & Company, February 2012. 128 pp.
A writer colleague, referring to a document she had written, confessed: “I totally D’Agata’d this.” I couldn’t help...
8 tags
Los Angeles Review of Books Radio
Our inaugural broadcast on KCRW.
Click here or on the image above to go to KCRW and listen or download.
7 tags
The Lyrical Essay
Image ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com John D’Agata’s latest book, The Lifespan of a Fact, has caused quite a fuss. We’ll be running a couple of interesting pieces about the book and the kerfuffle this week: one tomorrow by Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind, and one the next day by Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir and other books.
The questions at the center...
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Another 100,000 Galleys
Image
© Paul Bausch The famous Library at Alexandria, at its largest, housed perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls, or the equivalent of some 25,000 books. A quaint number: ten years ago, we were publishing, in the U.S., around ten times that a year. Now, we publish that many every two and a half days.
Anyone with access to a networked computer can publish a book, or ten, or a hundred. Anyone...
3 tags
The Return of the Baffler: An Interview with John...
by Evan KindleyThe Baffler was founded in 1988 in Charlottesville, Virginia by Thomas Frank and Keith White and quickly established itself as a leading fifth column in the ongoing culture wars. Abjuring both abstruse academic specialization and mainstream harmlessness, The Baffler sought to carry on the grand tradition of viciously satirical populist cultural critics like H.L. Mencken, Edmund...
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The American Aftershock
ERIC BEEN talks to THOMAS FRANK about his new book, Pity the Billionaire. Photo: Lisa Jane Persky When Thomas Frank co-founded The Baffler in 1988, according to the introduction of the recently relaunched opinion journal’s first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, its crucial mission was to “restore a sense of outrage and urgency to the Literature of the Left.” [Click here to read an interview...
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The End of Mourning
JESS ROW
on Tony Kushner and 21st century Marxism. Lazy Boy, 2005 From the series “East of Eden” © Pipo Nguyen-Duy
Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles Tony Kushner The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Communism With a Key to the Scriptures
Produced at the Public Theater, New York, May-June 2011
It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward,...
5 tags
Unmistakably Irish: Recalling Beckett's Godot
by Kelly Candaele In the play Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett’s best known work, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles – the main characters Vladimir and Estragon are stuck in a ruined landscape where they bicker, contemplate suicide, and observe a ritual of degradation enacted by two visitors, Pozzo and his underling Lucky. They wait for the mysterious Godot who just might...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, March 15th: From the Outside Looking In: Writers Finding Their Place in Los Angeles featuring Bernard Cooper, Joyce Farmer, Lynell George, Marisela Norte, and Michael Tolkin at Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm. Ben Ryder Howe discusses and signs My Korean...
11 tags
Cinematic
SWATI PANDEY
on Roger Ebert’s Life Itself. Roger Ebert Life Itself
Grand Central Publishing, September 2011. 448 pp.
For many people, Roger Ebert was, is, and always will be a television personality. Television images are hard to shake, particularly when they’re nationally syndicated. Ebert’s show — co-hosted first, and most famously, with Gene Siskel, and later with Richard Roeper —...
19 tags
The Hand That Feeds
MALCOLM HARRIS
on Olivier Zunz’s Philanthropy in America. American Philosophical Society, Non-commercial, educational use only Olivier Zunz Philanthropy in America: A History
Princeton University Press, October 2011. 396 pp.
In his new book, University of Virginia history professor Olivier Zunz seeks to shape snippets of biography, a constellation of financial records, and selected...
1 tag
Radar LARB
Gas pump sticker © C.P. Heiser LARB’s staff picks for weekly reading: Evan Hughes on Saul Bellow the cuckold: “[Bellow’s friend] Ludwig wrote sports books and derivative novels in the Bellow-Roth mode that have fallen out of print — Atlas calls him ‘painfully short of talent’ — and perhaps he acted out of resentment that he needed Bellow to carry him through...
15 tags
In Medias Ars
DOMENICK AMMIRATI and CÉCILE ALDUY
on Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory. Plot (I) Detail, 2010 map, acrylic, pins, adhesive, paper © Shannon Rankin All rights reserved http://bit.ly/xG8DzV DOMENICK AMMIRATI From Cocks to Corpses Michel Houellebecq The Map and the Territory
Transl. by Gavin Bowd
Knopf, January 2012. 288 pp.
While Michel Houellebecq has inveighed against...
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The Wrong Marlowe
CHARLES KELLY
on an amnesiac pulp writer in L.A. “You don’t deserve it, but I’ll give you a choice,” I said. “I was going to leave you out here, with the heat and the mosquitoes and the bugs and the snakes and the alligators. You’ll never make it in. I doubt if I could myself.” His whole face was wet as he stared at me. “You won’t go easy if you stay, so I’ll give you the choice. Stay, or...
LARB Recommends
Photograph by Robert Adams featured at March 11th photo exhibit. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, March 9th: Ashley Ream reads and signs her novel Losing Clementine at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. Saturday, March 10th: Fifth installment of This is Your Library featuring John Salley, Sonja...
6 tags
Dissent
GORDON FELLMAN
on Liu Xiaobo’s No Enemies, No Hatred. Liu Xiaobo No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems
Edited by Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xia, and Perry Link.
Harvard University Press, January 2012. 400 pp.
The 20th century was marked by near-absolute totalitarian political systems in massive industrial societies. It was also a time for dissidents to rise and broadcast...
10 tags
Church and State
ALBERT WU on Liao Yiwu’s oral histories and the new Christian martyrs in the Chinese heartland. The Ladder of Paradise icon described by St. John Climacus http://bit.ly/yzi4GR Liao Yiwu God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China
Translated by Wenguang Huang
HarperOne, September 2011. 256 pp. _____. The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories:...
5 tags
People Who Eat People
STEVEN SHAPIN
on Cătălin Avramescu’s Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Brazilians cook human flesh … ©
(1671) From Nieuwe en onbekende wereld by A. Montanus, Courtesy of New York Public Library Collection Cătălin Avramescu An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth
Princeton University Press, August 2011 (originally published 2003)....
