May 2012
8 posts
Radar LARB
The week in miscellany New fiction from Jennifer Egan, serialized on Twitter: She explains on Page Turner: “I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one — because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry...
Radar LARB
The week in reading Revisiting Vonnegut: “He stood for peace, love, decency, humanity—became the Kurt Vonnegut we knew for the final four decades of his life, a figure about whom it was possible to say, in the words of a recent book, that ‘precious few authors have ever loved mankind so completely.’ He became, in other words, exactly what he had always warned against, a...
An Interview with Trop's Tom Dibblee
Metropolis Cafe in Milledgeville, GA. Photo: Deepak Kumar Tropis a brand new literary website, the collective project of 19 writers scattered all over the United States. Editor Tom Dibblee, an MFA candidate at CalArts in Valencia, lives in Los Angeles, and agreed to talk to the Los Angeles Review of Books about the new venture. This interview was recorded in Tom’s black Chevy pickup truck as...
Radar LARB
The week in reading George Bernard Shaw (age 75) surfing at Muizenberg beach Eric Puchner on meeting his “cooler” doppelganger: “Statistically speaking, there’s probably a cooler you out there. The guy who’s actually living that life you’d imagined for yourself before you got married, had a couple of kids, and strapped in to that desk job. Maybe he...
The Book of Love
by Audrey Bilger An excerpt from Here Come the Brides!: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriageedited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort WHEN I FIRST CAME OUT as a lesbian in my mid-thirties, I looked for books. It’s what I do any time I make a change. A decade before that, I stopped eating meat, and I read every...
"Tradition – A Curse: Punk in a Small Spanish...
By Robin Cembalest Photo credit: Robin Cembalest The following article, referred to by Greil Marcus in part 3 of his interview with Simon Reynolds on our main site, was originally published in the Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, Summer 1988. Reprinted with permission of the author. ¤ In Priego de Córdoba, a hill town in southern Spain, neighbors are gathering before the siesta in Bar El...
Radar LARB
Billboard for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown on Sunset Boulevard, 1974. Willie Osterweil and Susan Salter Reynolds on the perils of freelancing: “…I finished a book this morning. It’s called The Least Cricket of Evening, and it’s by an essayist named Robert Vivian out of University of Michigan and, I could’ve been six years old, I mean, I just had the same feeling, like, ‘Oh, what...
Motives and Motifs in the Curious Case of Bo Xilai
Bo Xilai complements the Shanghaiist by Jeffrey Wasserstrom One of the many things that I like about the Los Angeles Review of Books is that we have a designated editor for noir. Be it hard-boiled, true crime or international espionage, I have always enjoyed unraveling the puzzles of a good whodunit. But the real force of such stories, at least when set in distant times or foreign places one has...
Radar LARB
Sizing up the Moons, Jason McGuran 8 experts on “Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?”: ”The question shot straight into my brain and disabled the parietal cortex. There was a sizzle and a puff of smoke, and the smell of sulfur filled the air. I groped in the dark for a 50-kopeck piece and tossed it upwards. It clinked hollowly on the linoleum. The flickering light of the candle from above...
April 2012
36 posts
4 tags
Castellucci’s Class Notes: Period 1, English
The relaunch of the Los Angeles Review of Books feels, in a lot of ways, like the start of a new year. This may be due in part to the writers who have recently come on board as regular contributors to the LARBlog — Scientific American journalist David Biello and LARB contributor Lisa Teasley among them. Today, our YA section editor Cecil Castellucci begins her own column, Castellucci’s...
Radar LARB
Stacks, Lauren Swayze Jennie Erdal asks, “What happened to the philosophical novel?”: “It seems the problem for philosophical novels these days is, well, their philosophicalness. Which is a pity, for the novel and philosophy have a great deal to give one another. Indeed, one of the things the novel does best is to depict people – fictional characters but recognisably like us –...
Unpacking Music Man Murray: My visit with one of...
by C.P. Heiser Murray and the collection © C.P. Heiser Today, the fifth annual Record Store Day, is a time to revisit those high fidelity vestiges of our pre-digital world and drop by your local record shop. In honor of the day, we are reposting Chris Heiser’s visit with one of Los Angeles’s foremost record collectors, “Music Man” Murry Gershenz. ¤ Turning to his record...
Still Touched by Your Presence
Deborah Harry and then bassist Gary Valentine Lachman at Max’s Kansas City 1976 photo © Lisa Jane Persky In the New York Times on Saturday, LARB contributor Gary Lachman was profiled in connection with his new book, Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin): “Mr. Lachman joins a long line of philosophers and writers, including Kant and Baudelaire, intrigued by...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.Friday, April 20th: Slake Los Angeles presents Literary Death Match featuring Lauren Groff, Krys Lee, Jerry Stahl, and Tom Bissell at Atwater Crossing beginning at 8:00 pm. Mystery Writers of America presents pre-Festival of Books party at Skylight Books beginning at 6:30 pm.Saturday, April 21st:...
5 tags
Photo Realism: Artist Edmund Wyss on His Passion...
by Edmund Wyss S Inside by Edmund Wyss, oil on board, 2012 A massive bookstore nestled in a mall complex of San Francisco’s Japan town. Past the various display tables of neatly arranged tchotchkes I make a beeline for the magazines. The variety and depth of the selection is astounding: WWII armor model periodicals, fixie bicycle zines, glossies devoted to every Adidas shoe ever made along with...
New LARB Rises
Check out the entirely new Los Angeles Review of Books: Eric Zener © Much Clearer Down Below 2011 The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit, multimedia literary and cultural arts magazine that combines the great American tradition of the serious book review with the evolving technologies of the Web. We are a community of writers, critics, journalists, artists, ...
The New Site is Live!
Please join us at [click here] lareviewofbooks.org [click here]
5 tags
Still Touched By Your Presence
Deborah Harry and then bassist Gary Valentine Lachman at Max’s Kansas City 1976 photo © Lisa Jane Persky In the New York Times on Saturday, LARB contributor Gary Lachman was profiled in connection with his new book, Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin): “Mr. Lachman joins a long line of philosophers and writers, including Kant and Baudelaire, intrigued by...
Radar LARB
Disney Hall, M Goetzman Death to Microsoft Word! A Tom Scocca jeremiad: “Word’s idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world’s most narcissistic writer and the world’s most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor.” Dennis McDougal on Southern...
