July 2012
31 posts
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In discussion
LARB Editor Clarissa Romano and Little Bee author Chris Cleave have a good old fashioned sit-down chat tomorrow at the Santa Monica Public Library. Cleave’s new book, Gold, is the story of two elite female athletes training for the 2012 London Olympics. More info here.
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The Playful Destruction of J R
A month into #OccupyGaddis, not quite halfway through the book, we’re finally beginning to see the shape of J R. We’ve been introduced to the entropic 96th Street Apartment – and are confronted with Schramm’s suicide. We learn of Gibbs’s unfinished second book, a history of player piano called Agapē Agape, which also happens to be the name of Gaddis’s last novel. We have an emerging sense...
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The week in reading…
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Anti-heroes
We live in an age of failed institutions and political upheaval, our society is left with nothing to worship – except perhaps the anti-hero. The individual that will make a difference, no matter what. Recently, the storytellers of television have created lead characters that are complicated and dubious, flawed and deluded, radical and enigmatic. TV is flooded with these types, as the simplicity of...
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“My Courage is Roaring Like The Sound Of The Sun”:...
Lauren Eggert-Crowe’s review of Wild appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books today. Here she shares her mix tape inspired by the book.
You’ll feel like you’ve bid farewell to a friend when you finish reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. You’ll catch yourself wondering where she’ll be on the trail when you pick up...
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My English Teacher
In Memoriam, Lorraine Schulmeister (1918-2012)
by Louise Steinman
This piece is part of our ongoing series of writers’ profiles of influential teachers.
An autumn afternoon on the sunny Great Lawn at Westlake School for Girls. Lorraine Schulmeister, my English teacher, and I read aloud from Emily Dickinson: “I dared not meet the Daffodils, / For fear their Yellow Gown / Would...
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Still More #OccupyGaddis
As the fourth week of #OccupyGaddis begins, the conversation about J R continues around the Web. Most of the action is happening on Twitter, under the hashtag #OccupyGaddis, and on blogs. Infinite Zombies remains the indispensable resource apart from Twitter. Our Goodreads group and Facebook group are relatively quiet – pay us a visit!
One of the themes of our conversation so far has been the...
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Radar LARB
Jonathan Wolstenholme F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins discuss revisions to an early version of The Great Gatsby: “One is that among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything...
On the LARBlog now
LARB YA Section Editor Cecil Castellucci resumes her blog “Class Notes” today. Her latest, The Year of the Beasts, appeared in May from Roaring Brook Press.
A well-documented fact: the story-making,...
Cecil Castellucci resumes her LARBlog series “Class Notes” with a harrowing recollection of just such an encounter—read it here now.
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Style Notes
By Sonia Johnson As Lee Konstantinou mentioned when he introduced me, I spent a week this May with the William Gaddis papers at Washington University’s special collection. While there I found a list of “style notes” sent to Robert Gottlieb, Gaddis’s editor at Knopf some time in 1974 (the original document is cut off as you see here.) It wasn’t clear from surrounding documents when exactly it was...
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Out of the Gutter
This week the Los Angeles Review of Books featured a review of John Goodis’s collected novels, recently republished by the Library of America. Goodis wrote several popular noir novels in 40s and 50s, but his work was largely forgotten after his death in 1967. To mark the review here, we are rerunning Cullen Gallagher’s report from the 2012 Edgar Awards.
Edgar Week with the...
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