September 2012
49 posts
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First Editor
In which LARB’s James Simenc reflects on Editorial Boot Camp
by James Simenc
I felt guilty for years over a speech I gave at my eighth grade graduation. The assignment was simple: reflect on my years at the school, and list 10 lessons that my fellow classmates and I had learned. I began with the obvious platitudes — one, respect your peers; two, success requires hard work; three, learning is...
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Dear Television joins LARB!
Dear Television is Jane Hu, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. We will be writing epistolary criticism about TV. If Clarissa Harlowe were writing about Girls — and she kind of is, isn’t she? — this is what that would be like. Abridged. This season, we’ll be corresponding about FOX’s New Girl and The Mindy Project from our new home at the LARB. Join us!
‘New Girl’ and...
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Radar LARB
Ship Write by Geoff Dyer: “Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
Why we don’t understand Kafka: “‘Impatience led to our expulsion from paradise’, wrote Kafka in one of his aphorisms, ‘and impatience stops us returning.’ The besetting sin...
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#OccupyGaddis Ends
So fall begins as Gaddis ends, with Lee Konstantinou wrapping up our #OccupyGaddis summer. Special thanks to Lee, Sonia Johnson and Joseph Tabbi for their contributions to the LARB blog, and to everyone who read along, tweeted, blogged, and commented.
Something weird happens at the end of William Gaddis’s J R. A few weird things, actually, connected to Doctor (aka Coach) Vogel. What we might...
LOGLINES (A Love Story)*
A lawyer meets a young woman with money problems.
A lawyer falls for his sultry client.
A lawyer falls under the spell of his fiancee’s cousin.
A woman marries despite doubts about her husband-to-be.
Marriage slowly erodes an independent woman’s resolve.
A drifter awakens desire in a lawyer’s neglected wife.
A middle-aged couple’s pent-up frustrations surface.
A woman plots to...
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The Posthuman Imagination (part 2)
by Joseph Tabbi
I’d promised to try and tease out some of the biographical elements William Gaddis wove into J R. I’ll also try to indicate how Gaddis’s resistance to biography is not (as in his literary hero, T.S. Eliot) a repression of personality - far from it. Rather, what we can observe of the many, many examples of biographical writing in Gaddis, is a transformation of the...
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Skylight Readings Series, Ep. 1: Nathalie Handal,...
Nathalie Handal, reading ‘Poet in Andalucía”
IN THE FIRST of our series, brought to us by PEN Center USA, direct from Skylight Books in Los Feliz, poet Nathalie Handal reads from her newest collection Poet in Andalucía, which traces in-reverse the lyrical journey of Federico García Lorca’s classic Poet in New York. The reading...
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Michael Krikorian on the books his friends in prison want to read:
The single most asked-for book, requested by roughly 20 percent of the guys I know in prison, is a 6000-word glorified pamphlet called The Art of War, written in the 6thcentury by a Chinese guy named Sun Tzu. This book is such a prison staple that a California prosecutor tried to use possession of it as proof that an inmate was...
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Radar LARB
“RV Dusk” by Scott Listfield, 2011, in Picks of the Harvest at Thinkspace Gallery
Christopher Beha “on Making Sentences Do Something”: “I had finally learned the lesson, and it applied to my fiction as well as my nonfiction: Whenever my sentences had a function outside themselves — whether that function was connecting up other sentences,...
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“Isn’t it pretty to tweet so?”
A journalist makes nice with Papa Hem, via Tahrir Square and Old Havana
Hemingway wrote a few good books before he became a cartoon, and I own a couple of them. I stole my copy of The Sun Also Rises from my father, which he got during his school days. It’s the Scribner’s printing from 1954, hardbound and dark blue. I’ve always liked the way it feels in my hands, but not always the...
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Essential: What Romney and Obama Should Be Reading...
by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
In mid-August, the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting feature in which a nicely diverse set of authors provided summer reading suggestions for the two main presidential candidates. The respondents flagged a lot of good books, some timeless and some timely, but one thing was missing: a book devoted to China.
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The omission seems noteworthy, given how important...
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An Interview with Literary Journal Bengal Lights
by C.P. Heiser
As part of our occasional series of interviews with the founders and editors of new literary magazines, we recently exchanged emails with author, editor, tea-grower and university director K. Anis Ahmed. Ahmed, who returned to Bangladesh in 2004 after picking up degrees at Brown, Washington and New York universities, is about to launch the inaugural print issue of Bengal Lights, a...
