If you help us raise $10,000 this week, a generous reader will match it with a check for another $10,000. 

That’s $20,000, money critical to our future. 

The week is half over and we’re almost halfway to our goal. If you haven’t donated yet, please do so now. If we don’t hit our goal, we’ll miss out on that matching grant which is so important to keeping the Los Angeles Review of Books going strong into 2013.

Click here to make a donation.

**Update 11/29/12: the Chris Ware proof is no longer available. Congratulations to the donor who will be receiving it soon. But don’t let that stop you from making a donation!**    

Less than three days are left in our fundraising drive and we haven’t made our goal yet. Remember, we need to raise $2,000 each day this week in order to receive a grant of another $10,000. This money is crucial for LARB’s continued success.

Please give now. Even $25 goes a long way.

As an incentive, we have something special for the person who helps us make our goal today. The person who puts us over the top of our next $2000 will receive the original “blue line” proof (pictured above) of Chris Ware’s critically acclaimed new graphic novel Building Stories. Click here and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

Photo by Lisa Jane Persky

I’ve known Judith for a couple of years, and we’ve sometimes talked about her growing up Mormon in Utah, a story that fascinates me.I want to know about how a writer as fierce and fearless as Judith got to here from there.  

Even before Willard Mitt Romney snagged the nomination for President, I suggested Judith write a piece about Mormonism for the L.A. Review of Books, a piece with as much autobiographical material as she saw fit. She kept ducking it, and I surmised, with Sherlock Holmes-like intuition, she was not ready to write that story. Then, one day, she started. Timing is always mysterious in the life of a writer. Imagine how delighted I was to get this desert-dry, historically rich, revealing, wonderfully one-of-a-kind piece, which turns out to be the start of an autobiography she will write for Pantheon. —Laurie Winer

Click here to read “The Mormon Chronicles” by Judith Freeman.

As part of our 2012 fund drive, we’re spotlighting some of our editors’ favorite pieces, none of which would be possible without the support of our readers. If you help us raise $10,000 this week, we can secure another $10,000 as a matching grant. We can’t do it without you. And as an added bonus, all donors will receive our monthly Digital Edition. Please make a donation today: click here and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

See image credit below.

Donate to the Los Angeles Review of Books this week and receive a one-year subscription to our monthly digital edition. Our digital editions bring together our best recent and forthcoming pieces, chosen by one of our editors, exploring a different theme each month. Recent topics include politics and Young Adult fiction, and December’s issue will feature a collection on art and architecture.

Published in two formats, our ebooks can be read on just about any e-reader, or downloaded to your computer. Our digital editions let you read carefully selected LARB essays wherever you are - in bed, at a cafe, on a plane, train, or bus. Just not while you’re driving, please.

But the only way to receive our digital editions is to make a donation right now. In addition to receiving the next 12 editions, you’ll also help get us closer to our goal of raising $10,000 this week, which will enable us to receive a $10,000 matching grant. Keep LARB going strong into 2013 and receive a one-year subscription to our digital edition. Do it now.

Click this link to donate now and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

YA Cover Illustration © Harry Briggs
Politics Cover Illustration © Lisa Jane Persky
Digital Editions Art Director: Lisa Jane Persky

Day two of the LARB fund drive brings three new pieces on Judy Blume, including Nell Beram’s look at the classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. LARB is leading the conversation on YA literature, but we’re only able to do it because of the financial support of readers like you. Please show how much you love LARB and make a donation now. This link will take you to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

**Updated 11/28/12: Out of Print gift cards are no longer available; they have been taken. But don’t let that stop you from making a donation!**

Our fund drive is nearly half over, and we’re just about on track to make our goal of raising $10,000. Remember, we need this money in order to receive a matching grant of $10,000. This money is critical to LARB’s future. Please give now.

The Los Angeles Review of Books relies on the support of readers like you to publish essays like “Indigenous to the Hood” by Leslie Jamison:

The here of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. Here is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” writes Susan Sontag, “is a quintessential modern experience.” Part of what feels strange about this tour is that you’re assuming the posture of a tourist — How many people have died here? How do the boys come of age?—but you are only 18 miles from where you grew up.

Alfred says more people have died in LA gang conflicts than the Troubles in Ireland. You’d never thought of it like that, which is his point: no one thinks of it like that. These blocks look so ordinary — South Central Avenue itself is just a gritty bracelet of strip malls and auto body shops; Watts is parched lawns that once burned. The here of Watts was on fire in 1965. Black boys who hadn’t been let into the Boy Scouts were sick of it. They made their own clubs. 35,000 people rose up. People got sick of it again in 1992, when Rodney King was beaten and thousands of people, the children of the Watts riots, said enough. Reginald Denny with a brick to the head said enough.

Click here to read the rest.

As part of our 2012 fund drive, we’re spotlighting some of our editors’ favorite pieces, none of which would be possible without the support of our readers. If you help us raise $10,000 this week, we can secure another $10,000 as a matching grant. We can’t do it without you. And as an added bonus, all donors will receive our monthly Digital Edition. Please make a donation today: click here and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

Photo by Lisa Jane Persky

Josh Wilker was late. In fact, we both were. I’d asked him to review Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” sometime prior to that book’s release in hardcover, and then we both … forgot about it. Rather, Josh and his wife had a baby, the book appeared to widespread acclaim, and by the time I noticed the essay had never arrived, we were on to other things. Only we weren’t. In April, 2011, just prior to LARB’s launch, Josh sent me his piece. It was kind of about Harbach’s novel and also about Moby Dick, Tom Seaver, LSD, rural corruption, American utopias. It was amazing, and it struck me as everything I’d ever want “criticism” (if that’s what it is) to be: both addressing its subject and free of that subject, measured and yet emotional, imagistic but abstract, lettered and articulate even as its author happily admitted to areas of ignorance. It was, and is, one of my favorite things we’ve yet published, and the fact that it was “late” (according to the promotional cycle, which has absolutely nothing to do with how books live in the world) was simply overturned by the fact that it is timeless. Just like its subjects, the American novel and our beloved pastime, unfolding in those mortal fields of eternity.—Matthew Specktor

Click here to read “Measures of American Beauty,” Josh Wilker’s review of The Art of Fielding.

LARB is leading the conversation on David Foster Wallace, with pieces this week on his depression, the influence of math on his writings, a roundtable discussion, and his essay collection Both Flesh and Not.

Every one of these articles was made possible by donations from readers like you.

This week we have been given a fantastic opportunity. If we raise $10,000 by Friday we will get a matching grant of $10,000. We need your help to do it. Click the red button and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

AND don’t forget: for a basic donation of $25 you’ll receive an annual subscription to our monthly magazine, LARB Digital Editions.

***Update 11/27: All of our gift cards have been allocated, but don’t let that stop you from making a donation to help LARB stay strong into 2013.***

Some of the greatest independent booksellers support the Los Angeles Review of Books. Beginning at 11:05 am PST today, be among the first 18 people to make a $40 donation to LARB (or more) and get a $25 store credit redeemable online from one of our fund drive sponsors:

City Lights (San Francisco)
Green Apple (San Francisco)
Iconoclast (Sun Valley, ID)
Readers’ Books (Sonoma, CA)
Skylight (Los Angeles)
Word (Brooklyn, NY)

Please click the red button and make a donation today, using the form generously hosted by UC Riverside. And don’t forget, every donation of at least $25 also receives a free subscription to our monthly magazine.

While our supplies of this special offer are limited, your options on where to buy books are not. 

All our bookstore sponsors sell books online, so whether you live in San Francisco, CA, Elko, NV or New York, NY, you can shop for books and support local booksellers.

What are you waiting for?  Show your love.  Support LARB today.

In our short time on the Web, the Los Angeles Review of Books has been a smashing success. We’ve become the home of some of the smartest, sharpest writing on books and culture you can find anywhere. What we haven’t been so good at is telling our community of readers how much we rely on them. As a non-profit organization, we depend on readers like you to pay our writers and editors and keep our magazine strong. 

Every article you’ve read at LARB was made possible by donations. Now we need your help. This week we’ve been given a fantastic opportunity. If we raise $10,000 by Friday we will get a matching grant of $10,000. We need your help to do it. Click the red button and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside.

If you are one of the thousands of people who have come to love the Los Angeles Review of Books, this is your week to show it. Give now, and help us stay strong in 2013. Please make sure you donate this week. If we don’t hit our target, we’ll miss out on a matching grant that could mean so much for our continued success. For a basic donation of $25 you’ll receive an annual subscription to our monthly magazine, LARB Digital Editions.

The LARB success story is one of the most extraordinary on the Web. Hear about it directly from the people who make it possible every day: our editors.

So what are you waiting for?  Show your love.  Support LARB today.

• Media and expression: theses in tweetform by Nicholas Carr
  
  
• Kafka’s Wound: A digital essay by Will Self
  
  
• Rocket and Lightship: Meditations on life and letters by Adam Kirsch
  
  
• The Neighborhood Effect: On William Julius Wilson and Urban Sociology by Marc Perry
  
  
• Upper Middle Brow: The culture of the creative class by William Deresiewicz (see comments)
   
• A Few Indignant Words for Professor Wampole: A response to the NYtimes’s “How To Live Without Irony” by Stephanie Bernhard