• LARB Highlights 2018

    As we near the end of 2018, we’re looking back at some of the pieces we’re proud to have published this year. Here is a list curated around some recurring threads in our work. We hope you enjoy — and if you’re moved to support LARB during our fund drive this December, we welcome your donation, no matter how small, to sustain the operations of our 501(c)(3), keep our publication paywall-free, and increase our capacity to pay our contributors. 

    Support our fund drive by 12/31 making your tax-deductible donation here, or by spreading the word with a tweet about why you #SupportLARB.

    This list was compiled and curated by Paige Parsons.

    #SupportLARB's 2018 fund drive with a tax-deductible donation https://lareviewofbooks.org/donate Click To Tweet

     

    LA’s Own

    If LARB has not already convinced you that our city has a vibrant literary scene, these pieces shed light on writers who are deeply embedded in the city’s cultural life. Read about two beloved LA writers: the late food critic Jonathan Gold, and mystery novelist Naomi Hirahara.

    The Hat: Remembering Jonathan Gold” by Michael Jaime-Becerra

    Naomi Hirahara’s Los Angeles” by Mike Sonksen

     

    On California State Politics

    As our national politics continued to be a chaotic storm throughout this second year under Trump’s presidency, it has become more and more useful to scale down, to consider democratic politics at the state level. In these two reviews of historical texts, critics consider how our own state has changed over recent decades, and what this history has to say about our broader political futures.

    California Sons: Miriam Pawel’s ‘The Browns of California’” by Jake Wertz

    A Tale of Two States” by Darryl Holter

     

    On Pop Music

    Running the gambit of popular musical genres, these reviews consider the dialogue between pop music and broader cultural patterns, delving into the relationships of queer aesthetics to radical politics, hip hop to religion, and country music to progressivism.

    New Formation: Janelle Monáe’s Radical Emotion Pictures” by Adrienne Brown

    Rock of Ages” by Frank Johnson

    The Other Country” by Nick Murray

     

    On Translated Literature, and the Art of Translation

    These pieces consider the role of the translator, who is often approaching the impossibility of rendering “untranslatable experiences” across languages, in the words of poet Vickie Vértiz. Each of these pieces— an essay by a translator, a review of a poetry collection, and an interview—all elaborate on the complexity of bringing a text into another linguistic and cultural world.

    What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation” by Deborah Smith 

    Untranslatable Voices: Vickie Vértiz Writes Los Ángeles in ‘Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut’” by Isabel Gómez

    The Real Clarice: A Conversation with Magdalena Edwards” by David Shook

    A Perpetual Layering of Language and Meaning: An Interview with Writer and Translator Jenny McPhee” by Nathan Scott McNamara

     

    Best Interviews

    Here are a few of the good conversations that happened at LARB this year.

    Delightful Listening: A Conversation Between Viet Thanh Nguyen and Arundhati Roy” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

    Struggling with a Puzzling Illness, Then Living its Answer: A Conversation with Porochista Khakpour” by Kavita Das

    My Small America: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib” by David Breithaupt

     

    LARB Radio Hour

    And here, listen to a few more good conversations, where LARB editors chat with authors about their lives and work; additionally, listen to an interview with podcaster David Naimon on his conversations with the late Ursula Le Guin.

    “‘Would You Have Waited for Me?’ Tayari Jones’s ‘An American Marriage’”

    Chris Kraus’s Social Practice

    The Science of Fiction: David Naimon on Ursula Le Guin

     

    On #MeToo

    At the beginning of 2018, the #MeToo movement was still new to the public consciousness, having become a viral phenomenon during October 2017. As more stories of sexual abuse across industries came to light, it became important to step back from the outrage to consider the less visible, less headline-worthy ways that sexual abuse affects women’s lives. This year, LARB published a bimonthly column, “Popular Feminism,” exploring different cultural facets of gendered power dynamics; see also, pieces that consider how different literary forms, including comics and YA fiction, make visible the sexual abuse that has become too ordinary in our culture.

    Popular Feminism: #MeToo” by Sarah Banet-Weiser

    Ms. Adventures in Higher Education” by Katherine West and Chet Wipley

    Growing Up and Moving On” by Jilly Pretzel

     

    On the Academy

    Given the increasing precarity of the academic profession, coupled with the rising costs of high education, many educators and students are left with difficult questions about their place and purpose within the structure. Here, our writers explore these roles, as well as the messy and painful interpersonal power dynamics that emerge out of it all.

    Whose University Is It Anyway?” by Ron Srigley

    What was Liberal Education?” by Richard Eldridge

    The Apprentice in Theory: Fan, Student, Star” by Catherine Liu and Devan Bailey

     

    On the Press Under Trump

    Throughout 2018, much has been said about Trump’s mocking and denigration of the media, as well as on the influence of fake news in national politics. These pieces explore recent writing on the current predicament of American journalism, as seen through the history of the mass media and its relationship to structures of power.

    Extra! Extra!” by Evelyn McDonnell

    Can Journalism Be Saved?” by Nicholas Carr

     

    On Taking a Tech Detox

    Everyone is so overwhelmed by the way smartphones and social media have come to dominate our daily lives, that even the tech companies responsible have begun to pay lip service to the cause of reducing tech addictions. Here, check out some writing on the way our “attention economy” has made our time itself into currency.

    Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience” by Grafton Tanner

    Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism” by Leif Weatherby

     

    On Work

    These three pieces focus on the ways work is changing for different industries and demographic groups in the US: from the banality of white-collar “bullshit jobs” to the labor movements formed by low-wage workers in the face of health violations and job insecurity.

    An Excerpt from “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now” by Annelise Orleck and Liz Cooke

    Nomads” by Justin Tyler Clark

    Is Your Job a Bunch of B.S.?” by John Schneider

     

    On the Big Questions of the Environmental Crisis

    In the summer of 2018, California experienced the hottest July in its history. These two reviews, both published this summer, engage with the ways that the effects of global climate change and distributed unequally, across race, class and geography.  

    Who is a Beneficiary? You Are” by Christina Lupton

    Sinking Cities” by Rafaela Bassili

     

    Out of the Archives

    Sometimes our old favorite voices come back into public discourse, decades after their time. This year, Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was published, almost a century after its writing, and a James Baldwin novel became a film, in a rare decision to grant film rights by his estate. These LARB pieces engage with the ways old work reenters the world, in all of the possibilities for renewal, manipulation, and retelling.

    A Different Backstory for Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’” by Rebecca Panovka 

    Bukowski’s Posthumous Poetry: As the Spirit Wanes, Shit Happens” by Abel Debritto

    Beautifying Beale Street” by Melanie Walsh 

     

    On Poets and Making Poetry Anew

    Here are two reviews of new work by poets that are asking us to rethink what poetry is for; both Anne Boyer’s dense essayistic poetry and Elizabeth Acevedo’s young adult novel-in-verse consider how poetry fits into the world, and how it can be part of a process of resisting the world’s harms.

    Not Unpacking but Seeking” by Kyle Proehl

    World Split Open: The Poetry of Adolescent Girlhood” by Sadie Shorr-Parks

     

    The Poetry Itself

    To end, here are some of the poems to savor, all published this year in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal.

    The Next Black National Anthem” and “Token Comes Clean” by Joshua Bennett

    Ars Sequoia // Ars Empathetica” by Donika Kelly

    Pasadena Ode” by Sharon Olds

     

    Image: Wolfgang Tillmans, summer still life, 1995. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.