Remembering Maurice Sendak
May 10th, 2012
“Exquisite in both story and sentence, the Anne books built me as a reader, which is to say: they built me.”Sarah Mesle on "Anne of Green Gables"
Los Angeles Review of Books
Strawberries on Life Support
The alien can be found within us; for proof, we need look no further than the colonies of bacteria proliferating in the crook of the human elbow.
May 9th, 2012
A Grosser Power: A Contrarian Look at The Hunger Games
The only way The Hunger Games works as art is if it shows ordinary people being entertained by death. Then it forces the audience to look at itself.
May 8th, 2012
Discoveries: Tom Bissell, April Bernard, James Franco, John Green, Sarah Manguso
On 'Magic Hours,' 'Miss Fuller,' 'The Dangerous Book Four Boys,' 'The Fault of Our Stars,' and 'The Guardians.'
May 6th, 2012
The France of Yes and the France of No: Sunday's Presidential Elections
On Sunday, French voters will go to the polls to decide whether Sarkozy, the incumbent, or François Hollande, the poll favorite, will be president.
May 4th, 2012
I Gotta Be Able To Counterattack: Rap and the Los Angeles Riots
"L.A. hip hop, like the punk and skateboarding subcultures of the 1970s, had sprouted from the imaginations of forgotten kids..."
May 3rd, 2012
Ruminations on Riots
When it comes to matters of race, L.A. would rather forget.
May 2nd, 2012
Dead or Straight: The Conundrum of the Lesbian Coming-of-Age Story
How true, how frequent, is the "dead or straight" binary to the lesbian novel at large?
May 2nd, 2012
The Embers of April 1992
"Los Angeles became a carnival of repression."
April 30th, 2012
Perched on Nothingness
April 30th, 2012
Fix-up Artist: The Chaotic SF of A.E. van Vogt
"The disjointed novel is more in vogue today than at any previous point in history."
April 30th, 2012
Reality Hunger: On Lena Dunham's "Girls"
For Hannah, talking is a way of coming to terms with, and owning, her appetites.
April 28th, 2012
Mr. Amis's Planet
Martin Amis has always been a casualty of his own biography.
April 25th, 2012
Weetzie Bat Meets the Genie
"Block paints Los Angeles in late-eighties' Rococo: Patrick Nagel doing the Go-Gos in dayglo."
April 23rd, 2012
Novels Are Not the Only Books
"As soon as I finished reading 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?' I wanted to take stock of the Winterson canon."
April 20th, 2012
Books
Genres
Television
"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen... More
Science & Technology
"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein... More
Art & Architecture
"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa... More
Nonfiction
"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.... More
Literary Fiction
"Mere flim-flam stories, and nothing but shams and lies." — Miguel de Cervantes... More
Biography & Autobiography
"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn... More