Press Center

With a diverse editorial staff from Southern California and around the world, the Los Angeles Review of Books is in the vanguard of new media organizations delivering some of the best, most thoughtful, most deeply researched writing today. LARB is well-known for publishing reviews, essays, and interviews that create and impact public debate on politics, the arts, entertainment, religion, and foreign affairs. We work with hundreds of authors who cover these and many other topics each year, assisting them with research for their stories and making our experienced media spokespeople available for interviews and commentary, whether on television, radio, in print or online.

 

LARB is regularly quoted by The New York Times, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and others as an authoritative source, and tweeted by Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, David Lynch, and hundreds of others, including all the book sharing sites and the major book sales outlets (Amazon, B&N, IndieBound). Flavorpill and Bloomberg.com have both named us one of the five best literary sites on the internet. We are featured regularly by Arts & Letters Daily, the gold standard of intellectual aggregators, Byliner, The Browser, Longform.org, Longreads.com, Reddit, Digg, AtlanticWire, Reader.ly, and many others. We are read and shared by over a half million readers each month, and by our 320,000 followers on Twitter and 58,000 on Facebook.

 

If you are a member of the media and would like to discuss covering LARB for your publication, please email [email protected].

 

“As someone who believes in the importance of books, as someone who engages in close readings and appreciates the close readings of others, I am committed to, dependent on, and nourished by the work done by LARB.”

— Claudia Rankine

 

“The Los Angeles Review of Books is one of the bright spots, a phoenix rising from the ashes.”

— Margaret Atwood

 

“As culture somehow gets more and less transparent, we need publications committed to the art of provoking and taking care of readers. No other publication in the world consistently pushes readers with fresh takes and fresher writing. When I need to believe in art and people again, I read the LARB.”

— Kiese Laymon

 

“I appreciate and am very thankful to LARB in particular for its generously long essays, reviews, and interviews, a length increasingly rare online, and increasingly precious.”

— R. O. Kwon

 

LARB consistently publishes genuinely bold and illuminating essays on contemporary culture. No house style, no predictable angle, no circumscribed purview, no obvious political tack — just good, interesting, and often surprising writing.”

— Namwali Serpell

 

“Above all else, what I love about LARB is its vitality. In its pages, culture is celebrated and with a voice that is urgent, lively and joyous.”

— Carlos Fonseca

 

“The LA Review of Books is a monster of wonderfulness. It’s more alive than anything in American literature now.”

— Andrei Codrescu

 

“The best literary magazine in the country.”

— Jon Robin Baitz, playwright, creator of Brothers and Sisters and Other Desert Cities.

 

“LARB beckons a new model of a literary review, not tied to a newspaper or based in a university but creating its own autonomous space. … It is the kind of idea that makes you wonder why no one had done it before.”

— Jeffrey J. Williams, The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

 “One of the instant jewels of the Internet.”

— Richard Brody, The New Yorker

 

“J’ai lu avec plaisir…. Voilà le genre d’article, sérieux et détaillé, qu’on ne trouve jamais en France!” (“I read with pleasure … Here is the kind of article, serious and detailed, that one never finds in France!”)

— Alain Badiou

 

“What is being done at the Los Angeles Review of Books is renegade. The fish swimming upstream. A perfect example of disruptive innovation in a floundering industry.”

— Forbes

 

“[The Los Angeles Review of Books’s] smart essays and elegant design immediately won me over.”

— Ron Charles, The Washington Post

 

The “wonderful, slightly demonic twin” of the New York Review of Books.

— Slate’s Culture Gabfest

 

“Since launching in April, the Los Angeles Review of Books has become immediately notable for both the quality of its writing, the range of its interests, and the names of its contributors.”

— National Book Critics Circle Critical Mass

 

“One of the most exciting, ambitious publications to launch in the last few years.”

— Longform.org

 

 “The Los Angeles Review of Books, the non-profit online literary review has planted a flag in the scorched earth of Sunday books supplements …”

— New York Observer

 

“Not only is it a place to read great writers writing about great writers, it’s a hub for culture in L.A. They celebrate and encourage online and offline community in a way that reflects their respect for diversity of readers as well as for the evolution of the culture of books.”

— Cameron Diaz, actress

 

“To learn about LARB is like being told that 100,000 guardian angels are about to be sent to earth to protect all that is sacred, imperiled and invisible. I hope it will become a shelter, a source of unity and a rallying cry for literature in the West and far beyond. ”

— Pico Iyer, bestselling author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

 

“A distinctly Western sensibility. … The site, known in short as the LARB, offers a big-tent approach — promising coverage of two dozen different genres, from fiction to film to comics.”

— Los Angeles Times

 

“LARB is the West Coast’s answer to the New York-dominated literary review scene, to the folding of print book reviews across the country over the last several years and to the charge that Angelenos don’t read.”

LA Weekly

 

“It speaks to Los Angeles in that it’s a little bit renegade. It doesn’t feel brokered, like a publicity arm for literature.”

— Matthew Weiner, Mad Men creator/executive producer

 

“[LARB provides] a really good service and a great breadth of material.”

— Ira Silverberg, Literature Director, National Endowment for the Arts

 

“Nicely done. They wanted to be able to show off the mass of great content already on the site, plus new features, and that they have.”

— LA Observed

 

“Impressed by the array of writers and a nascent ‘West Coast thoughtfulness.’”

— Dan Kois, book editor at Slate, quoted in LA Times

 

“An ambitious new LA-based literature review journal that’s re-imagining the art of literary critique and propelling it into the 21st century. Digital, sprawling, and fearless, the LARB aims to reinvigorate book discourse by widening the margins of literary coverage and overthrowing the traditional book review format.”

— Katherine Manderfield in LAist

 

“Impressive.”

— Columbia Journalism Review