Essays Archive | Los Angeles Review of Books

All Essays

John Rechy: An Interview
"I’ve never thought of myself as a rebel. This may sound naive, but I did not expect that City of Night would create the kind of stir that it did."
John-Manuel AndrioteJan 17, 2015
- Fiction
A Guide to Federal Surrealism: Fiction and the American Intelligence Community
As the CIA continues to grow and publish reports on its own activities, it has developed a style all its own. Federal Surrealism.
Grayson ClaryJan 17, 2015
- Politics
Taylor Negron, 1957–2015
Taylor Negron "knew everyone, worked with everyone, and was loved by all."
Erika SchickelJan 15, 2015
- Film
Hollywood Calling: Luise Rainer, Sally Hawkins, and the First Law of Telephone Scenes
As night follows day, so Oscars follow telephone scenes.
Christopher GrobeJan 14, 2015
- Film
Toward a Messy and Uncertain Grace
Truth contains beauty, balance, empathy, mercy, love, and insight, but also horror, brutality, and desperate need.
Aimee LiuJan 13, 2015
- Memoir & Essay
Still Fissured: Haiti’s Health System, Five Years After the Earthquake
Featuring "Haiti: Then and Now," A Photo Essay by Allison Shelley
Allyn GaestelJan 12, 2015
- Around the World
Forgive My Father, For He Has Sinned
On the poetic struggle of two familial, and familiar, figures of speech
Ava KofmanJan 11, 2015
I Dare Not: The Muted Style of Writer in Exile Ha Jin
As a new generation of Chinese writer-exiles settles in the West, we wonder whether Jin’s flat, alienating style will come to be regarded as a kind of artifact, a self-preserving fossil of the trauma generated by those who witnessed the mixture of real and manufactured emotion that fueled a collective mania.
Albert Wu, Michelle KuoJan 11, 2015
- Fiction
- Literary Fiction
Too Faithful to Succeed: On "Inherent Vice"
Anna Shechtman on Paul Thomas Anderson's film adaptation of Thomas Phynchon's novel "Inherent Vice"
Anna ShechtmanJan 9, 2015
- Film
Ode to Oakes
Pioneers of a practical miracle, the Oakes twins’ method has been deemed by some the greatest innovation in perspectival representation since the Renaissance.
Irene HsiaoJan 8, 2015
- Art & Architecture
Humanitarian Intervention at Home
Relating "whether Ferguson demonstrators are mostly marauding looters or merely exercising their freedom of speech" to United States foreign policy.
Hawa AllanJan 7, 2015
- Cultural Studies
Somehow the Mud Shines: On Photographs by Barak Zemer
Barak Zemer's photographs are fragile creatures.
Noura WedellJan 3, 2015
- Art & Architecture
The Fun of Frost
Inspector Frost is not your average P.I.: lazy, incompetent, childish, insubordinate, unkempt, old. And funny.
Philip MordueDec 31, 2014
- Noir
The Virtues of Know-Nothing Criticism
Discussions of films, or books, or comics seem to inevitably turn into discussions about accreditation.
Noah BerlatskyDec 31, 2014
- Literary Criticism
The Cozy in the Closet: Josh Lanyon’s Holmes and Moriarity Series
"Christopher Holmes himself, that detective who is not the detective you expect, is out of the closet — and yet still often in its shadow, both actually and metaphorically."
Noah BerlatskyDec 30, 2014
Suicidal Thoughts: The Creative Lives and Tragic Deaths of a Prince and a Pauper
Nancy Spiller reacts to the suicides of Les Plesko and Robin Williams.
Nancy SpillerDec 30, 2014
- Cultural Studies