Reviews Archive | Los Angeles Review of Books

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The Artist Is Present (Online)
Sophie Bishop’s new book tracks the pressures artists face to conform their ‘brands’ to the demands of the algorithmic boss.
Sarah BrouilletteFeb 20
- Art & Architecture
- Economics and Finance
You Say You Want a Revolution
Should historians look at violent revolutions with rose-colored glasses while vindicating the terror that carried them forth?
Jack JacobsFeb 19
- History
- Politics
A Fiction of Global Terror
Timothy Rideout’s new book shows how precarity among the middle and working classes powers the fears at the heart of 21st-century gothic literature.
Tracy Fernandez RysavyFeb 19
God and the Unconscious
Joan Copjec’s new book charts the conceptual affinities and historical convergences between psychoanalysis and Islamic philosophy.
Henry ClementsFeb 17
- Philosophy & Religion
- Film
Sex in the City: Istanbul 1923
A cheerful collection of Turkish erotica, translated by Burcu Karahan, offers insights into early 20th-century sexuality in Istanbul.
Kaya GençFeb 17
- Gender & Sexuality
- Fiction
Social Mobility and Stagnation
How the university entrance exam and residency permits structure life for in China.
Susan Blumberg-KasonFeb 16
- Cultural Studies
- Education
The End of Cinema?
Amid cinema’s decline, two new books by A. S. Hamrah resist defeatism.
Georgie CarrFeb 15
- Film
How to See Like a 17th-Century Friar
A major new study puts the visual paradoxes and optical illusions of baroque art at the heart of theological debates of the Counter-Reformation.
Emanuele LugliFeb 13
- Philosophy & Religion
- Art & Architecture
Really Classical Figures
In the wake of Bob Weir’s death, a new book emerges on the Grateful Dead’s overlooked engagement with literature.
Christian KriticosFeb 12
- Music
- Literary Criticism
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Columbia
Chris Horton’s ‘Ghost Nation’ and Ching Kwan Lee’s ‘Forever Hong Kong’ follow protesters and revolutionaries who, successfully or otherwise, challenged the power of the state.
Paul KreitmanFeb 11
- Politics
- History
Until the Next Grave Is Dug
On Urszula Honek’s bleak debut story collection, the Booker long-listed ‘White Nights,’ newly translated by Kate Webster.
Cory OldweilerFeb 10
- Fiction
Monsters of the Anthropocene
Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ reduces Mary Shelley’s novel to a one-dimensional warning about technological hubris.
Deborah R. CoenFeb 9
The Crisis at the Heart of Modernity
Terry Eagleton’s recent book employs his trademark witty style in an attempt to say something new about the era that birthed modernism.
Arleen IonescuFeb 9
- Cultural Studies
- Literary Criticism
What Comes First, the House or the Haunting?
‘Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora,’ a new anthology edited by Kristy Park Kulski, uses storytelling to demonstrate why ‘the ghosts of our futures cannot just be entities that lurk in the background.’
Jered MabaquiaoFeb 7
- Fiction
- Cultural Studies
A Clearing in the Mind’s Petrified Forest
In ‘Monk Fruit,’ Edward Salem’s poetry presents ‘a wild ride of touchpoints’ that serve together as a ‘gastric lavage’ for the trauma-fatigued reader.
Rosalie MoffettFeb 7
- Poetry
A Void Filled with Possibilities
The protagonist of Antônio Xerxenesky’s novel ‘An Infinite Sadness,’ newly translated by Daniel Hahn, searches for ‘something beyond psychological solutions’ at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.
Rachel GerryFeb 5
- Fiction