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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/charles-manson-apocalypse-come/"></div><p>Joan Didion, in “The White Album,” famously identified the Manson Family’s most explosive night of murder as marking the end of the &#8217;60s. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” This timeworn narrative, which Didion also helped codify with her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” tells us that the idealism of the &#8217;60s descended rapidly into nihilism and violence. Manson — along with the deaths at the Altamont Free Concert and the violence of the Weather Underground — has long served as the periodizing marker for this end. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/charles-manson-apocalypse-come/#more-5866" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Charles Manson and the Apocalypse to Come

bruno-sanchez-andrade-nuno

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/we-wish-you-great-harm/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/dan-sinykin">Dan Sinykin</a></p>
<p>I listened to Barack Obama’s first inaugural address on a bus, in the desert, in Israel, while jets flew overhead to bomb the Gaza Strip. I was with 35 other American Jews and a half-dozen Israeli soldiers. Next to me sat Amit, who had, not a week earlier, killed Palestinians as part of the ground siege in Gaza. “It’s not like I looked them in the face,” he told me. “We were all shooting.” To avoid nightmares, he hadn’t been sleeping. “When I close my eyes,” he said, “I see things.” Yet he carried himself lightly, had perceptive eyes, a kind face. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/we-wish-you-great-harm/#more-2948" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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We Wish You Great Harm

<strong>Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University. His book, <em>The Conglomerate Era: US Fiction since 1960</em>, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2023.</strong>

Dan Sinykin

Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"Mere flim-flam stories, and nothing but shams and lies." — Miguel de Cervantes

Literary Fiction

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

The Sublime Danielle Steel: For the Love of Supermarket Schlock

LARB Lit

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

The Naïf Goes to the Everything Store: On Mark McGurl’s “Everything and Less”

<strong>Florence Dore is professor of American Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she has been on the faculty since 2010. She has just completed&nbsp;<em>Novel Sounds: Southern Ballad Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll</em>&nbsp;(2018), and she is working on a sequel,&nbsp;<em>Novel&nbsp;Sounds II:&nbsp;The Rock Novel in Contemporary American Fiction</em>. In 2016 and 2017, Dore convened “Novel Sounds,” a public conference and concert series at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. She was co-editor of the Post45 Book Series at Stanford University Press from 2009 to 2014, and she remains&nbsp;a member of Post45’s Steering Committee.</strong>

Florence Dore

<strong>J. D. Connor is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of <em>Hollywood Math and Aftermath:</em> <em>The Economic Image and the Digital Recession</em> (2018) and <em>The Studios After the Studios</em> (2015).</strong>

<strong>Beginning in April 2023, J. D. Connor writes the City of Industry column for <em>LARB</em>:</strong>

<strong>City of Industry offers monthly dispatches on the collisions between the art … the industry … and the experience of contemporary Hollywood. The art is often underestimated and demands closer analysis. The industry is undergoing profound and rapid changes that demand explanation. And our experiences of movies and TV and everything that has grown up around them demand more precise description. City of Industry will try to do all those things at once. Neither an insider’s guide nor a view from nowhere, this column is about what it means to think inside the Hollywood slipstream.</strong>

J. D. Connor

Rebel Yale: Reading and Feeling “Hillbilly Elegy”

Education

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Trump and the End Times

Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University. His book, <em>The Conglomerate Era: US Fiction since 1960</em>, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2023.