avidly-reads

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/culture-makes-us-feel-announcing-avidly-reads/"></div>For the past five years, <a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org">Avidly</a> has been one of the most original, surprising, and entertaining venues for cultural criticism and personal narrative on the web. Founded by Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood in 2012, Avidly has brought us essays on everything from Ernest Shackleton’s “<a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2014/05/16/my-chilly-ponies/">Chilly Ponies</a>” and <a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2014/10/02/weird-sex/">weird sex</a> to <a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/06/27/still-life-brexit-with-a-sick-child/">Brexit</a> and <a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2017/02/20/american-rage/">Dylann Roof</a>. Now Sarah and Sarah are bringing their sui generis editorial sensibility to a new book imprint, <a href="http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/avidlyreads/">Avidly Reads</a>, to be published under the auspices of <a href="https://nyupress.org/series/avidly-reads/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://nyupress.org/series/avidly-reads/', 'NYU Press');">NYU Press</a> beginning in 2019. The first three titles — Jordan Stein’s Avidly Reads: Theory, Eric Thurm’s Avidly Reads: Board Games, and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Avidly Reads: Making Out — have just been announced (and are described in detail below). I emailed the Sarahs to find out more about what they have in store. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/culture-makes-us-feel-announcing-avidly-reads/#more-6039" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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How Culture Makes Us Feel: Announcing Avidly Reads

Tracy Tynan, London born, studied social anthropology at Sussex University and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with BA in Liberal Arts, later pursuing film at UCLA. In 1982 she began designing costumes for films and TV. Her many credits include Choose Me, The Big Easy, Mi Familia, and Tuesdays with Morrie. In 2010 she was awarded the WIFTS foundation International Visionary award for her contribution to Costume Design. She is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts &amp; Sciences, Costume Designer’s Branch. As an artist, she has collaborated with Erika Rothenberg on several projects, including Suicide Notes, Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, and Shower Curtain of Death. She created a fractal sculpture for High Desert Test Sites 2013, a large Mengers Sponge, constructed of 3,000 business cards, collected from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, NM. Her memoir, Wear &amp; Tear: The Threads of My Life, will be published by Scribner on July 12th 2016. Tynan lives in Los Angeles with her husband, filmmaker Jim McBride. Photo credits: Ken Locker.

Tracy Tynan

Evan Kindley is senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Evan Kindley

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

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Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Radio Hour: Tracy Tynan's "Wear and Tear", plus D.W. Winnicott

Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold (Vintage, 2002), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes (Simon &amp; Schuster, 2011), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His other novels include: The Mezzanine (Weidenfeld &amp; Nicolson, 1988), Room Temperature (Grove Press, 1990), U and I: A True Story (Random House, 1991), Vox (Vintage, 1993), The Fermata (Vintage, 1995), The Everlasting Story of Nory (Vintage, 1998), A Box of Matches (Vintage, 2003), Checkpoint (Vintage, 2004), Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon &amp; Schuster, 2008), The Anthologist ((Simon &amp; Schuster, 2009), and Traveling Sprinkler (2013). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He received the International Hermann Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. Nicholson Baker lives in Maine with his family.

(Photo: © Margaret Brentano)

Nicholson Baker

Radio Hour: Nicholson Baker's "Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids"

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohnis a journalist, author and producer exploring issues involving women, culture and media.Janice has a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University. Her first script, Those People: A Love Story&nbsp;(formerly Lovers in Their Right Mind) was selected by DreamAgo 2016 Plume &amp; Pellicule international screenwriting atelier. Her work-in-progress documentary, “…but can she play?”has been twice recognized by Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Awards. In publishing, Janice is a contributor to the James Gayles anthology, Reflections&nbsp;(Pochino Press, 2014), and co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed&nbsp;(Atria, 2012). Her work has appeared in the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Essence, among other publications. She is a former Senior Editor for Los Angeles Review of Booksand served as Director of the Los Angeles Review of Books/ USC Publishing Workshop. She is currently Associate Director for the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Radio Hour: Evan Kindley and Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Jane Hu is an English PhD candidate at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in Film and Media Studies. She has published in Textual Practice, The New Yorker, the New Republic, Slate, and The Awl.

Jane Hu

<h4>Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) is the TV editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His essays have appeared in&nbsp;Slate, Film Quarterly, J19, PMLA, The New Republic, and other venues. And he's the co-founder — with Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, and Lili Loofbourow — of the “Dear Television” column. He is also the author of a book about religion and early cinema called The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and he teaches in the English Department and the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis.</h4>

Phillip Maciak

BoJack Horseman: Season Three

Aaron Bady, Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, Lili Loofbourow, Phillip Maciak, Sarah Mesle, &amp; others

Dear Television

Mad Men, Season 7: "The Milk and Honey Route"

Mad Men, Season 7: "New Business"

<h4>Sarah Mesle (PhD, Northwestern) is faculty at USC and Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Prior to arriving at USC, she held post-doctoral fellowships in English at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a nineteenth-century Americanist by training and is interested, generally speaking, in the long history of the American popular novel and in the many ways pop culture can excite, estrange, and surprise.</h4>
<h4></h4>
<h4>With Sarah Blackwood, she is co-editor of <a href="http://avidly.org/" target="_blank">Avidly.org</a>. You can <a href="https://twitter.com/sunsetandecho">follow her on Twitter</a>.</h4>

Sarah Mesle

<h4>Lili is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley working on Milton and seventeenth-century theories of eating and reading. She tweets at <a href="https://twitter.com/Millicentsomer">@millicentsomer</a>, blogs at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.excrementalvirtue.com/">Excremental Virtue</a>, and writes TV criticism over at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.deartelevision.wordpress.com/">Dear Television</a>&nbsp;along with Jane Hu, Phillip Maciak and Evan Kindley. You can sometimes find her at The Awl, The Hairpin, and The New Inquiry. </h4>

Lili Loofbourow

The 2014 Dear TV Questionnaire

The Sick and the Tired

The Long Voyage

A Secondary Art: The Letters of Malcolm Cowley

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

Visions of the Ordinary in Willowbrook: An Interview with Rosten Woo

<h4>Anne Helen Petersen is a Ph.D. from the University of Texas – Austin in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. She currently teaches film and media studies at Whitman College.</h4>

Anne Helen Petersen

“True Detective” Finale

Community: Season 5

Evan Kindley is senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.