SHORT TAKES

Trash, Spectacle, Sentiment

Bravery in the Blackness of Punk

The Points Between

What Came After Spinsters

Charles Yu & George Saunders Reunited

Just over 10 years ago, Charles Yu reviewed George Saunders’s story collection Tenth of December for LARB. This Saturday, September 23, 2023, the duo will reunite to discuss Saunders’s work at the our fundraiser Luminary Dinner. A limited number ...

Excited Atoms

Anyone who has taken a dance class knows that dancing on carpet is miserable. Sure, a dense shag can cushion your fall, but it’s definitely not worth the friction; a mere pirouette will wreak havoc on the balls of your ...

BRANDON SWARD

Winning at Being Canceled

LIVE DEBATE: HAS THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION FAILED? at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles, September 13, 2023. Grimes doesn’t really know anything about feminist theory. Then again, who cares? “Women will be obsolete in like five years,” ...

MADELEINE CONNORS

This Play Has Game

MAPPING AN ART WORLD: LOS ANGELES IN THE 1970S-80S, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Downtown Los Angeles, June 18, 2023–March 10, 2024. The work included in this exhibit (why must we insist on calling art “work”?) inspires the mindset that ...

ANNIE BUCKLEY

Musical Trickery and Subverted Expectations

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD with LITTLE WINGS, at the Regent, Downtown Los Angeles, August 31, 2023. Ushers and security guards corralled me inside the Regent before Black Country, New Road’s sold out first show in downtown Los Angeles. The post-punk ...

DANIELLE CLOUGH

LARB Wins a Whiting Award

We are incredibly grateful and honored to be the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize! The Whiting Foundation’s sixth annual Literary Magazine Prize honors seven print and digital magazines, and we could not be more thrilled to be ...

LARB STAFF

Sparse Anchors of Memory

THE SOUND INSIDE, at the Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, September 6–October 1, 2023. In retrospect, I should have expected that I would see Daniel Franzese (Damian from Mean Girls) at the industry night opening of The Sound Inside at the Pasadena ...

BRANDON SWARD

Political Fictions After September 11th

Jon Wiener interviewed Joan Didion the week after 9/11. Brandon Sward brings the piece up from the LARB archive: On this day, 22 years ago, it seemed to many Americans that everything changed. That Tuesday morning, two airplanes struck the ...

BRANDON SWARD

The Shapes People Choose as Their Symbols

KEITH HARING: ART IS FOR EVERYBODY, at the Broad, Los Angeles, May 27–October 8, 2023. A. J. Urquidi brings you the details: On Saturday, August 19, I boarded the Long Beach Blue Line (now called the A Line, a fortuitous ...

A. J. URQUIDI

Harriet Jacobs’ Enduring Legacy

Koritha Mitchell visits the birthplace of Harriet Jacobs. Read the story here—also featured in LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth—then listen to Koritha Mitchell and Michelle Lanier talk to each other about how the practice of engaging with history can ...

Having Once Been Beautiful

IT’S BETTER TO START OUT UGLY, written and directed by Asher Hartman, at JOAN, Los Angeles, August 4–6, 2023. Martin Harries reports: The audience, on three sides, can at first imagine that they are on the edges of a ...

MARTIN HARRIES

The Challenge of Loss

Loss is everywhere. Present-day, late-modern societies in the West are confronted with collective experiences of loss to an unprecedented degree. This raises a fundamental challenge, because modern society since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has thrived on a big promise — the promise of ...

ANDREAS RECKWITZ

“This Fairground Farce of Light”: Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Cinema” (1928)

Luke Parker presents his translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1928 poem “The Cinema.”...

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, LUKE PARKER

Iran’s “Master Poet of Freedom”: On Ahmad Shamlou

Niloufar Talebi reflects on the towering legacy of Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou on the anniversary of his birth....

NILOUFAR TALEBI

Valentin’s Story: A Refugee Center in Odesa

Ilya Kaminsky shares a story from a refugee center in Odesa, as told by Diana Grebneva....

ILYA KAMINSKY, DIANA GREBNEVA

Writing About L.A. in the Sixties with Mike Davis

Jon Wiener remembers working with the incomparable Mike Davis....

JON WIENER

Culture as Witness in Ukraine

Sasha Dovzhyk reflects on the strength of Ukrainian culture under fire....

SASHA DOVZHYK

“This is a Battlefield”: A Conversation with Mike Davis

I first read Mike Davis in an Urban Sociology course at Pasadena City College. For the course the professor assigned a chapter from Davis’ monumental City of Quartz (1990), “Fortress L.A.” I have spent most of my life living in ...

Essay on Iron

Amit Majmudar presents his verse essay on pumping iron....

AMIT MAJMUDAR

Emerging Translator Laila Riazi Wins Inaugural LARB + Yefe Nof Residency Competition

During her two-week stay at Yefe Nof in Lake Arrowhead, California, this December, Ms. Riazi will complete and polish her translation of a little-known novella, l’Oeil Noir, by Lebanese-American artist and writer Etel Adnan (1925-2021), in consultation with LARB editor-in-chief and longtime literary translator Boris Dralyuk....

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