"Swann’s fantasies spoke to the feminist, gay-rights, and environmental movements. His intense focus on 'civilization' processed the growing sense of cultural malaise."
Sean Guynes on Thomas Burnett Swann: lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-burnett-s...
"Accessibility was at the forefront of what Ella Jenkins did, a sense that music was for everyone. That’s something very rooted in Black American and African diasporic culture."
Gayle Wald on Ella Jenkins' legacy: lareviewofbooks.org/article/gayle-wald-ella-...
@heatherhouser.bsky.social explores "knowing fictions": "When climate information becomes atmospheric in this way, a text encodes the failure of knowledge."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/climate-fiction-...
The cover of Screen People
"The constant stimulation, excitement, and novelty of the entertainment industry have become not an exception but an expectation."
Helena Aeberli on Megan Garber's "Screen People." lareviewofbooks.org/article/screen-people-in...
The cover of Aqua
"It becomes clear that the art in question is the art of writing, the mastering of disaster through what Barzini calls the 'psycho-magical act' of writing."
Leland de la Durantaye reviews “Aqua”: lareviewofbooks.org/article/aqua-water-lost-...
"Cannabis was central to, as Mezzrow put it, 'a whole new language.'"
From the LARB archives: How Mezz Mezzrow fostered a cannabis counterculture that got the Beat Generation writing: lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-mighty-mezz-...
"The images online are static; they say nothing of the history we lost. It’s as if I’m looking at one of Ruscha’s apartments, admiring a facade."
Jordan Guevara on childhood homes: lareviewofbooks.org/article/historic-filipin...
An image of the "concubine room" in the Burns House with a ladder going up at an angle over a bed to a lofted area
David Heymann on postmodern architecture's legacy and Charles Moore’s Burns House, "the world of a secure man who knows exactly how he wants to live but needs a place of his own to center his universe." lareviewofbooks.org/article/charles-moore-ar...
Out today from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, my essay reflecting on Thomas Burnett Swann's life and legacy as a fantasy writer 50 years after his death. This has been a year in the making and I'm happy there's a piece like this giving Swann some overdue attention!
the cover of This is Rhythm
"We’re in a culture where we don’t care about children very much, so we have little interest in people who actually take care of children."
Oliver Wang interviews Gayle Wald about her new Ella Jenkins biography: lareviewofbooks.org/article/gayle-wald-ella-...
"Fiction can help us reflect on where this all goes beyond consumption and a display of knowingness."
@heatherhouser.bsky.social on "knowing fictions": lareviewofbooks.org/article/climate-fiction-...
“Sometimes a lyric poem can feel like a fragment torn from a lost epic—divine powers and historical epochs haunt the blankness above the poem and below it.”
Dan Beachy-Quick on three poetry translations: lareviewofbooks.org/article/poetry-translati...
The spines of Swann's books
Sean Guynes looks at the forgotten fantasies of Thomas Burnett Swann on the 50th anniversary of his death: "A half-century after his death, Swann is—unfairly—a mere footnote in the history of fantasy." lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-burnett-s...
"The following is a long discussion of how Los Angeles got to this sorry place. The story isn’t pretty."
From the LARB archives: Joseph Giovannini on LACMA's remodel. lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-suicide-by...
"How does someone who writes out of hate write so beautifully?"
On "The Tunnel": lareviewofbooks.org/article/william-h-gass-t...
"Higher education is clearly broken, but not for the reasons you may hear from pundits and talking heads."
On the troubled state of American universities: lareviewofbooks.org/article/disaster-capital...
A photo of the Burns House
"Its astonishing and absurdly complex 'cosmopolitan' spatial organization is at once deeply personal and a remarkably frank."
David Heymann on the secrets of Charles Moore’s Burns House. lareviewofbooks.org/article/charles-moore-ar...
"The worm’s world is both simple and complex, clean and messy. That is our world, or it could be, if only we could learn to see it that way. The worms are right!" Henry Cowles reviews “The Power of Life”: lareviewofbooks.org/article/jessica-riskin-l...
"Implicit in this evaluation is the assumption that pop artists should be conduits for radicalism. But is that what artists and culture-at-large should be?"
Natasha O’Neill on W. David Marx’s “Blank Space”: lareviewofbooks.org/article/blank-space-cult...
“Historically, the Arctic had been regarded as inaccessible to geopolitical ambitions. Today that notion seems naive.”
Bill Thompson reviews Kenneth Rosen’s “Polar War”: lareviewofbooks.org/article/polar-war-book-r...
Jordan Guevara as a baby with his mom
Jordan Guevara reflects on childhood homes and the neighborhood as art: "It is only in my grandmother’s house that memories are formed in this way, outside of language."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/historic-filipin...
the spines of a bunch of Swann books
"Swann’s fantasies spoke to the feminist, gay-rights, and environmental movements. His intense focus on 'civilization' processed the growing sense of cultural malaise."
Sean Guynes on Thomas Burnett Swann: lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-burnett-s...
The cover of Polar War
Bill Thompson on the takeaways from Kenneth Rosen’s "Polar War": "Stability in the Arctic requires finding common ground, Rosen insists, not only with other nations but also with the land." lareviewofbooks.org/article/polar-war-book-r...
The cover of The Power of Life
Henry Cowles reviews Jessica Riskin’s “The Power of Life”: "In Riskin’s Lamarckian science, we are invited to see how, in being part of the world, we share in its vitality, its agency."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/jessica-riskin-l...
A black and white picture of Patrick Radden Keefe with the text "Listen now!" overlaid
On today's #LARBRadioHour, New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, to discuss his new book, "London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth."
Listen to it now: lareviewofbooks.org/av/patrick-radden-keefe-...
"Science without poetry lacks imagination, but notably, it also lacks a moral compass."
Today's #histSTM & #biology lunchtime read: Henry Cowles explores the mixed legacy of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social essay on Jessica Riskin's The Power of Life. 🗃️📜📚
An old family photo with a man posing with a kid
“And yet, we’re still here, in Los Angeles, inhabiting the spaces that should have erased us, that, in fact, tried to.”
Jordan Guevara remembers his family home on Rosemont Avenue: lareviewofbooks.org/article/historic-filipin...
"The smaller the museum, the greater the damage to the institution."
From the LARB archives: Joseph Giovannini on LACMA's remodel: lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-suicide-by...
"The literalism of 'The Pitt' may be its superpower. In the face of mass institutional acquiescence to fascism, there’s a lot to be said for loudly asserting the value of radical empathy and social justice."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-radical-crin...
LITLIT is less than two months away, and we’re so excited to announce our vendor line-up!
Join us at SCI-Arc in the Arts District on June 6 and 7 for LARB’s annual fair celebrating small presses and mags, literary organizations, and indie publishers from all over the West Coast. https://litlit.org/