Jerry Stahl on what the Los Angeles Review of Books means to him.
Spotlight on Our Staff
Don’t stand outside looking in! Come on inside and make a donation, and while you are at it, support us by becoming a member. Do it by midnight tomorrow and get 10% off, or, for one more day and a half, become a Lifetime Member for $500. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. To the hundreds of you who have already chipped in with donations from $25 to $25,000, and to those of you who have already become members, we thank you! Together we can build this thing!
Tom Lutz, “Odious and Unpleasant”: Our editor in chief responds to n+1’s Elizabeth Gumport on the worth of book reviews.
E.C. McCarthy, “Sucker Punch”: Our deputy editor on literary transactions.
Lisa Jane Persky, “Skin Deep”: Our editor at large and image curator on writers and tattoos.
Julie Cline, “A Portis Reader”: Our nonfiction editor on fiction by Charles Portis.
Matthew Specktor, “Positions of Privilege”: Our fiction editor on nonfiction by Joan Didion.
Clarissa Romano, “Mentors: Barry Hannah”: Our newest senior editor on studying with a great Southern novelist.
Kate Wolf, “Patience and Virtue”: Our new art editor interviews Lydia Davis.
Sharon Mizota, “Art Therapy”: Our art editor emeritus on the strange case of Yayoi Kusama.
Michael Goetzman, “Pulp Nonfiction”: Our assistant managing editor talks to John Jeremiah Sullivan for our staff blog.
C.P. Heiser, “Unpacking Music Man Murray”: Our blog editor visits one of L.A.’s last great record merchants.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “The Lifespan of a Myth”: Our Asia editor on Mike Daisey, Tiananmen Square, and the importance of fact-checking the rough draft of history.
Cecil Castellucci, “Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the Darkness”: Our young adult editor on why YA needs to tell difficult stories.
Rob Latham, “The Exegete”: Our SF editor on the crazy world of Philip K. Dick.
Michele Pridmore-Brown, “Social Darwinism”: Our longtime science editor on the science of friendship.
Ross Andersen, “Golden Eye”: Our brand new science co-editor on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Boris Dralyuk, “The Incomplete Cain”: Our noir editor on a master of “the ultra-hard boiled manner.”
Oliver Wang, “Living with Linsanity”: Our audio editor writes a diary of the Jeremy Lin phenom. Audrey Bilger, “Just Like A Woman”: Our new gender and sexuality editor on the ongoing Jane Austen debates.
Franklin Bruno, “Gilded Age Fan Club”: Our music editor on Daniel Cavicchi’s history of fin-de-siècle fandom.
Jonathan Penner, “Cronenberg”: Our film editor sits down and talks with director David Cronenberg and constructs this LARB interview.
Dispatches from Twenty Minutes Into The Future
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift: a free subscription to our ongoing line of epubs.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, speculative fiction editor Rob Latham offers up
three highlights from LARB Year One.
The so-called steampunk movement is one of those rare times when a craze incubated in the world of science fiction has mutated and infected the culture at large. Most of the previous ones have not been much to celebrate (can you say Scientology?). In this case, however, there’s something really charming about the embrace of outmoded technologies and forms of fashion, which suggests that our hyper-high-tech world just isn’t fully satisfying somehow. The DIY fascination for goggles, bicycles, brass compasses, and all the other rusty paraphernalia of Victoriana has, for a significant subcultural faction, overwhelmed the latest press releases about googleglasses, electric cars, and OpenStreetMap GPS.
Steampunk has been a small but growing subgenre of SF since the mid-1980s, with James P. Blaylock’s The Digging Leviathan (1984), K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Desires (1987), and William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) paving the way for an eruption of retrofuturist nostalgia over the last decade. Steampunk exhibits have become a fixture at museums around the world, and SF has responded with a number of recent texts canvassing the history and tracing the future prospects of this subgenre. Who better to give us a tour of this neo-Wellsian domain than John Rieder, author of the finest study of proto-SF, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction?
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Golden Calf 1 © Irving Norman, 1957
Of all the SF writers to establish a name for themselves outside the confines of the genre, none has come close to rivaling the international reputation of William Gibson. Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer (1984) was an instant classic, popularizing the term “cyberspace” and inspiring a host of imitations that never came close to capturing its unique aura of noir sangfroid and grungy techno-chic. Gibson has gone on from that auspicious debut to craft a series of smart, ambitious novels that have at once raised the bar for the clear-eyed vision of plausible near futures and closed the gap between those futures and our present day. His latest trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010), is a series of eerie-cool dispatches from what Max Headroom (a Gibsonian creation if ever there were one) would have called “twenty minutes into the future”: not far from the spook country of neoliberal market madness that we all already inhabit. (Incidentally, Matt Frewer, the actor who played Headroom, is a striking double for Gibson and could readily play the author in any possible biopic.) Sherryl Vint’s brilliant review of Zero History shows how Gibson has begun to make the global market itself his main protagonist.
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In a career of barely more than a decade, British author China Miéville has become SF’s Charles Dickens, crafting gorgeously retro fantasy refractions of London’s seething maelstrom — e.g., Perdido Street Station (2000), The Tain (2002), and Un Lun Dun (2007)—with the sort of sharp political edge one would expect of the author of a Ph.D. dissertation entitled Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. Miéville is also the poster stud for the contemporary collapse of genre categories that has spawned all sorts of hybrid monsters amid the racks at Barnes and Noble; his brilliant 2009 novel The City & the City, for instance, crossbreeds SF with fantasy, horror, the detective story, and the spy thriller in a seamlessly inventive way.
Miéville is a connoisseur of monsters, adapting the visionary pulp bestiary of H.P. Lovecraft for the postmodern age. He admits to being “a complete magpie for anything weird that takes your fancy,” especially submarine behemoths like the giant sea-dragon in The Scar (2002) and the eponymous Kraken (2010). Yet he is just as fascinated with the abyssal, bloated monstrosity of human language and the social ideologies that animate it, as his 2011 masterpiece Embassytown makes abundantly clear. Neil Easterbrook, who is currently writing a monograph on Miéville, carefully lays out the novel’s deconstruction of the referential and the metaphorical in his review.
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Rob Latham is the speculative fiction editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at the University of California at Riverside.
What’s Going To Happen?
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift: a free subscription to our ongoing line of epubs.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, poetry editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi on
three or four highlights from LARB Year One.
Every morning when I wake up I think to myself, “What’s going to happen?” Some days that question is tinged with existential dread but most days it’s a call to adventure. Like most worthwhile things in my life my tenure as Poetry Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books began with friendship and a meal. Matthew Specktor invited me to Joan’s on Third where, over a perfectly soft-boiled egg (four and a half minutes), I listened to him tell me about a new literary endeavor dedicated to a serious consideration of the changing culture of the book and the unique and specific vision the city of Los Angeles could bring to this conversation. I’d like to say that I played it cool when he asked if I’d be interested in joining Claudia Rankine as the LARB’s Poetry Editor. I did not. From the minute he started talking, I knew it was world I wanted to be part of. I liked the gutsiness and risk of the idea. I liked the idea of a place where poets could write about poetry and all of its possibilities and frustrations. By the time we finished our meal, I already had a long list of poets I wanted to talk to about writing for us. Before I knew it, so many other poets were writing to me with one great idea after another for books they wanted to review and ideas they wanted to flesh out. About throwing a perfect party my grandmother used to say, “If people believe they’re going to have a good time, your party can’t fail.” Looking back over the last year, I see how right she was. Every one of these reviews started with a writer’s excitement about poetry and their desire to share that excitement. Here are three snippets from the ongoing poetic conversation we’re having here at the LARB.
Satellite view of the Mississippi River shows riverbank land-use patterns.
Image courtesy of NASA
Image courtesy of NASA
One of the nicest things about having two poetry editors is that it can lead to unexpected juxtapositions. On January 19th, 2012 we ran two reviews: Peter Campion on Carol Muske-Dukes’s Twin Cities and Ange Mlinko on Susan Stewart’s The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen these two poets paired together before, and I love the way these reviews inform and deepen each other. Campion’s discussion of Muske-Dukes’ vision of personal loss and the way she enacts that in the formal patterning of the poem is beautifully mirrored in Mlinko’s contention that
[f]or much of history, to conceive of ourselves as being our own makers — as gods ourselves — has been hubris, the greatest sin. That history is over, and we are nothing if not responsible for making ourselves and the future. To do so will require the poet’s courage, including the courage to say farewell to the past and its forms.It’s a pleasure to see all four of these exceptional writers making meaning together and considering what it really means to be “free.”
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When I write to a potential reviewer I pretty much always say the same thing: “I’d like to give you space to think. I admire your mind and I’d like to watch it work.” Sometimes I say, “I’ve got this crazy idea and I’m hoping you’d like to have an adventure.” Our From the Other Coast series is a case in a point. I’m consistently amazed and troubled by the amount of very fine poetry being written in English that American readers never see, for the simple and galling reason that there’s no mechanism to distribute it here. Walk into Foyles or any book shop in Australia or any other English speaking country and you are going to find shelves full of Anglophone poets whose names you’ll never hear in America. In this series, which will continue on LARB 2.0, writers from all over the globe will consider the work of contemporary Anglophone poets in its national and historic context. I thought it would be a nice way for us all to get to know each other a bit better.
Our first installment came from Lytton Smith, a British poet who, at the time of writing, had just moved back to England after spending a number of years in America. His arrival back in the UK coincided with the 2011 London riots. I think this piece is a great example of what the LARB does best: It is engaging, beautifully written, and provocative about the ways public unrest and poetry inform and pressure each other. I’m very excited for future pieces in this series.
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Cow Shingle Beach ©
Patricia Patterson
Truth be told, I had nothing to do with this one; it’s not even technically a poetry review. Here is the poet Robert Polito is writing about visual artist Patricia Patterson. The reason I chose this piece is that it epitomizes what I love about the Los Angeles Review of Books: that we’re creating a space for writers of all kinds to rigorously investigate the things that excite them, whatever they happen to be. Here Polito speaks about Patterson through the lens of Elizabeth Bishop’s evocation of the changing world. I read this piece and I find out as much about Robert’s poems as anything else. I see him thinking on these pages; I learn something about how his poems are formed.
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These are some personal sentimental favorites from the past year, but of course I’m only one part of the story. My co-editor Claudia Rankine, managing editor Evan Kindley, and every other person who makes these reviews and essays happen are all essential participants in the conversation. We have some amazing pieces coming up in the next few months (Calvin Bedient on Jorie Graham, Brian Teare on Eileen Myles, and Jen Chang on Srikanth Reddy and Elizabeth Willis, just to name three). We’ll be doing in-depth portraits of small poetry presses. Heck, we’re even going to cover the London Olympics. What’s going to happen? I’m very excited to find out.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the poetry editor, with Claudia Rankine, of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Teaching Us to Care
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift: a free subscription to our ongoing line of epubs.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, senior politics editor Jonathan Hahn on three highlights from LARB Year One.
One of our goals at the Los Angeles Review of Books is to bring to our readers on-location reporting from political hotspots, both domestically and around the world. Our “Letters” series has so far featured dispatches from Cairo, Trinidad, Oakland, London, and Detroit. When the freelance journalist Aaron wrote to us that Guatemala, from which he had recently returned, was “one of the most dangerous places in the world to be female,” it of course caught our attention. The murder of women (or “femicide”), and the often broken justice systems that abandon their cases, have been well documented in Latin American cities such as Ciudad Juarez (as well as brutally represented in Roberto Bolano’s unforgiving indictment in Part IV of 2666). But the Guatemalan case may not be as well known here in the States. What’s unique about “Letter From Guatemala” is the detailed story that Aaron tells about one particular lawyer, Norma Cruz, and her struggle for justice on behalf of three sisters: Heidy, Diana, and Wendy Suruy. That case is just one of many Ms. Cruz has undertaken on behalf of the victims and their families in that country. “Letter From Guatemala” is an opportunity to learn about a part of the world you may not have known about, until now. Longform.org recently named it a “Pick of the Week.”
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As you’ve probably heard by now, American Public Media’s Marketplace recently revealed that performer Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (an excerpt of which was aired on This American Life), was grounded not in truth, but in one man’s determination to “make people care.” The show, which purported to document dramatic events Daisey personally witnessed during an investigation of Apple factories in China, was in fact stitched together with some facts, some news reports about the lives of workers there, and some personal anecdotes that, it turns out, are fabrications. In the follow-up interview with This American Life, Daisey explained his actions to host Ira Glass: “Everything I’ve done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end: to make people care.” The statement is a clever redirect, as it throws a moral gauntlet at our feet: Sure, I lied and made things up about something that really matters, but doesn’t the end justify the means?
Laurie Winer’s “Magicland” is an excellent case study of another charismatic media star gifted in the art of “making people care.” Glenn Beck, like Daisey, is known for his convincing, potent performances, and for the way in which audiences take up the stories he’s telling without question. Why do people believe what they do, and what makes their performance of the truth so attractive as to compel us to believe along with them, without probing deeper to see what’s really there? Is it just because they really care, and because they care so much, and perform that care with such cogency, that we start to care along with them? Does the truth matter if you’ve made people care about a bigger truth that matters even more? “Magicland” gives us a map of that slippery slope. “I am endlessly fascinated by why people decide to believe what they believe, and by the methods used to convince them to do so,” Winer writes. It’s a question we should keep asking.
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Jack Kirby from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957
Much is written about industrial cruelty to animals, but not nearly enough about the psychological framework that puts us in a position to view them as lesser than ourselves. In “Man Is Not Cat Food” (its title taken from a famous quote by archaeologist Louis Leakey), Barbara Ehrenreich challenges us not only to think about animals in a different way, but to wonder why we don’t do so more often. What is the “cognitive error” that compels us to view the world as being for humans alone, where we don’t bear the same moral responsibility to animals that we do to each other? “Why do we despise animals?” asks Ehrenreich. “What makes them not just non-human but ‘subhuman’?” In seeking her answer, she thinks through everything from the Cartesian “biological automaton” to PETA, Jane Goodall, the Hindus, the Mayans, and more. It’s another example of the unique, wide-ranging perspective that we at the Los Angeles Review of Books try to bring to issues of social and cultural import.
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Jonathan Hahn is the senior politics editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Book Reviews: What Are They Good For?
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift: a free subscription to our ongoing line of epubs.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, senior editor Clarissa Romano on three highlights from LARB Year One.
Painting © Maria Przyszychowska from a Photograph by Julian Wasser
Why do we read book reviews? Many would say, to find new books to read. Sure. Often, these are recent releases by familiar authors, the same catalogue of titles featured on Amazon’s home page or on display at the nearest Barnes and Noble. Then there are the reviews that turn you onto older books and writers that you may have overlooked. As we mature as readers, this list gets (at least a little) shorter. An L.A. fiction junkie, I’ve already had my Eureka moments starring John Fante, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, and Francesca Lia Block…but who on earth is Eve Babitz? I confess that, prior to 2011, I did not know. But from the opening lines of Steffie Nelson’s “L.A. Woman” — I think it might’ve been the reference to a “ surfer girl in thrift-store Dior” — I knew I had found a new author to read. Nelson evokes Babitz’s lush, visceral style without allowing it to overpower her own arguments; she drops bits and quotes from several books so that the reader comes away understanding that this is a body of work we’re examining here, not a lone novel. Lastly, even while describing Babitz’s boozy, blowsy, freewheeling biography, Nelson still manages to place emphasis squarely on her work, not her rep. The end result is that I both want to read all of Babitz’s books and hunt her down for a good long hangout session.
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When we first sat around and discussed what types of pieces the Los Angeles Review of Books should run, I think we all imagined something like “The Middle Years,” Janet Fitch’s review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall. It is, of course, much more than a book review: it’s an essay, a perfect blend of theory and presentation, in which anecdotes are shaken loose from Cunningham’s story and rearranged to convey a new, highly personal meaning. From the beginning, Fitch was very clear about her approach: she wanted to discuss middle age in the context of Cunningham’s latest novel. She makes all the obligatory references (to Death in Venice and Ulysses) but remains focused on her central point. As a result, she begins a conversation that we might not otherwise have about this book. “We are losing the ability to enjoy our private thoughts, where the privacy of thoughts (messy, contradictory, self-amusing) is part of the pleasure of having them,” Fitch writes. “The airless feedback loop of our social networks… is a thin substitute for the kind of mental life Cunningham depicts so richly — the private life of the adult mind.” Fitch’s essay does a great honor to By Nightfall, and reminds us of one of the novel’s greatest functions: to illustrate and embody complex and shifting ideas that expand beyond boundaries of story and time and place.
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Prue and Curtis in the I.W. from Wildwood Illustration © Carson Ellis
Perhaps only readers of the L.A. Review of Books would consider Maile Meloy more famous than her brother Colin. (She is, of course, the author of the lauded story collections Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It and Half In-Love. He is the lead singer of The Decemberists.) As Standiford tells it, both Meloys are venturing into new terrain with their latest efforts, the Young Adult novels The Apothecary (hers) and Wildwood (his). The happenstance of these books being published almost simultaneously is the jumping-off point for Standiford’s review; she considers the value of growing up in an artistic family and wonders aloud at the possible rivalries that can emerge out of dueling literary siblings. (Sadly for the scandal-hounds among us, the Meloy siblings appear to be rivalry-free.) They have each written lush, magical, adventurous stories featuring plucky young heroines. There is much conflict and strife to overcome before these girls arrive at their final destinations. Even then, this review warns, the rewards of becoming a savior are ambiguous, for with great power comes great… well, you know the rest.
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Clarissa Romano is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
See You in the Funny Papers!
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, our comics editor Ben Schwartz chooses
three highlights for LARB Year One.
Panel from The Dark Knight Strikes Again © Frank Miller
For the 10th anniversary of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, we ran an essay by Joe Carducci called “Sons and Fathers.” Miller was writing and drawing the book as terrorists attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11. As Carducci points out, Batman was created in 1939, with World War II steadily approaching, in a similar climate of fear and powerlessness. Of that era, Carducci writes: “Little boys burned for a response to the criminal impunity they witnessed all around them, and from the early thirties they found it in Dick Tracy, in radio’s Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet, in Superman, and then, in 1939, in Batman.” Young men like Bob Kane and Bill Finger (the creators of Batman) had grown up during a gangster-filled Depression and now saw a large historical conflict looming. From there, Carducci traces the parameters of the character, its political history, and its fictional and formal limitations.
What is the literary value of a character like Batman? I go back to John Updike’s comment to The Paris Review: “To create a coarse universal figure like Tarzan is in some ways more of an accomplishment than the novels of Henry James.” The universality of Batman is what Carducci gets to here: a creation at first glance quite silly, and yet one which intelligent people of the left and the right have not been able to stop talking about for the past 79 years. With a new Dark Knight movie due in theaters this summer about to continue the conversation, it’s a good time to reread Carducci’s analysis of that literary and social history. Carducci’s collection of essays and interviews, Life Against Dementia 1975-2011, is out this month.
If Carducci’s “Sons and Fathers” makes a case for comics’ universality, Jeet Heer’s “The Ceiling Worker” goes to the other end of the spectrum in his piece on Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise. Katchor is not himself obscure, but a love of obscurity permeates his work. Of Katchor’s parody of a 1949 New Yorker article by Joseph Mitchell, Heer says: “Spoofing a six-decade-old magazine article, even one as memorable as ‘The Mohawks in High Steel,’ is not something that a typical cartoonist would do, but then Katchor has never liked dawdling down familiar pathways.” Given that cartoonists usually dwell on the fringes of pop culture — the creators of Batman and Charlie Brown remain elephantine exceptions, not the rule — it’s no surprise that they often champion the odd and forgotten precisely because they are odd and forgotten. Learning that a lost toy or comic book still inspires an artist can be fascinating. But has that artist simply fetishized the object, or does it have deeper, more nuanced implications that inform their comics? Given Heer’s authoritative historical writing on so many obscure comics and their creators, there’s no one better suited to approach the work of a contemporary assessor of the forgotten like Ben Katchor.
Image: Alex Toth
In this era of the Important Graphic Novel, a rewriting of the charter rules for canon membership has been underway for several years now. Highly valued is the cartoonist who writes, draws, inks, and letters everything you see (this qualifies as Authenticity). Have you had a miserable life? If not, do you at least feel miserable about it? Have you thoughts on Important Topics? (This qualifies you for Gravitas). Do you understand the Importance of the Important Graphic Novel? For instance, do you refer to your work as Work? (This qualifies you as an Artist.) If you do all that, you have a pretty good shot at the contemporary comics canon. Then there are people like Alex Toth, whose work continues to influence cartoonists despite his many deficits, by 2012 standards. Toth was not a great writer, nor did he care to write all his (lower case “w”) work himself. If he had any autobiographical or social commentary in him, he worked in a pulp-minded publishing business that had no room for it. And he was so socially unpleasant, as veteran cartoonist Howard Chaykin recalls here, that he no doubt impeded his own professional career. Chaykin, whose career bridges Toth’s comics era and our own, gives us the perfect Toth analogue in Phil Spector: “No one — at least no one I know — would ever mistake the lyrics of Spector’s best known material for anything but teenaged pap and drivel, while his orchestration, presentation, and arrangement of this junky doggerel never fails to elevate it to the level of unequivocal genius.” Indeed, the genius craftsman has little place in the modern literary pantheon, but in “Aberrant Behavior,” Chaykin effectively separates his personal reminiscences and professional evaluation of Toth to explain how an artist with few of the qualifications of the successful modern cartoonist could have such impact on modern cartooning.
Ben Schwartz is the comics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is working on a history of American comedy, and tweets prolifically as @benschwartzy.
The Best of Youth
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible and varied. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift.
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, our Young Adult editor Cecil Castellucci chooses
some highlights for LARB Year One.
Farm Family © William H. Johnson 1940
We started off our journey with Margaret Stohl’s review of Zora and Me by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon. I loved the idea of a book for middle graders that was about Zora Neale Hurston’s life as a young person and her birth as a storyteller. It’s such a lovely way to introduce a classic writer to kids. I’m a big believer in introducing young people to great authors early; it gives them something to seek them out when they’re older and ready to delve fully into that author’s artistic works. Zora Neale Hurston is an important American writer and is always a delight to discover and rediscover. Margaret, who co-wrote the Beautiful Darkness series, did a lovely review of the book.
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One thing that I think is pretty universal: everyone has a favorite book from when they were a kid. That’s why I thought it was essential for the Los Angeles Review of Books to have a series about the books that made us. There are almost too many to choose from, but happily, so many stellar and influential books are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2011 and 2012 that it’s made it a bit easier to narrow down my selections.
Confession: I have never read The Phantom Tollbooth. But when Chelsey Philpot, who reviews for the School Library Journal, emailed me pitching an essay for the 50th anniversary, I already had Tollbooth on my list of classics that I wanted to cover for “The Books That Made Us” series. I said perfect!
But I wanted to take it a little further than just having an essay about these books that captured our imagination and made us fall in love with reading. So, to accompany Chelsey’s essay, I asked Aimee Bender, Jenny Hendrix, Jonathan Auxier, and Sally Nemeth to write some little “nostalgies” about that book which would run on our staff blog.
The Books That Made Us will be a continuing series, and I’m super excited about our next one, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, with an essay by Janelle Brown.
Even though the Tumblr site has been the main show, we’ve been doing great things over at the LARB staff blog as well. I’m particularly proud of our series for Banned Book Week last September. Sonya Sones, whose book What My Mother Doesn’t Know is on ALA’s list of the Top 100 Most Banned Books of the Decade, emailed me to ask if we were planning on doing anything. Since Young Adult literature is so often challenged and banned, I thought it would be a great idea to highlight. I asked Sonya to write about her censorship experience, and also invited Susan Patron, Ron Koertge, Ellen Hopkins, and Lauren Myracle, four other Middle Grade and Young Adult authors whose books have been banned, as well. What we got was a really lovely round up of what it means, and how it feels, to be banned.
Tintin (and Snowy) Copyright © HERGÉ / Moulinsart
2011 — All Rights Reserved.
2011 — All Rights Reserved.
Sometimes a pitch comes in and it’s so perfect that it’s hilarious. After losing the opportunity to write an essay on The Phantom Tollbooth to Chelsey Philpot, Jenny emailed me a few months later me wondering if I’d be interested in an essay on Tintin, since the Spielberg movie was going to be coming out. When I got the email it was morning and I was still in my pajamas and drinking coffee. I should clarify: I was wearing my Tintin Bianca Castifiore night shirt and drinking coffee out of my “I Heart Tintin” coffee mug. I wrote her back immediately and said Yes. Yes. Yes. She delivered this beautiful piece about Hergé and Tintin. We’ll be continuing to cover graphic novels for young people, and Tintin has always been for readers from 7-77.
I’m really looking forward to the relaunch of the LARB site and to all the things that will be upcoming in YA and Kid Lit. I am very pleased that with the launch we’ll be expanding our YA and Children’s Literature section focus; my kid lit co-conspirator is E.A. Hanks, and she’ll be heading up picture books and middle grade. So look for more thoughtful essays, cool series, more Books That Made Us, nostalgies, curated lists, and reviews of books both new and old.
And remember: there are always books that we miss when we are young, and it’s never too late to go back and read them. Classics are classics, after all. Good books can come along at any time, and for any age.
Cecil Castellucci is the Young Adult editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent novel is First Day on Earth.
Scientific Discoveries
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members — that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be more easily accessible and varied. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift (a free subscription our line of epubs, plus further perks to be named later).
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Our science editor Michele Pridmore-Brown chooses three great science reviews.
Spaceman © Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of the Emshwiller family
Who knew about the intimate connection between the women’s underwear manufacturer Playtex, haute couture seamstresses, space exploration, psychopharmacology, and the paint color “metallic silver”? All of these came together in the space suit designed to carry man to the moon during the height of the Cold War’s techno-extravaganza. Rosten Woo’s riveting review of Nicholas De Monchaux’s Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is a prime example of the intellectual pleasures of material history. It tells the story of a 27-layer garment designed to render the human body “fit for space” — and fit for the imperatives of the television age; hence the outer layer of silver metallic paint (the space suit, after all, had to look like what a garment of the future was supposed to look like).
Woo has the kind of syncretic intelligence we’re looking for in our reviewers. He reminds us just how tightly scientific agendas are wrapped up with cultural and political ones, and with the refashioning of human nature (consider the drugs designed to regulate astronauts’ sex drives, much as thorazine supposedly “suits” schizophrenics for modern living). Indeed, his review is a daring piece that gestures to the promises and limits of human adaptation — for living in space, in metropolises, and of course in the other varied habitats our technologies enable us to colonize, build or imagine. It begs the question of how much inner and outer “suiting” we Homo sapiens will need in the future.
[click here for article]
“bee?” © Mark Hanauer http://bit.ly/mSjmaq
Honeybees, unfortunately, aren’t nearly as adaptable as humans: it’s harder to “suit” them up to succeed in inhospitable environments. Imported and cultivated by humans, they’re reaching their adaptive limits. This means beekeepers are making a Faustian bargain by gambling on bees who are suffering from CCD. (That’s Colony Collapse Disorder, in case you hadn’t heard.) CCD is an eco-catastrophe, especially in California’s Central Valley where bees make almonds (and many millions of dollars) happen. A professor of biology specializing in behavioral ecology, Marlene Zuk delivered to our inbox a delightful, poignant review of Hannah Nordhaus’s The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Beekeeper and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America. As she puts it, everybody has a pet theory about CCD, variously blaming pesticides, bee plague, global warming, or “Satan in cahoots with the Tea Party.”
Zuk is that rare breed of scientist with a real literary flair and storytelling knack. It turns out she’s soon leaving sunny California for the University of Minnesota, but she is nonetheless staying loyal to the LARB. We’ll be relying on her and others like her to address eco-catastrophes like Colony Collapse Disorder, the ins and outs of natural, sexual and artificial selection, and the ways in which animal behavior helps us understand human behavior with regard to sex and gender.
[click here for article]
Brazilians cook human flesh … ©
(1671) From Nieuwe en onbekende wereld by A. Montanus, Courtesy of New York Public Library Collection
Have you ever wondered why we think that eating people is wrong? Steven Shapin, one of the world’s finest historians of science and an exquisite stylist to boot, graced us recently with an essay on just this subject. In reviewing Cătălin Avramescu’s Intellectual History of Cannibalism, he helps rescue cannibals from “the pathological margins of culture” and traces their starring role in several centuries of philosophizing about the nature of human nature. The cannibal, we learn, ended up posing pesky problems for Christian notions of physical resurrection, a problem that troubled the best scientific and theological minds from early Christianity on to the Enlightenment.
[click here for article]
Needless to say, we’re hoping for many more reviews like these: smart, whimsical, thoughtful, and relentlessly erudite, which braid together science, history, etymology, and philosophy, along with a smorgasbord of other emerging and submerging fields of inquiry.
Michele Pridmore-Brown is the science editor, with Ross Andersen, of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a scholar in the history of science at the University of California at Berkeley.
