Los Angeles Review of Books

IN A BASEMENT, a “dull light-colored wooden box” contained one of the most spectacular literary discoveries in France. Biographers of the controversial and enigmatic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline had been searching for a series of manuscripts, written during World War II, that had been lost for nearly 70 years. On August 4, 2021, Le Monde published […]

It is tremendously exciting to discover, at first slowly and then more and more forcefully, how this strange world with its own peculiar laws relates to our own subjective sense of reality, how it brings surprising truths to the surface of this subjective reality of ours by forcing us (and I am fully aware of […]

In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman debate an age-old question: what does it mean for criticism to “matter”?

“ANYTHING YOU DO every day—that’s your life,” writes poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert in her new collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. Across 16 essays, Gabbert reveals that she has spent her life reading books. Whether she’s roasting Ray Bradbury, mourning Sylvia Plath, or marveling at the implausible details of Percy Shelley’s death, Gabbert’s […]

FRESHMAN YEAR of college, I decided to join a choir during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even separated across a screen, singing into straws to minimize the noise, I found myself looking forward to my virtual choir rehearsals. They did provide connection, from checking in with people I had never met in person to […]

IT SEEMS NO coincidence that Yorgos Lanthimos’s cinematic rendition of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, released at the end of 2023, would come at a time of obsessive commentary about the possibilities and threats of AI. While Lanthimos’s movie has nothing, ostensibly, to say about digital technologies (beyond its own production process), the publication […]

MARY JONES HAD many names. According to the 19th-century New York newspaper The Sun, she was also known by the names Miss Ophelia, Miss June, and Eliza Smith. But she was Mary on the night of June 14, 1836, when she first encountered Robert Haslem on Bleecker Street. At this time, Lower Manhattan was a […]

IN 1993, EGYPTIAN WRITER and poet Iman Mersal, then 27 years old, came across a thin novel entitled Love and Silence at a secondhand bookshop in Cairo. She bought it for one Egyptian pound. The book, which follows a young woman searching for a sense of self in prerevolutionary Egypt, deeply resonated with Mersal, a […]

I CONFESS I’VE WATCHED the long, agonizing death of the girlboss, the cadre of female entrepreneurs who were the rising stars of my generation, with vicarious glee. At the top of their pyramid, with her sphinxlike smile and a B-school jargon-filled vernacular, sat Emily Weiss, founder of direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand Glossier. I had a […]

WHO IS TOM RIPLEY? Steven Zaillian’s recent Netflix series adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s most infamous literary creation starts and ends on this question. Ripley adapts the first of five books Highsmith dedicated to the exploits of the con artist–murderer-aesthete, and the portion of the story that has been reinterpreted the most: New York shipping magnate […]