Los Angeles Review of Books

Contents

Los Angeles Review of Books is an online literary magazine and review journal founded in 2011 that publishes reviews, essays, interviews, and cultural commentary. It situates itself within the literary ecosystems of Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and other cultural centers, engaging with works by figures such as Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison and Haruki Murakami. The publication often responds to events and institutions including the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize and major festivals like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

History

The review was launched in 2011 by a group including scholars and critics connected to institutions such as the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of the Arts, the Columbia University faculty, and the New York University community. Early coverage positioned the project alongside outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, n+1 and The New Statesman, and it rapidly engaged debates around works by David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov and J. M. Coetzee. The magazine’s formation intersected with digital initiatives similar to Slate, Salon and The Atlantic’s online expansions and with academic conversations at conferences such as the Modern Language Association annual meeting and symposiums at the Getty Research Institute.

Editorial leadership has included editors with academic ties to UCLA, USC, University of Chicago, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Yale University and Harvard University, and contributors drawn from literary communities around Paris, London, Berlin, Beijing and Mexico City. Regular contributors and columnists have written about authors like James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Seamus Heaney, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, while interview subjects have included figures such as Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdie, and Patti Smith. The editorial model features reviews, long-form essays and translations, involving translators and scholars connected to institutes like the Kenyon Review, the Stegner Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

The site publishes reviews of fiction and nonfiction by writers including Cormac McCarthy, Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Franzen, Sally Rooney, Marilynne Robinson, Hilary Mantel and Mario Vargas Llosa, alongside criticism about visual artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker and Ai Weiwei. Its cultural essays have addressed film and media figures like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Ava DuVernay and Steven Spielberg and have engaged with music and theater figures including Bob Dylan, Kendrick Lamar, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Marina Abramović. Special features have examined major texts such as Infinite Jest, Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Remains of the Day and The Handmaid's Tale, and series have focused on translation projects, archival recoveries, and thematic dossiers related to events like the Venice Biennale, the Sundance Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Venice Film Festival.

Critical reception compared the review’s ambitions to longstanding venues like The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, while noting its role in amplifying voices from diasporic communities including writers associated with Nigerian literature, South African literature, Caribbean literature and Latin American literature. Coverage in outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal has highlighted its influence on discussions around authors including Isabel Allende, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Amitav Ghosh, Svetlana Alexievich and Lina Meruane. Academics and cultural critics have cited its essays in scholarship alongside works published by presses like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Princeton University Press.

The review’s contributors and editors have been recipients or finalists of awards such as the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Whiting Awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Notable long-form pieces have focused on canonical and contemporary texts by William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as well as contemporary authors like Elena Ferrante, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ben Okri. Special issues and translated pieces have brought renewed attention to writers from Russia, China, Japan, Turkey and Poland and have been included in readership roundups and syllabi used at universities such as UCLA, USC, Columbia University, Stanford University and Princeton University.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United States