It’s fall. Throughout the country, students are heading into classrooms where they will read and discuss books. There are ongoing questions about what use this reading will be to them. Indeed, will it be any use at all?The essays in this month's Digital Edition are purposefully quite wide-ranging in their subjects and tone. Books, they show, are different things for English professors, for economists, for artists; they help us grieve, and they help us grow. The essays here share a...
More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, “Film and the Art of Adaptation,” consider a range of contemporary films inspired by celebrated works of American literature, including Baz Luhrmann's spectacular take on The Great Gatsby and James Franco's faithful transposition of As I Lay Dying.Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James’s orphaned children in...
The reviews selected for this month’s Digital Edition, “Foreign Lands, Invisible Cities,” are a sampler of the places we readers of fiction visited this year. From the flood-prone hills of Haiti to the common courtyards of Queens, New York, fiction reminds us that everywhere we go we find humans who love and lust and scheme and hope. Some of the reviews mix personal history with criticism: Lisa Locascio describes her own fascination with Mormonism in terms of Ryan...
This month’s Digital Edition serves up eight irresistible courses from LARB’s Food and Drink section. Including a taste of the dizzying heights of gourmandise in John McIntyre’s essay “Finer Dining Through Chemistry,” and samples of extreme foodie-ism in Douglas Bauer’s review of Anything that Moves by Dana Goodyear; with John T. Scott’s review of American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite...
As any historian or casual observer of urban transformation might tell you, walls are not everlasting. The following collection examines different ways monuments and notions of monumentality in art and architecture exist in relation to this reality. From Esther Yi's chronicle of the uncertain fate of a section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery, to Michael Z. Wise's essay on the Casa Malaparte in Capri, the articles collected in this month's LARB Digital Edition...
This is issue Forty (Extraordinary) One of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet which is being published in June of 2020 and is being sent out free to subscribers as a bonus to add joy to this daily more complicated world. (Contributors were paid the usual rates.) Readers who’d like to support the zine are encouraged to subscribe, mais oui, but also to donate to Color of Change, buy books through Black-owned bookstores such as Frugal Bookstore, and bookstores damaged or closed in the civil...