Tag: los angeles review of books
The Tender, Wild Realm of Children’s Literature: A Reading List
The plot of the book came to me as I was falling asleep: two girls share a bedroom, and squabble until they have no choice but to divide their room in half. Only one girl has access to the bedroom door. The other has the closet, which turns out to be an elevator. Suddenly, I was […]
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
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The evolution of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous character—and the woman who helped shape it. On actress-director Mabel Normand and her effect on Chaplin’s work: When Chaplin became the Tramp on Normand’s watch, he also learned to be a movie actor. As Sennett put it, Normand, ‘the greatest motion-picture comedienne of any day, was as deft […]
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A review of Tom Bissell’s new book of essays, Magic Hours: The best thing about Tom Bissell: He is fun. I think of him as “a wild and crazy guy.” I’m by turns entertained and completely aghast at his antics. He is totally obsessive. He’s watched that appalling movie The Room a bajillion times. I […]
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The killing of three sisters shocks a country where the past decade has seen a rise in violence toward women: Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were […]
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The story of Dan Marlowe, a pulp writer who suffered from amnesia, befriended an ex-con, and later inspired writers like Stephen King: Physicians thought the amnesia was psychosomatic, brought on by stress and money troubles, but there were hints of physical problems too. Before his brain emptied out, Marlowe had been laid low by crushing […]
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Another perspective on the city’s struggles, and the attempts to revive it: A recent New York Times article lauded Detroit as a ‘Midwestern Tribeca’ of socially aware folk; but off of its bustling main drag, Corktown is surrounded by Detroit’s burned-out industrial structures and houses, weedy lots, and subsidized housing. For every white entrepreneur in […]
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Before Wonder Woman there was Miss Fury, the first female superhero, introduced in 1941: Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well […]
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Joan Williams said it best herself when confronted with William Faulkner’s curious and cutting response to a book-jacket-blurb request from her editor. “It was obviously,” she said, “a very petulant kind of thing. Why couldn’t he have just given me a nice quotation?” Yet she knew why. For five years, 1949 to 1953, Williams and […]
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And so began the improbable last chapter in the fall of a major newspaper, as chronicled by O’Shea in The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. Among other things, the book is a reminder that whenever you think things can’t get worse, they can. They can get much, much […]
