Los Angeles Review of Books PubLab | We are the official annual journal of the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop, an immersive, collaborative summer program designed for students and innovators interested in publishing.

We are the official annual publication of the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop, an immersive, collaborative summer program designed for students and innovators interested in publishing.

Yeon Jin Kim Mixed media drawing. This is a world where things seem to assemble themselves and interact within a logic yet to be discovered.

Maybe is the Most Beautiful Word in the World

Aleatoric: Solely dependent on the throw of a dice or on chance; random. There’s something barreling towards me. Hulking. I can feel it closing in. It’s starting to envelop my future body, which will be my now-body, which will be the body I might want to live in one...

A bronze cast of two people's clasped hands.

Echo of Her Dreams

FROM AN EARLY AGE, as the daughter of immigrants, you see resilience reveal itself in small, unnoticed moments. It comes as translating for your mother, sitting in waiting rooms with your imagination and alertness side by side, and watching your parents try to...

A crowd of onlookers watch the flames consume the structure.

The Execution

The Execution “The Burning of the Mansion House, Queen Square” (1831-32), William James Müller. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the twenty-fourth of December and my firm had given us the day off. I thought I would spend the day at home,...

The deconstruction bodies are sitting together in a garden.

mama sārah and me

facing my mother in her lavish living room, i blow a red balloon. my younger sister, mellow with hash, tosses a yellow one onto the carpet while my older sister fretfully adds cheese sambūsa, warag ʿanab, and sticky toffee pudding to the menu. a sign boasting the ages...

An elderly couple stands side by side in front of a wooden house. The man wears a dark suit and hat, while the woman wears a long black dress and white head covering.

Iconography—Holy Mothers

Consider the work of God;who can make straight what he has made crooked?—Eccles. 7:13 (NRSV)Her name was Elizabeth Kauffman.This is the only picture I have of her, my great-great-grandmother, and she is old. Diminutive. Covered neck to dull boots in plain black...

An old tree overlooks a dark valley. The tree has been blasted in half; its trunk is splintered into an upper and lower section.

My Suitcase of Fragments

I’m sitting on the bed, unpacking my suitcase. I’m not entirely sure where I am. Somewhere near the border of France and Switzerland. From the window: a bell tower, a smudge of sky, and the kind of greenery that feels alive. Spring, or something like it. The house...

I Call My Hound Rage and He Moves

He walks backward on command, thick fur teeming with grays reversing back to flat.After he’s fed I see him swimming the Pacific in jagged loops and gulp-frantic swirls.He holds my salt in his mouth a red rubber ball. He gnaws at the tides.He moves when I move. When I...

An old man laughs giddily on a rope swing. His feet are bare.

Aging Like Fine Wine

SINDHU AAJI ALWAYS opened the door with a smile and a list of questions. No matter how often this happened, I never felt prepared.I was unaccustomed to it—to questions about my life, about my work, about me—even when they came from my husband’s octogenarian...