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.

A Black and white image of a man walking down the street with a motion blur effect

Enter the Pyrocene…Through Sebald: How W. G. Sebald Anticipated a World Full of Fire

IN TROUBLED TIMES, works of fiction blaze a path between bygone eras and the present. The best stand the test of time and offer a cogent perspective on our present world. Readers looking for insight into our twenty-first-century world and some of its foremost...

A ghostly portrait of Anne Boleyn by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Anne Boleyn in the Manosphere: What Ava Pickett’s hot new period piece can teach us about misogyny’s past and present

On April 26, 2025, just over one week before Ava Pickett’s 1536 premiered for its sold-out run at the Almeida Theatre in London, 38-year-old Owen Lawrence attacked the popular Otley Run pub crawl in Leeds, England, seriously injuring two women. In January of that...

An abstract relief carving in wood with organic textures, symbolic motifs, and a central open form. The piece emphasizes contrast, movement, and the beauty of hand-carved marks.

Room for Error: On Printmaking and the Limits of the Body

Room for Error: On Printmaking and the Limits of the Body Simone Zapata, Required Transfusion (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Pappajohn Biomedical Institute, University of Iowa. At a printmaking studio in Miami, Florida, I lay out dozens of CT scans across my...

A four-layered mixed-media collage piece, with a purple figure silhouette at the center.

Into Bits

It was barely 10 p.m., and Lane had just broken a Black Label all over the dance floor. It wasn’t her fault, really. She’d been pushing past a gaggle of glimmering twinks to get behind the DJ booth when one of their bony elbows jutted out and jabbed her right in the...

Antique tin box painted with nautical imagery: a light house overlooking two sail boats in a rocky sea.

I’ll Meet You at the Ocean

The smell of freshly mowed grass almost made me sick. Its underlying stench of gasoline mixed with the herbaceous musk of the grass was reminiscent of past summers in this neighborhood. I liked the smell then. Our house’s lawn was littered with unkempt weeds and wild...

Layered digital collage of three pixelated figures standing in front of a Buchla machine.

Echoes of the Fourth Person: A Dilemma of Sociality in Electronic Music

ONE PERSON is never enough. Buzzing away on my bassoon in a practice room or listening to The Strokes through a dime-sized speaker lodged in my ear are not typically lauded as the pinnacle of musical experience. One of the platitudes of music is that sound is social:...

Close-up of a watermelon covered with bubble wrap.

Authorities are trying to figure out who stole a 150-pound watermelon worth $1,500

Authorities are trying to figure out who stole a 150-pound watermelon worth $1,500WBALTV-11 | 11:31 a.m. EDT September 10, 2013 The sky is dark when he steps out ontothe back porch into his watermelon patch. In a minute, he will find the vine is cut, feelthe dirt...

A woman faces away from the viewer, gazing into an oval mirror. The reflection is that of a Nahua woman.

I See You

I see you, Malitzen, the betrayer and the victim. You did what you did out of fear and out of smarts. They named you “She who speaks lively.” And you spoke. You spoke all the tongues available to you to make a living, to keep alive. I see your dark eyes like dark...