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 painting of a small island with a copse of tall dark trees in the center. In the foreground, smaller, a tall figure dressed in white stands on a boat being paddled to the center of the island by a servant.

Call Me Amalekite

"Isle of the Dead" (1880), Arnold Böcklin. Sourced from Wikimedia, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Is it enough tocall me Amalekite?A treacherous soul harbored inimperfect man. Is evilso...

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...

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...

Landscape painting of a vast plain with a lone tree, some haystacks, a few animals, and fluffy pink and purple clouds close to the horizon.

Eighteen Months of Almost

Eighteen months we passed a handful of seedsback and forth over the same field.You plant it. No, you.Neither of us knelt. The ground stayed open,soft, ready to take whatever we gave it:These feelings. Lord, these feelings!Down there it was quiet. Down there nobody...

A sepia photo of a woman's feet with pink shattered glass sprinkled on top.

Broad Feet

Nazuk loved the chappal store. The summer brought slippers, open-toed sandals, kolhapuris, and hawai chappals that made even the fatties buoyant. In the winter, ladies loved pumps, court heels, comfort moccasins for the grannies or the closeted lesbians, and the...

Digital collage, banana tree layered over lush forest, at center, a black woman is blended into the landscape as her gaze follows the observer.

Saida Blair Portfolio

“Untitled (Jamaica 1)” (2023). Digital collage. Copyright Saida Blair (2026)Blair's work starts with photography; nevertheless, this medium is not a containing frame. Astute and careful, her multimedial assemblages navigate the intersection of form and the oral...

Andrea Long Chu’s Females, Revised

Andrea Long Chu’s Females, Revised “At Your Own Expense” (2026), digital collage and mixed media, Lauren Burnham. Incorporates various silhouettes from the ledger book of William Bache (1803-12), sourced from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian...

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...