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 close-up of several cyanotypes of a naked woman turning and ascending stairs, waving her hand, in a study of motion.

Switch Stance

All truths wait in all things—Walt WhitmanI envy surfers (coteries of loose joints) who design their lives around patterns and leave no trace.Rising with the sun (an income of energy), rushing to the edge of a flower-studded cliffwhere no words are needed. Views tell...

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 elaborate castle structure perches atop a monster's jaw, which swallows condemned souls.

A Corporate Digest

David followed the woman in the navy pantsuit toward a moment six years of school had been pointing to—countless dorm rooms, textbooks, and microwave dinners converging. Her five-inch-high heels led him down a precisely built hallway. It was simple yet thoroughly...

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...

Three women dressed in bright colors sit together on a couch and stare into the camera.

Amara Higuera Portfolio

Amara Higuera Portfolio Amara Higuera is a Mexican-American artist based in Los Angeles that experiments with the lens and its limitations to approach an identity that falls into the cracks between categories and the complex web of connections that shape it. Ranging...

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...

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 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...