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 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 nineteenth-century stereograph of two side-by-side identical prints. Both are a photograph of a bride and groom during their wedding march, with their wedding party following behind. The image is largely black and white, excepting the pink bridesmaids' dresses and blue-green palm fronds surrounding the group.

Monogamy is Dead, Long Live Monogamy!

When I was a teenager, my mother died. A few years later, my father remarried. I now have the language to describe grief as an encounter with what could have been and cannot be, one in which we negotiate with imagined futures after loss. At that time, however, I found...

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...

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...

Cyanotype collage featuring varied fabrics, snake skin, plants, and some chains.

Home Made Wild

In spring, we count snakes in the garden. The raised beds are built over what used to be an in-ground swimming pool. The walkway that once surrounded the pool is still in place; beneath the concrete slabs, snakes poke their heads out to reach the sun. They camouflage...

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 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...

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...