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.

Painting of a violin on a sheet of music, set on olive green background

The Ceaseless Song

I made music before I could speak. I drummed and hummed along with tunes it seemed only I could hear. When I could stand, I hauled myself to the piano and pressed the keys blindly above my head. I wrote my first song before I could reach the pedals. When I was strong...

Photograph of a casement window opened to a view of green plants allowing natural light to enter the dark interior room.

Neighbors

My neighbor in Idaho was an eyeful. I watched her when I was feeling bored, hungry, or restless. I got to feeling like I knew her, even though we rarely spoke. We exchanged a hello now and then when she came or went as I was washing my truck or carrying my...

Joy Reyes Portfolio

Memories become larger than life in Joy Reyes’s mixed-media collection, embodying familial strength and love passed down through generations. In a vivid display of color and texture, the Dallas-based artist marries iconic imagery from her Mexican heritage with...

Black-and-white block print of a rooster crowing. Behind the rooster there is a small building in the distance.

Learning to Drink Black Coffee in Arkansas

I grew up in a house near the Randal Tyson Recreational Complex in Springdale, Arkansas. For sixth and seventh grade, I went to Helen Tyson Middle School, just down the road from Don Tyson Parkway, which would take you to the corporate headquarters of the...

Black-and-white photograph of a blurred female dancer spinning in a thin silk dress.

Elizabeth Stoddard’s Unruly Girlhood

Weird girls are having a literary moment. A search for “weird girl books” on TikTok confirms this, yielding hundreds of videos celebrating the genre. Authors like Mona Awad, Sayaka Murata, and Ottessa Moshfegh feature heavily. These books vary widely in content but...

An Eye on AI

What makes AI images a strange invention is their innate inscrutability. What we see in these pictures cannot be said to have existed. Unlike photographs, AI images do not result from light falling on material surfaces; they are functions of algorithms and databases,...

Revis[it]ing the Slave Narrative: The Past and Future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking 1979 novel Kindred follows the main character Dana, a contemporary Black writer in Los Angeles, as she is pulled across time and space to the Maryland slave plantation where her ancestors lived. Through Dana’s story, Butler uses the...

Challenging the Peripheral: Reading Assam in Reema Rajbanshi’s Sugar, Smoke, Song

Growing up in the capital city of Guwahati, Assam, life was marked by recurring floods and occasional violence, shaping a unique resilience in middle-class girls like us. We were taught two critical lessons with utmost seriousness: never to venture out...