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.

Orange fungus growing on a fallen bark.

Decompose

"Witches' Butter" (2022), Yazlin Juarez. Courtesy of the author.Yazlin Juarez is a writer and artist from Pico Rivera with a bachelors in literature from UC Santa Cruz. She takes every opportunity to forge spoken word poetry, photography, and design into instruments...
Sepia-toned woman surrounded by flowers

In Her Head

They met six months ago, in a low-lit bar downtown frequented by corporate twentysomethings. Virginia saw him approaching out of the corner of her eye and thought he looked nice enough. He was tall, wearing black pants and a dark blue button-up. While he talked to her...

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...
Watercolor painting

Untitled, Still

           for 奶奶, in the land of steady hands Upstroke, downbeat, the waves fathomtowards the shallow surface of spring—            hiss      lake foam                 of           thin                  rain                     slicked                        ...
Black, white, and red face

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,...

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...
plaque

Cemetery: A Colonial Time Portal

All India is full of neglected graves that date from the beginning of the eighteenth century—tombs of forgotten colonels of corps long since disbanded; mates of East India men who went on shooting expeditions and never came back; factors, agents, writers, and ensigns...
Two people with their elbow on the table, with their chin in their hand. Question mark and the word "secret" written in brackets.

Anel I. Flores Portfolio

This collection of paintings by San Antonio–based artist Anel I. Flores (they/she) intimately captures a lesbian subject’s journey from secrecy and shame to unabashed freedom. Flores pairs portraits of lesbian couples with the words “secret” and “amor prohibido”...