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.

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 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 tunnel leading into Caracas, Venezuela, under colorful buildings and bordered by two line-drawn images of catalpa flowers.

Querida

Querida Emily Lauletta, “Caracas through Catalpa,” 2026, digital collage. Background photograph of El Paraíso tunnel and catalpa images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Marcello cursed through ground teeth at the backpack zipper as it caught for the fourth...

Layered digital collage of three pixelated figures standing in front of a Buchla machine.

Echoes of the Fourth Person: A Dilemma of Sociality in Electronic Music

ONE PERSON is never enough. Buzzing away on my bassoon in a practice room or listening to The Strokes through a dime-sized speaker lodged in my ear are not typically lauded as the pinnacle of musical experience. One of the platitudes of music is that sound is social:...

Caribou antlers jut out of the snow against a pale wintery landscape.

Heretics

In the darkness of the fields, she waited, seated on the dirt as the horned man came for her. She had first thought the horns he wore were those of a caribou. They were just as grand, with moonlight gliding off their points like slivers of white off a calm lake. They...

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 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...

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...