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.

American rapper Lil Nas X in pink prison outfit talking on the telephone

Queering the Prisoner Escape Narrative: Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby”

“Industry Baby,” the third single off of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album, Montero, alongside its music video, constitutes a queering of the prisoner escape narrative, a form often recognized and even heralded for its masculinity. When I mention prisoner escape narratives here,...

LARB Fellows Portfolio

Erin Gilbert, The Many Difficulties 2: Writing Sam Carter, And The Smoke RisesAnd the Smoke Rises, by Sam Carter Urte Laukaityte, Process.ion 1 Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, Untitled Vevina-Anne Swanson, I am Malory Alberto Quintero, Beautiful Warrior (After the...
dark blue painting

Awash in Blue: The Blue Portfolio

While searching for a visual throughline to direct the art we, the Art Directors, stumbled upon blue. Although typically associated with sadness, we did not find only misery in the color. We thought of ink, of handwriting, of Picasso’s Blue Period, of blue period...
A digital drawing of a girl in yellow dress swallowing a bee

Ichor

I don’t dance, but I did with him that night. The air hung heavy and hot around our heads, and little gnats glanced off our skin like pinpricks. Unwelcome, but no real blood drawn. Chatter and clinks from other people’s night floated out into the fading evening. The...
Streaks of bright light on a black background

An Ending

  “Are we allowed to be here?” I asked as I looked down into the hole that would be a grave in a few short minutes. He stepped in to stand beside me. “If not, they’ll make us leave,” he said. We looked around and there was no one to make us leave, for the moment....

And the Smoke Rises

A pigeon sits atop a tree and gasps for breath back. Novelist Richard Price once gave the advice that “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You...

Lovecraft’s Nameless Things: Understanding Racial Ecologies in “Dagon”

H. P. Lovecraft is everywhere these days, a multimedia star in death that he never became in life. His influence, perceptible in everything from recent noir (True Detective) to ’80s nostalgia (Stranger Things), speaks to a legacy of monster-making that has shaped the...

Via Perpetua

Upon the Aurès Mountains  a d VIII Id Jan, VII a r c1 (8 January 256 CE)  NumidiaModified after Karten von Römischen Provinzen (detail) from Römische Provinzen by Theodor Mommsen, 1921 via commons.wikimedia.org. © Bin im Garten. CC BY-SA 3.0In 256 CE, a mystic warrior...