Ian Ellison reviews Brian K. Goodman’s “The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers Across the Iron Curtain ..read more

Scholar Randol Contreras joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to discuss his new book “The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East ..read more

Elizabeth Alsop explores the ubiquity—and limitations—of the “trauma backstory ..read more

In an excerpt from LARB Quarterly no. 41, “Truth,” Sarah Yanni accounts for what she left behind when she called off her wedding—and what she... (2023), paper beads on barkcloth, 57 7/8 x 66 1/8 inches; (2023), paper beads on barkcloth, 75 x 64 1/2 inches. Images courtesy of Karma and Sanaa Gateja ..read more

EVERYONE IS UNHAPPY in Ennis, Alaska, the setting of the fourth season of True Detective (2014– ). To be fair, things are pretty bad: a mining outfit has wrecked the local ecosystem; blizzards are frequent, and temperatures subzero; the town has entered a two-week stretch during which the sun never rises; and there may be something spooky and The Thing–like in the permafrost. To top it all off, local police have just discovered a terrifying tangle of bodies on the tundra, frozen into a “corpsicle” that recalls the agonies of Dante’s Inferno. And that’s just the pilot. There are more calamities ..read more

JORGE LUIS BORGES’S first trip to Japan in 1979 was dedicated to the demons in his father’s library. Borges’s fascination with Japan began—like many of his fascinations—in English books owned by his psychologist father. He would visit Japan again in 1984. In 1988, Argentinian historian Guillermo Gasió collected articles, interviews, and lectures from Borges’s time in Japan and published them as Borges en Japon, Japon en Borges. The Japanese-to-Spanish translations selected by Gasió present a complex cultural collaboration between Borges and the literary establishment and cultural underground o ..read more

THERE IS A PERIOD in American capitalism that created the trauma plot. The War on Terror dovetailing with Web 2.0 storytelling—the monetization of personal data at their intersection—it all set the stage for trauma to become the dominant way we make sense of our lives. From the rubble of 9/11, Gawker was born. The personal became political and a new surge of veterans caused PTSD funding to soar. While jet fuel melting or not melting steel beams remains divisive, there’s a prevailing consensus that the body keeps the score. It’s in this landscape that literature enters a double bind. The person ..read more

ELONGATED. TRUNCATED. TURNED INSIDE OUT. I worked recently with a colleague with whom I had not collaborated since the early days of the pandemic, and the two of us tried to describe our experiences of time in this four-year interval: before COVID-19, after COVID-19, during lockdown, postvaccination. Primitive markers aside, we couldn’t find a satisfying way to describe the radical abbreviation and elasticity of time we had experienced, the bizarre texture of it. Lockdown, which sounds like an adult version of being grounded, felt recent and long ago, its piquant forms of loneliness remembered ..read more

FRANZ KAFKA NEVER traveled to America, but that didn’t stop him writing a novel about it. Or at least starting one. Der Verschollene (which means something like “the missing person,” “the man who disappeared,” or, as the Princeton Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold memorably put it, “the boy who sank out of sight”) was renamed Amerika by Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, when he first published it in 1927, three years after its author’s death and against his wishes. Presumably, Brod figured Amerika just sounded sexier. Between 1912 and 1914, Kafka had been working on what was his first real att ..read more

Subscribe on Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud Do you love listening to the LARB Radio Hour? Support the production of this weekly podcast on books, art, and culture. Donate today. Scholar Randol Contreras joins Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to discuss his new book The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. The book is a study of the history and present lives of veterans of the legendary Maravilla gang that long dominated the scene in East Los Angeles before a bitter rivalry with the La Eme during the 1990s and early 2000s that had Maravillas scrambling for th ..read more