“WE DREAMT OF / Flowers and listening to women / Still, every time / we go to bed / we go to war.” Thus begins the titular poem in Cristine Brache’s latest collection, Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024), a rich, layered, lyrical meditation on mortality, embodiment, womanhood, and the various performances therein. It’s a poem I heard Cristine read for the first time at New York’s KGB Bar in late 2021, when our friendship was new, yet somehow still familiar. Now, several years and many conversations later, when I read “Goodnight Sweet Thing” to myself, I hear my friend’s voice in my head—“Sleep / drow ..read more

CULTURE, NO MATTER what today’s feverish online discourse might tell us, is consummately, frustratingly ordinary. This is not a value judgment, but a simple truth, and remains as true today as it was when Raymond Williams argued it 60-plus years ago. Every historical moment and civilization has its art, its customs, and its contours expressing how it feels to be alive and conscious at its particular moment in time. Williams’s argument was already quite prescient when it was made. The postwar economic boom had pulled the Western world into spectacular realms: rock and roll, cinema, marvelous mo ..read more

LIKE THE PROTAGONIST of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s new cli-fi novella Lost Ark Dreaming, I, too, have a recurring dream of being overtaken by rising waters. In Yekini’s dream, the biblical story of the ark and the flood mixes with the rising waters overtaking Lagos, Nigeria. Yekini clutches a basket with a baby in it, refusing to surrender it or flee. By the time she realizes what she has chosen, the waves have come, and she cannot escape them. But the basket in her hands is now empty. In my dream, I make the opposite choice. At first, I try to outrun the rising waters, fleeing to higher ground ..read more

THAT THE PERSONAL is the political is no less true for its having become a cliché. Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order (2012), the debut book by Yuan Yang, provides a master class in this truism, as it follows four young Chinese women coming of age against the larger political canvas of contemporary China’s explosive metamorphosis into the factory of the world. Meticulously researched and reported, this bildungsroman uses the narrative arcs of its protagonists to throw light on some of the major themes that define 21st-century China—in particular, the consequences of ..read more

ON THE WALL of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple, a buff, bejeweled monkey towers over an army of Hindu gods. The 49-meter bas-relief depicts Samudra Manthana, a mythological event during which gods and demons churn an ocean of milk to glean the nectar of immortality. None of the gods, except Vishnu, matches the stature of the monkey, who is a divinity himself, the legendary Hanuman. Here, Hanuman models control and stability, anchoring the band of deities. But in another fresco within the same temple, he fiercely leaps to attack his opponents, embodying a very different persona: Hanuman, the milit ..read more

To this day I pussyfoot along the stacks whenever I have to go to a library. I doubt I will ever be at ease in those institutions, just as I will never be at ease in restaurants, hotels, theatres, cinemas and all the other places which I never set foot in as a child. —Sindiwe Magona, Forced to Grow (1997) IS THERE SUCH a thing as the posture of reading? Is it merely a cosmetic act? Is it a deception when the posture is bereft of real textual engagement? When you look like you’re reading but in fact you’re not? I don’t mean those moments of lapsed concentration may befall a seasoned reader. I m ..read more

HOW DO YOU account for a disappearance? How do you explain a sudden absence? Take the case of Jeanette Marchand, the character at the center of Christopher Priest’s final novel Airside (2023). In the novel, Marchand is a Hollywood A-lister who disappeared in 1949: her flight landed at Heathrow, and she was seen leaving the airplane—but then she seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Her case has become an obsession of film critic Justin Farmer: Was she a skilled escapologist? Was it magic or aliens? Did she die or live on? When Farmer notices that Teddy Smythe—a minor actress who began ..read more

RELEASED ON JUNE 20, 1974, Chinatown has been part of the cultural record for 50 years. In 1991, it was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. In 2010, when Chinatown was 36 years old—the same age as Jack Nicholson when he starred in the movie, when he was, by broad critical consensus, at the peak of his star power—a poll of The Guardian’s top critics proclaimed it “the best film of all time.” So, we might take the occasion of its 50th birthday in 2024 to celebrate a consecrated classic. Or we might notice instead that today, 14 years on from its coronation as best of ..read more

This is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 41: Truth. Become a member to get this issue plus the next four issues of the LARB Quarterly. ¤ I. A BLACK HORSE falling in darkness to the ground. Three hunters standing at the edge of a hillside in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow. Two planets, one lit from the side, the other a pinprick of red light in the distance, moving toward, and then alongside, the first. The prologue to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) consists of this series of disconnected images. The eight-minute procession opens wi ..read more

ON A SATURDAY MORNING in 2008, I tried to convince my mother to read the work of a writer I had just discovered: the Chilean essayist and novelist Pedro Lemebel. On a pleasant restaurant terrace a few blocks from her Santiago apartment, I tripped over my words, struggling to convey what was so appealing to me about his latest essay collection, Serenata cafiola (“A Gigolo’s Serenade,” 2008). His language seemed to jump off the page in a way that, at the time, I found unprecedented. “Lemebel?” came a voice from the next table. A petite, spry old lady turned to face us, smiling. “You like him? He ..read more