Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal Spring 2016
The forthcoming spring issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal features work by emerging, established, and award winning writers, including creative non-fiction, and poetry. This issue also features an original translation of work by short fiction writer Hisham Bustani, who has won accolades for bringing “a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture.” Essays range over the following topics:
How did oranges become California’s iconic fruit? Tom Zoellner dives into the untold story of the Golden State’s early citrus industry in his essay “The Orange Industrial Complex.”
“If you’ve had sex, you have stories to tell about the people you’ve had sex with.” Starting from this truism, journalist Amanda Fortini draws connections between stories by (and feminist storytelling techniques of) Susan Minot, Louise Wareham Leonard, and Debra Monro.
What was America’s impact on famed South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s fiction? Martin Woessner follows in Coetzee’s footsteps to UT Austin’s special collections (where Coetzee himself once studied) and looks for answers in Coetzee’s personal papers.
Occasioned by the death of influential historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson, Goenawan Mohamad writes a tribute to his friend and former teacher. Mohamad is the founder and editor of Tempo magazine, Indonesia’s most-respected newsmagazine.
Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, a nonprofit, multimedia literary and cultural arts magazine that combines the great American tradition of the serious book review with the evolving technologies of the web. Readers of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, join a community of writers, critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and scholars dedicated to promoting the best that is thought and written, with an enduring commitment to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness, and the power of the written word. He lives in Los Angeles.
Michael J. Agovino is the author of The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City and The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game.
Hisham Bustani was born in 1975 in Amman, Jordan, and has four published collections of short fiction. He has been described as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century.” He has collaborated across artistic disciplines, working to bring literature together with music, painting, contemporary dance, and hip-hop. Bustani’s work has been translated into five languages, and has appeared in World Literature Today, The Common, and The Literary Review. His book The Perception of Meaning was awarded the 2014 University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award and was published by Syracuse University Press in 2015.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Last Train to the Midnight Market (2013), and has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman and the Knight Foundation, among others. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2015, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Narrative Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and more. She serves as co-founder and managing editor for Print-Oriented Bastards, a contributing editor for The Florida Book Review, and producer for The Working Poet Radio Show.
Mike Davis is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, In Praise of Barbarians, and more than a dozen other books. He teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Her recent books include The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, and, most recently, With Dogs at the Edge of Life. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books, 2015). He was selected by Billy Collins for the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award at the Key West Literary Seminar. Poems have appeared in Boston Review, Sixth Finch, Handsome, Prelude, The Offing, and elsewhere. He works as a freelance writer for publications including Slate and The New Republic, and lives in Brooklyn.
Natalie Eilbert is the author of the debut poetry collection Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Conversation with the Stone Wife (Bloof Books, 2014) and And I Shall Again Be Virtuous (Big Lucks Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.
Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in various publications and earned awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and the Jerome Foundation.
Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the forthcoming collection The Fat Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2016). He has received the Bard Fiction Prize, a Michener-Copernicus Award, and nominations for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, The L Magazine, The Millions, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. He is a senior editor of Conjunctions and currently teaches at Bard College.
Sarah Lindsay is a Lannan Literary Fellow and author of four books of poetry, most recently Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower from Copper Canyon Press. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize and the Carolyn Kizer Prize, and has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times, Parnassus, and others. She is employed as a copyeditor in Greensboro.
Goenawan Mohamad is founder and editor of Tempo magazine, Indonesia's most respected news magazine. It was banned by the Suharto government in 1994 after publishing details of the government’s purchase of aging East German destroyers, a confidential subject of dispute among Suharto’s cabinet members. In 1995, Mohamad founded the Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information (ISAI), which produced alternative media intended to circumvent censorship. Mohamad later formed the Alliance of Independent Journalists, the only independent journalism organization in Indonesia. Following Suharto’s resignation in May 1998, Mohamad led a group of reporters in restarting Tempo online and in print. Mohamad was a 1990 Nieman fellow at Harvard University and in 1997 received the Nieman fellows’ Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. In 1998, he was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award. Mohamad is a visiting history professor at the University of California at Berkeley this year, where he will teach courses in Indonesian and Southeast Asian culture. Mohamad is the Asian representative on the Advisory Committee for the ICIJ.
Helen Malmgren is a freelance writer and reporter. Her investigative stories have won numerous awards, including two Emmys and a George Foster Peabody Award.
Mary Otis is the author of the short story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, McSweeney’s, Best New American Voices, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Mary is a fiction professor in the UC Riverside Low-Residency MFA program. She is at work on a novel.
Davis Rierson’s television and feature film screenwriting credits include Dawson’s Creek, Spin City, Scrubs, and Disney’s Ice Princess. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Teen Vogue.
Francesca T. Royster is professor and chair of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare studies, performance studies, critical race theory, gender and queer theory, and African-American literature. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995.
Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, winner of the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His poems and translations from Italian have appeared in Agni, A Public Space, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Baltimore.
David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including both the Rome Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque. He is the author of 11 collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry), most recently the collections The Auroras and The Window, as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is also the co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. St. John has written libretti for the opera The Face and for the choral symphony The Shore. He lives in Venice Beach, California.
Maia Tabet is an Arabic-English literary translator living in Washington, DC. Her translations have been widely published in journals, literary reviews, and other specialized publications, including The Common, the Journal of Palestine Studies, Words Without Borders, Banipal, Art & Thought, and Portal 9, among others. She is the translator of Little Mountain (Picador, 2007) and White Masks (Archipelago, 2010), by the renowned writer Elias Khoury, and the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction–winning Throwing Sparks (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014), by Abdo Khal. Her translations of Sinan Antoon’s Ave Maria and Hisham Bustani’s The Monotonous Chaos of Existence are forthcoming.
Katie Wech is a television writer and mother of two living in Los Angeles.
Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge UP, 2011).
Kim Young is the author of Night Radio, winner of the 2011 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press) and finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the founding editor of Chaparral — an online journal featuring poetry from Southern California. She teaches at California State University Northridge and lives in LA with her husband and daughter.
