Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal Winter 2016

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 LARB 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.

KANNAN MAHADEVAN was born in Basel, Switzerland, and grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow and received an MFA in fiction. This is his second story to appear in the LARB Quarterly Journal. He is currently at work on a novel.

KAREN E. BENDER is the author of the story collection Refund, which is a finalist for the National Book Award, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; she is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms.

ELLEN COLLETT is an LA–based writer with an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars who truthfully likes animals.

NATHALIE HANDAL’s recent books include the flash collection The Republics, which Patricia Smith lauds as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers”; The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

DIONISIA MORALES lives and writes in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, Colorado Review, Brevity, Oregon Humanities magazine, and other journals.

JEREMY N. SMITH has written for Discover, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among many other publications. His first book, Growing a Garden City, was one of Booklist’s top 10 books on the environment for 2011. Born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, he is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife and young daughter. His most recent book is Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients.

WILLA CARROLL was the winner of Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize, judged by Brenda Hillman, and Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and placed as a semifinalist for the “Discovery” / Boston Review Contest. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Tuesday, An Art Project, Poemeleon, Stone Canoe, Structo, Free State Review, and elsewhere.

JOHN RECHY is an American writer whose novels include the now classic City of Night and 15 other works of fiction and nonfiction. His books have been translated worldwide. He is the recipient of PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Luis Leal Award in Chicano literature. His forthcoming novel — “a true fiction” — is Island! Island!

ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL is the author of two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World

. His nonfiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A book of essays is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. He was a Fulbright fellow in Taiwan in 2014.

SVEN BIRKERTS is the editor of the journal AGNI. His book The Other Walk was published by Graywolf Press in September 2011. His book Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age will be published later this year.

JOSH BELL has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and is currently Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard University. He is the author of No Planets Strike and his next book is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in early 2016.

REBECCA CHACE is the author of: Leaving Rock Harbor; Capture the Flag; and Chautauqua Summer. Her plays include Colette and The Awakening. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Huffington Post, NPR’s All Things Considered and other publications. She is director of creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University and 2014 recipient of the Grace Paley Fiction Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

BEN PACK lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing and critical reasoning at USC. When not discussing TV, pop music, and kids, he and his boyfriend fantasize about defying their apartment’s no-pet policy in order to get a dog. They plan to adopt.

PETER GADOL’s six novels include The Long Rain, Light at Dusk, and Silver Lake, which was nominated for awards from the Southern California Independent Bookseller Association and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Gadol is Chair and Professor of Graduate Writing at Otis College of Art and Design.

ANGELA WOODWARD’s novel Natural Wonders won the Fiction Collective Two Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2015. She is also author of the novel End of the Fire Cult and the collections Origins and Other Stories and The Human Mind.

IRA SUKRUNGRUANG is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: the Adventures of Buddhist Boy, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection, and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.

MAX NELSON is a New York–based film critic who regularly contributes to Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, and Film Comment, where he writes a bimonthly column on new and upcoming restoration work.

TRACI BRIMHALL is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins. She teaches at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

SALLY ASHTON is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name Is Juanita, and These Metallic Days. She is editor-in-chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She teaches at San Jose State University.

LISKA JACOBS has been nominated for the Kirkwood Literary Prize in Fiction twice, selected for the New Short Fiction series, and is a recipient of a Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ scholarship. She is one of the founding editors of DUM DUM Zine, an alt lit publication based in Los Angeles, and is currently pursuing an MFA through the University of California, Riverside.

DIANE SEUSS’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.

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.

PAUL MANDELBAUM is the author of two volumes of linked stories, Garrett in Wedlock and Adriane on the Edge, and the editor of two literary anthologies, most recently 12 Short Stories and Their Making. Part of Emerson College’s Los Angeles faculty, he also teaches short story writing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

MORGAN PARKER is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Switchback Books, 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in numerous publications, as well as anthologized in Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos Books) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books). She has done editorial work for Apogee Journal, No, Dear Magazine, and The Atlas Review. Winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize and a Cave Canem graduate fellow, Parker lives with her dog Braeburn in Brooklyn, New York. She works as an editor for Amazon Publishing’s imprint Little A, and moonlights as poetry editor of The Offing. She also teaches creative writing at Columbia University and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Award for Nonfiction. Her writing is forthcoming or has been anthologized in Guernica Annual, Wise Latinas (University of Nebraska Press), and American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (Dalkey Archive Press). She has received fellowships from the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, Bread Loaf, and is the current Community Radio Storytelling Fellow at Making Contact, a national radio program. Currently, she is working on a memoir about her grandfather, a medicine man from Colombia who it was said could move clouds.