Los Angeles Review of Books

LITLIT brings together independent publishers and literary arts organizations from LA, SoCal, and beyond for a two-day festival of books, panels, and discussions. This free and public event creates space for cross-cultural and collaborative dialogue between writers, readers, and publishers about the literary arts as a form of community activism, enrichment, and engagement. LITLIT is dedicated to cultivating and promoting the Los Angeles literary scene by raising public awareness and creating new opportunities for collaboration and engagement.

The LARB Publishing Workshop is a three-week intensive summer course offering students a comprehensive overview of how the publishing industry works and where it is heading. Our curriculum and program of speakers reflect LARB’s commitment to innovation, inclusivity, and independent literary production, featuring students and leading professionals from wide-ranging backgrounds and a robust scholarship program. Our goal is to train a new, diverse, and forward-thinking generation of publishing professionals here in Los Angeles.

Our Publishing Workshop is committed to recruiting and training underrepresented students looking to start careers in publishing. We increase access to an industry traditionally centered in New York City and built on unpaid internships, legacy connections, and workshops that offer little to no financial aid. By contrast, we work to ensure that all qualified participants can participate regardless of their finances. We concentrate especially on building the publishing industry here in LA.

The LARB/USC Publishing Workshop will give Angelenos unprecedented access to the world of publishing, from traditional books & magazines to e-publications, apps, games, multimedia and new platforms.

LARB will profile LA writers and artists every day of the year, making the country and world aware of their work, increasing their ability to sustain creative lives by building the requisite critical understanding and infrastructure, and giving LA writers and artists the exposure they need to compete.

To continue to build the infrastructure supporting LA's creative economy with a weekly radio program and free print tabloid.

We are trying to establish a major institution for cultural exchange and conversation, centered on an online review of arts and culture. Los Angeles-based and Los Angeles-focused, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) is the communal product of many minds, including some of the best know and most established figures on the L.A. cultural scene, along with emerging L.A. writers in the fields of literature, art, music, politics, and cultural studies, enhanced and enlarged by the active conversation of readers all over the city, the county, the state, and beyond. We work hard to bring the worlds of publishing, academia, film and television, new media, art, and music together with the common reader in a fruitful, productive, and engaging conversation. --- In a feudal world, there is no criticism; only the king's taste matters. Given the cosmopolitan collection of diverse cultures here in Los Angeles, literature, the arts, and culture need a critical conversation, need to have spokespeople and champions and translators and critics to help cultural work find its audience, to build bridges among communities, and to disseminate the best that is being thought, written, and produced here in Los Angeles to the full range of local audiences and out into the larger world. --- Cultural criticism has a long and important history, and for the last 150 years it has taken place largely in a print world supported by advertising and subscription. That world is dying, as seen as the shuttering of book review supplements in almost every city in the country, and the shrinking of book and arts coverage elsewhere. LARB aims not just to replace these lost venues, which have been central to the vibrancy of American culture over the last century and more, but to rethink them, reinvent them using all of the new media tools at our disposal, making the cultural conversation more diverse, more interactive, and more wide-ranging, less hemmed in by traditional models. By merging the worlds of traditional literary publishing, academia, small presses, online writing, film and television, and the explosion of desktop production of all kinds, LARB hopes to build a big cultural tent, creating a space for very fragmented communities to interact and learn from each other. --- LARB is a daily online publication that has already, in a small way, begun this transformation. We are a largely volunteer organization that has managed to post over 1300 in-depth reviews, essays, and interviews, produced by a wide variety of contributors, from first-time writers to some of the most esteemed figures in literature, art, music, film, television, politics, and culture. We have already seen the impact on the morale of writers and readers in L.A., and we hope to increase our presence and impact, bringing our work to a larger audience, and a wider array of audiences, as described below. We also will impact the arts and culture scene through innovative public programming around the city, and through developing innovative curricula for our schools. --- In sharing culture and cultures, communities thrive. We are not interested in art for art's sake, or criticism for criticism's sake. We think that literature, art, and culture are central ways that a society understands itself, incubates its own progress, and forges its bonds across what might otherwise be divides. We hope to be a major partner in helping Los Angeles arts and culture continue to significantly enhance human development. --- We believe that all art and culture is both local and (at least potentially) global at the same time, and that a central way to ensure the continuing vitality of the L.A. arts and culture scene is to disseminate its work nationally and globally. We also believe that while the world has taken notice of L.A.'s excellence in classical music and art, as well as, of course film and television, it has been slower to recognize L.A.'s literary and critical strengths. We have started to have a real impact in that area and hope to do much more. Criticism and conversation are necessary to incubation, to nurturing, and to bringing literature, the arts, and culture to their largest possible audience, and thus to have their greatest impact, to realize their greatest potential.