I was instantly fascinated when the Los Angeles Review of Books launched a few years ago. At first, its origin was obscure (UC Riverside, as it turns out) and I wondered if it wasn't just some random person with good design skills and some friends putting it together. It's a consistently interesting literary journal and covered a wide variety of book and book news. And, of course, I didn't exist for it. For a while, this was the closest I got: in a review of Gardner Dozois's best-of annual, a reviewer took time out to hint that he had read Rich Horton's best-of annual, and wrote:
Horton goes on to defend many of his selections as special butterflies which offer some remarkable feature or bug that happily exempts it from one of Kincaid’s many categories of exhaustion (steampunk, science fantasy, “traditional” sf, nostalgic sf, vampires).
The steampunk story alluded to was my own "Arbeitskraft." And that was it. Until today, when Love is the Law was reviewed in LARB by Jesse Bullington, who writes, in part:
Love is the Law is not the first time Mamatas has upended genre conventions with his instantly recognizable style, but it may be his most accomplished effort yet. Not because it’s less ambitious than his previous novels (it isn’t), or because it’s more straightforward (though it is). No, what makes Love is the Law such an exemplary achievement is that here at last Mamatas has struck a nigh-perfect balance amongst all the disparate elements he draws together. In the past, the jarring clash of this narrative flourish with that contemplative aside was all part of the rough-and-tumble charm, but here the pieces all slide smoothly into place…no mean feat, considering how ambiguous it is in places.
Check it out. Buy the book. We are thrilled. Enjoy this Gorilla Biscuits album:
Horton goes on to defend many of his selections as special butterflies which offer some remarkable feature or bug that happily exempts it from one of Kincaid’s many categories of exhaustion (steampunk, science fantasy, “traditional” sf, nostalgic sf, vampires).
The steampunk story alluded to was my own "Arbeitskraft." And that was it. Until today, when Love is the Law was reviewed in LARB by Jesse Bullington, who writes, in part:
Love is the Law is not the first time Mamatas has upended genre conventions with his instantly recognizable style, but it may be his most accomplished effort yet. Not because it’s less ambitious than his previous novels (it isn’t), or because it’s more straightforward (though it is). No, what makes Love is the Law such an exemplary achievement is that here at last Mamatas has struck a nigh-perfect balance amongst all the disparate elements he draws together. In the past, the jarring clash of this narrative flourish with that contemplative aside was all part of the rough-and-tumble charm, but here the pieces all slide smoothly into place…no mean feat, considering how ambiguous it is in places.
Check it out. Buy the book. We are thrilled. Enjoy this Gorilla Biscuits album: