Sarah LaBrie

L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading check out: *Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets *Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups In the opening pages of......

If you're familiar with the writing of cultural theorist and freelance critic Mark Dery, you already know he writes in loop-de-loops and mazes, often embedding the meanings of his sentences in elaborate spirals of prose. His new essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, follows that pattern, bringing together......

Laura Dave made a career of writing the kind of fun, unabashedly frothy fiction we all tend to impulse-buy at the airport before long flights, but that doesn't mean she hasn't earned her literary stripes. For one thing, the author has an MFA from the University of Virginia's highly regarded......

With his third book, Imagine, neuroscience researcher Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist, How We Decide) answers the question "Where does creativity come from?" with some questions of his own: Why do long jogs inspire jolts of insight? How did anybody dream up Scotch tape before Scotch tape existed? And......

"Fail again. Fail better," goes the well-worn Samuel Beckett quote former actress Heather Donahue chooses to open her new memoir, Growgirl. As epigraphs go, it would be hard to find one more appropriate. In 1999, Donahue starred in cult hit The Blair Witch Project, only to watch her meteoric rise......

At first, the idea of a three-hundred page cultural history of dirty magazines seems quaint, like somebody writing a book-length ode to the telegram. After all, it's been a long time since Playboy stood for anything other than bad reality TV, and you couldn't purchase a Penthouse right now if......