LA Review of Books
Taking a stab at the empty cultural space for serious book reviews these days, The Los Angeles Review of Books (a digital magazine) debuted--or at least posted a preview of itself--yesterday with a thoughtful and worthwhile (if somewhat ironic) essay on "The Death of the Book" by Ben Ehrenreich. It begins:
Pity the book. It's dead again. Last I checked, Googling "death of the book" produced 11.8 million matches. The day before it was 11.6 milion. It's getting unseemly. Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as well be human. [....More]
