Los Angeles Review of Books: Weather Issue : No. 24, Fall 2019

Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.

Whenever you bring up the weather as a subject, someone will offer up a quote, usually by Mark Twain. There is the famous and apocryphal “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” There are also quotes from Proust: “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” Oscar Wilde: “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” There’s a reason that so many writers talk about the weather: it’s always been a challenge for the literary world — how to make it interesting, how to make it relevant, how to make part of the story. Considering the current state of politics and the climate, that challenge happens to be pretty urgent at the moment. This issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal will deal with climate — the facts around it as well as the ways in which it is changing how we understand our world and how we write about it. This issue will also be about redefining the boring, the banal and the everyday. How do our lives change when a boring subject of conversation becomes something major? Finally, how will fiction change regarding the weather? How will literature adapt and mold itself around the importance of this new subject? Amitav Ghosh famously called for a new type of fiction, better suited to deal with this problem, and this issue will publish just that.