An impulsive, madcap, and newly concussed young woman comes of age as she navigates her Ghanaian American identity, her relationships, and the muddled landscape of history, memory, imagination, and delusion.

Twenty-four-year-old Akosua is easily knocked off her feet. When she falls and hits her head, she’s too preoccupied with her latest dramas to fully absorb the shock. In the span of three months, she has broken up with her boyfriend Wisdom, discovered that her deadbeat dad has moved back to the States from Ghana, and dropped so many classes that she believes she’s the only history grad student in the history of grad students to be registered for just one partial-credit class. Instead of facing her problems, Akosua seeks distraction in Daniel, a “good Ghanaian man.” But as her head injury worsens, she questions whether she can continue to run away from her father any more than she can keep ignoring her brain and its traumas. Vibrant, funny, and bittersweet, Blood on the Brain is a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture—and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis. Established in 2003, LAR publishes both the stories of Los Angeles, endlessly varied, and those that grow outside our world of smog and glitter. LAR seeks voices with something wild in them, voices that know what it means to be alive, to be fallible, to be human.

Issue 24 features work from Catherine Pierce, Lory Bedikian, Clea Bierman, and more.

The Los Angeles Review Masthead
Publisher: Tobi Harper
Editor: Kate Gale
Managing Editor: McKenna Themm
Assistant Managing Editor: Dulce Arteaga
Fiction Editors: K. K. Fox and Hananah Zaheer
Flash Fiction Editor: Sophia Ihlefeld
Poetry Editors: Blas Falconer and Vandana Khanna
Nonfiction Editor: Marco Wilkinson
Translation Editors: Francesca Bell and Linda Murphy Marshall
Book Review Editors: Deirdre Collins and Tansica Sunkamaneevongse
Production Editor: Rebeccah Sanhueza

A Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. A Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES • AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION • Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

“One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time.”—Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry • "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."—Library Journal • “Your favorite writer’s writer.”—Entertainment Weekly • “Percival Everett is poised for a big year.”—The Wall Street Journal • Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets.”—Pasadena Star-News • “Wry and epigrammatic.”—Publisher’s Weekly • “A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry.”—Amsterdam News 

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.