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Episodes
Sunday Mar 13, 2016
Sunday Mar 13, 2016
The Fugitives (Simon & Schuster)
From National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino, a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, compulsion and free will.
Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that's maimed his public reputation, he's retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library. But Salteau is not what he appears to be, a fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter of elusive ethnic origins who arrives to investigate a theft from a nearby Indian-run casino. Salteau's possible role in the crime could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Kat s sudden appearance in town immediately attracts a restive Sandy.
As the novel weaves among these characters uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we learn that all three are fugitives of one kind or another, harboring secrets that threaten to overturn their invented lives and the stories they tell to spin them into being. In their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the others games all of them just one mistake from losing everything.
Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. It is also a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American life a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world that's connected in almost every way.
Praise for The Fugitives
"The language of The Fugitives is at once remarkable, startling and invisible. I was completely sucked into the worlds of these characters. It takes a master to make me forget I'm holding a book. Well, I forgot that for more than 300 pages.Brilliant."--Percival Everett
"A powerful and fiercely unsentimental novel that blazes past all the well-worn pieties about love and loss and leaves them in ashes."--Jenny Offill
“Sorrentino's smartly conceived story is something of a thriller, though more Richard Russo than Robert Ludlum; it's about ruses and masks and our desire to be something other than our imperfectible selves . . . Thoughtful but full of action—and a pleasing entertainment, too.” – Kirkus Reviews
Christopher Sorrentino is the author of five books, including the National Book Award Finalist Trance. His work has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Harper's, The New York Times, Tin House, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.
Sunday Mar 13, 2016
Sunday Mar 13, 2016
I Hate the Internet (We Heard You Like Books)
What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?
Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city’s gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.
In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?
Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms."
Praise for I Hate the Internet
"Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervor of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era, even if some of his implicit politics may be the exact reverse of the Frenchman's. I just got an early copy of his newest, I Hate The Internet and devoured it - he's as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don't need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages." -- Jonathan Lethem, The Scofield
"A riproaring, form-follows-function burlesque of the digital age that click-meanders its way like the ADHD freaks we're all becoming, while offering up compelling narrative lines that kept me clicking faster and faster. Read this book. Now." -- Dodie Bellamy
"I Hate the Internet is thought provoking—and so funny! I can’t remember the last book I read that made me laugh this much. Kobek has a gift for seeing things from a different angle and for uncovering lies and invisible structures of society, and he does it in a playful, anarchistic and quirky way. The rows of association in this book—Kobek’s deconstructing voice—will keep you entertained and baffled throughout the reading." -- Dorthe Nors
Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called “highly interesting,” by the Times Literary Supplement, has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing, and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. Presently, he's working on a book about the Ol' Dirty Bastard's first album for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series.
Matthew Specktor is the author of two novels, American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book about the motion picture The Sting. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Monday Feb 29, 2016
Monday Feb 29, 2016
Join us as the popular podcast, First Draft, goes LIVE with some of LA's most fantastical KidLit authors. This February,Victoria Aveyard, Lindsey Klingele and Elissa Sussman will sit down with host Sarah Enni to discuss everything magical and mystical in YA literature.
First Draft Live is a bi-monthly panel dedicated to fostering a community of young adult readers within Los Angeles. Through a rotating roster of KidLit authors and pre-determined discussion topics, we ask participants to speak as fans and members of the young adult community. We hope to facilitate a fun and casual conversation between readers and authors in the same vein as First Draft Podcast, the event’s namesake and inspiration.
Victoria Aveyard was born and raised in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town known only for the worst traffic rotary in the continental United States. She moved to Los Angeles to earn a BFA in screenwriting at the University of Southern California. She currently splits her time between the East and West coasts. As an author and screenwriter, she uses her career as an excuse to read too many books and watch too many movies.
Elissa Sussman is a writer, a reader and a pumpkin pie eater. In a previous life she managed animators and organized spreadsheets at some of the best animation studios in the world, including Nickelodeon, Disney, Dreamworks and Sony Imageworks. You can see her name in the credits of THE CROODS, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG and TANGLED.
Lindsey Klingele has worked in the writers' rooms of television shows such as ABC Family's THE LYING GAME and TWISTED. THE MARKED GIRL is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles.
Sarah Enni is an author, journalist, and founder of the First Draft podcast. She's the palest girl in Los Angeles.
Monday Feb 22, 2016
Monday Feb 22, 2016
Guthrie LA: 1937-1941 (Angel City Press)
“What happens when we push beyond Woody’s iconic image to try to understand how an unemployed hillbilly singer in the late 1930s transformed himself into something else?” writes co-editor Darryl Holter in the book’s first essay. “We learn that transformation started in, and started because of, Los Angeles, a place key to Woody’s evolution."
The book’s twelve essays, richly illustrated by photographs from the era, explore such themes as Guthrie’s early radio success in Los Angeles with the Woody and Lefty Lou Show; his first recordings made on old Presto disks; and the important friendship he forged with the actor and leftist radical Will Geer (later of “Grandpa Walton” fame). Other pieces cover Guthrie’s racial egalitarianism, as he threw off the worst of his Oklahoma and Texas roots and pushed past a notorious lynching in which his father may have participated; his ability to mold evangelical perspectives into politically savvy folk songs; and the impact he still exerts in his songs about migrants and workers looking for their main chance in California.
“Because Woody Guthrie came to Los Angeles when he did, his music stridently addresses inequities and inequalities amplified by the Depression. In Los Angeles, the ever-observant Dust Bowl troubadour became the urban folksinger,” says co-editor William Deverell. “His time in L.A. created the Woody that—eighty years later—bears witness to America’s promise and its problems.”
In addition to Woody Guthrie L.A. 1937 to 1941, Darryl Holter has written books and scholarly articles on labor history and urban revitalization. He has a Ph.D in History from the University of Wisconsin and taught for several years in the History Department at UCLA. Holter manages several family businesses in Los Angeles and is an Adjunct Professor in History at the University of Southern California. He is also a singer-songwriter and a member of Professional Musicians Local 47. His album, Radio Songs: Woody Guthrie in Los Angeles, 1937-1941, was released to critical acclaim in 2015.
Woody Guthrie L.A. 1937 to 1941 is the latest of several books by William Deverell, a professor of history and the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth century American West, Deverell has authored works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history, including Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. InWoody Guthrie L.A. 1937 to 1941, he brings together his overlapping passions for the history of American folk music, the Great Depression, and Los Angeles.
Monday Feb 22, 2016
Monday Feb 22, 2016
Underworld: From Hoboken to Hollywood (Fantagraphics Books)
Join underground cartoonist Kaz, and writer Ben Schwartz, to discuss the first ever complete collection of Underworld, the award wining alt-weekly strip of brilliant parody-like characters in their off kilter city of Underworld.
Praise for Underworld
"Kaz is the last of the Mohicans. True hardcore. His shit is the shit." - Jack Black
"I started reading Kaz' comics in the early '90s-hilarious! I love his distorted point of view. When he came on board to work on SpongeBob, I was nautically nonsensed!" - Stephen Hillenburg
"[Kaz' strip] 'Look-Away Popeye' made me sit and contemplate the medium for two hours. The back of Popeye's head as he looked away! If it wasn't for Kaz I never would have started drawing comics professionally. He made it seem possible." - Tony Millionaire
"Kaz' comics make me feel crazy. But in a delightful way that I'm not sure I want to read anything normal ever again." - Julia Wertz
Born in Hoboken, NJ, Kaz began his comics career in the 1980's as a contributor to Raw magazine. In 1992 Kaz createdUnderworld, published by Fantagraphics, and has continued to create weekly strips that have been published all over the country. Kaz now lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and animator on shows like SpongeBob Squarepants, andPhineas and Ferb.
Ben Schwartz has written jokes for the 84th Oscars, Letterman monologues, Wits, as Suck.com’s Bertolt Blecht, and his screenplay Home By Christmas is on the 2011 Blacklist. As a journalist and critic, he has written for The New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, Bookforum, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and is currently a judge for theLos Angeles Times Book Prizes for graphic novels and comics. He is currently working on a history of American humor set between the two world wars, published by Fantagraphics. He lives in Los Angeles and can be followed on Twitter at @benschwartzy.
Sunday Feb 21, 2016
Sunday Feb 21, 2016
"Good Girl" features the work of 32 contributors and examines the spectrum of disappointment that encompasses the experience of the "Modern Woman" while confronting the very nature of the concept. in honor of every woman who has ever been asked just how she manages to 'do it all,' or has been criticized for not doing enough, issue three will showcase a range of perspectives trapped within and breaking free of the social expectations of Woman.
Our readers will include:
Ginger Buswell isn't sure. She thinks she writes to grasp the mystery of our corporeal existence. Her thoughts on writing and corporeality verge on the mystical and, at times, the mischievous. She has occasionally enjoyed spreading rumors about René Descartes. During business hours Ginger has served as editor at such prestigious publications as Molossus, When in Drought, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared infrequently in Sparkle & Blink, Harlequin Creature, Yay! LA Magazine, and the A3 Review. She lives in Los Angeles with two well-meaning chihuahuas and several pseudonyms.
Agatha French is a Los Angeles-based writer, reviewer, and editor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic, NANO Fiction, Burrow Press Review, Everyday Genius, and The Nervous Breakdown, among others. She is deputy editor of the online literary magazine Coda Quarterly; co-creator of Four Eyes Project, set to launch in spring 2016; and food editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Marisa Malone is interested in memory, embodiment, and cultural influences on femininity. She explores these themes through writing, letterpress and drawing. She is the author of two self-published chapbooks and her poetry has been published in BlazeVOX Journal. She lives in Oakland, CA and is likely to be found in a thrift store or browsing a book shop.
Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and illustrator, and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You, Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe, and There Is No Right Way to Meditate. Her comics have also appeared in Bitch, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, The Rumpus, and other publications. A graduate of the fine art program of University of California Los Angeles, she currently lives in Los Angeles, where she spends most of her time as a wannabe foodie and pursuing the next perfect taco-truck taco. You can find her on twitter and instagram.
Charley Star is an award-winning fine art, portrait and lifestyle photographer, as well as a poet and writer. Her portrait and wedding photography have been published in numerous national magazines, several wedding books, and in all the top wedding blogs. Her fine art photography has been exhibited in several exhibitions in LA and Southern California, and she has an upcoming group show at the South East Center for Photography. Her poetry and writing have been published in several national and regional magazines as well as several online parenting blogs. She is working on her first chapbook of poetry. Charley is a mom of three, and therefore spends a lot of time discussing heavy-hitting political issues like whose turn it is for the Legos. She has mastered the art of hiding out in bathrooms to write small novels on her phone without little babes underfoot. She writes a blog on the beauty and heart of motherhood at somethingstrongandtrue.com and lives in LA with her family.
Sunday Feb 21, 2016
Sunday Feb 21, 2016
And Again (Touchstone)
Jessica Chiarella’s inventive debut novel And Again marks the launch of a bold new literary voice. In the spirit of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, And Again follows four present-day terminally ill patients who are granted the opportunity to abandon their diseased bodies and adopt healthy replicas through a revolutionary pilot program: “SUBlife.”
Free of scars, blemishes, and any trace of their diseases, the bodies themselves are perfect, but patients Hannah, David, Connie, and Linda soon discover that the fresh start they’ve been given has its flaws. Without their old bodies, they’ve lost their physical identities—muscle memory, mature taste buds, impulse control.
Hannah, an artistic prodigy, has to relearn how to hold a brush; David, a Congressman, grapples with his controlling old destructive habits; Connie, an actress whose stunning looks are restored after a protracted illness, tries to navigate an industry obsessed with physical beauty; and Linda, who spent eight years paralyzed after a car accident, now struggles to reconnect with a family that seems to have built a new life without her. The four meet weekly in a Chicago hospital to discuss the challenges of reentering their old lives, careers, and relationships. But when SUBlife comes up for FDA approval, they must all confront the implications their new lives now hold for the future of medicine.
Told in alternating perspectives, And Again deftly combines realist and speculative fiction to explore what it means to start life afresh and to ask the question: how much of our identities rest not just in our minds, but in our hearts and bodies?
Praise for And Again
“In Chiarella’s contemplative first novel, four protagonists give astonishing first-person accounts of their participation in a medical experiment called SUBlife, wherein their disease-ridden bodies have been swapped for freshly minted clones…Chiarella’s entrancing prose and fully fleshed characters should garner widespread, enthusiastic praise.”—Booklist
“Chiarella's engaging writing creates so many haunting moments that readers will find themselves moving quickly through the story, as well as awaiting her next work. This is a novel about what it means to be human, with all the flaws and vulnerabilities that implies, and whether we can ever truly begin again.”—Kirkus
“And Again was continually haunting me…Jessica Chiarella has so much talent.” —National Book Award Finalist Susan Straight
Jessica Chiarella grew up in the Chicago area and has a master’s in writing and publishing from DePaul University. She is currently a student in the University of California, Riverside’s Creative Writing MFA program.
Karolina Waclawiak received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and The Believer (where she is also an editor). She lives in Los Angeles.
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Be Frank with Me (William Morrow & Company)
Be Frank with Me, with its eccentric characters in self-imposed isolation, their grand but sometimes misunderstood gestures, and idiosyncratic approach to coping with the ordinary world, captures the intensity of growing up just a little bit different than everybody else. Or, in Frank’s case, a lot different from everybody else. Already called “magnificently poignant, funny, and wholly original” (Library Journal), Kirkus summed it up as “the curious case of where’d you go, Salinger.” It’s a spot-on description, as Be Frank with Me has the poignant quirks of Haddon, the effervescent spirit of Semple and, at its center, a Salingeresque reclusive literary legend.
That legend is the enigmatic M.M. “Mimi” Banning, holed up in her Bel Air mansion for the quarter-century since her classic but still-best-selling first novel’s publication. Broke after losing her savings in a Ponzi scheme, Mimi now must write her long-awaited second book. To ensure the timely delivery of her long-anticipated manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi outlines the parametes for an acceptable assistant: No Ivy-Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids. Quiet, discreet, sane.
When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put to work right away—as a full-time companion to Mimi’s son, Frank. The kid, Alice discovers, sees world in a very different—but completely fascinating—way. With little to entertain them but the sound of Mimi typing behind closed doors, Alice and her eccentric companion decide to embark on a series of giddy adventures in the greater world of Los Angeles. To occupy her imagination her downtime, Alice becomes consumed with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and itinerant male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and whether Mimi will ever finish that book.
Full of heart and countless “only-in-Hollywood” moments, but with a deep ring of truth, Be Frank with Me is a captivating and unconventional story of an unusual mother and son, and the intrepid young woman who finds herself irresistibly pulled into their unforgettable world.
Praise for Be Frank with Me
“Johnson’s magnificently poignant, funny, and wholly original debut goes beyond page-turner status. Readers will race to the next sentence. And the next. Her charming, flawed, quietly courageous characters, each wonderfully different, demand a second reading while we impatiently await the author’s second work.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Witty dialogue, irresistible characters, and a touch of mystery make this sweet debut about a quirky Hollywood family an enjoyable page-turner.” —Booklist
“The curious incident of where’d you go, Salinger: clever, sweet.”—Kirkus Reviews
“What a charmer this book is! From the very first page, I fell hard for Frank, an adorable oddball with anamazing brain, a wardrobe to die for, and a lonely fragility that pierced my heart again and again. When I finished, I wished him and his makeshift, off-beat family well—and immediately began missing him.”—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times-bestselling author of Love Walked In and The Precious One
“There’s so much to love about this novel: the hilarious one-liners, the unforgettable characters, the unexpected moments of tenderness and all the funny, sad, poignant twists and turns this story takes. I lost myself in these pages and you will too.”—John Searles, nationally-bestselling author of Help for the Haunted
“Beautifully written, brimming with insight, mystery, and benevolent wit, Julia Johnson had me gripped from the first chapter to the final page of Be Frank with Me.”—Julia Sweeney, author, actress, comedienne
“Be Frank with Me is complex, nuanced, detailed and profound. In other words, funny, in the best, most resonant way. Read it with both eyes because it will delight both the thinky and the feely parts of your brain.” —Dave Foley, comedian and, technically, an actor
“Julia Claiborne Johnson has written an effervescent gem of a novel, expertly balancing on a literary tightrope between lighthearted and heartbreaking. Be Frank with Me is peopled by characters at once utterly unique, and entirely authentic. I may re-read this book just to spend more time with Frank.” —Laura Nicole Diamond, author of Shelter Us
“BE FRANK WITH ME is that rare, hits-me-just-right book I am always hoping to find when browsing: Witty, but never cutesy. Deeply felt, but never sentimental. Peopled with deeply flawed, fully realized characters I cared about. It pulled me in so strongly that I found myself reading in that whole body way that is a rare and luminous pleasure after childhood, so immersed that the phone and the dogs and the kids had to work to pull me out. I loved every minute I spent in Julia Claiborne Johnson’s glass house with her cast of dedicated stone-throwers. This one is special—don’t miss it.”—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times-bestselling author of The Opposite of Everyone
“Julia Claiborne Johnson has struck gold in creating Frank Banning—a one-of-a-kind exasperating, witty and endearing nine-year-old genius who functions as the beating heart of this marvelous book.”—Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members
Julia Claiborne Johnson worked at Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines before marrying and moving to Los Angeles, where she lives with her comedy-writer husband and their two children.
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Bad Luck (Little Brown and Company)
Clay doesn’t believe in dragons. Then again, there was a time when he didn’t believe in magic, either...
Earth Ranch isn’t what it seems. Ostensibly a camp for juvenile delinquents, it’s actually a camp for young magicians. Clay is just getting used to the place when a young castaway, Brett, washes up on the shores of the remote volcanic island that is the camp’s home. Clay offers help and swears secrecy, only to discover that Brett may be a part of a nefarious scheme to capture a dragon rumored to be hidden on the island. Could this dragon be real? Is Brett who he says he is? Can Clay and his friends get to the bottom of the island’s secrets in time to save it from a scorching end?
Danger, adventure, mischief, mystery, old foes, new friends, and a certain clever narrator make bestselling author Pseudonymous Bosch's sequel to Bad Magic, Bad Luck, completely irresistible.
Pseudonymous Bosch is the infamously anonymous author of the bestselling Secret Series. Despite rumors to the contrary, his books are not actually written by his pet rabbit, Quiche; the rabbit is merely his typist.
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Monday Feb 15, 2016
A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press)
A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary–the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. Minimalist literary horror, Evenson’s stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and everyday life.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
“Brian Evenson is one of the treaures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”--Jonathan Lethem
“One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today.”--The Believer
“The bloodfests that sometimes ensue are metaphoric as miniature Francis Bacons. . . [Evenson’s] fiction is repulsive but more ‘moral’ that anything than comes from Bret Ellis or A. M. Homes.”--The Stranger
“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”--George Saunders
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrativeprecipice,” Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York’s top books. The recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.
Maggie Nelson is the author of The Argonauts, as well as an American poet, art critic, lyric essayist and nonfiction author of books such as The Red Parts: A Memoir, The Art of Cruelty, Bluets, and Jane: A Murder. The Art of Cruelty was a 2011 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Jane: A Murderwas a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.
Nelson has taught at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Wesleyan University, and the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute; she currently teaches in the CalArts MFA writing program. She was awarded an Arts Writers grant in 2007 from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2011, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Monday Feb 15, 2016
Liar: A Memoir (Crown Publishing)
Indie darling and novelist Rob Roberge makes his major-house debut with Liar: A Memoir, an intense, darkly funny book of addiction and mental illness, relapse, recovery, and the nature of memory. Liar is Roberge’s desperate attempt to document his life when faced with the prospect of forgetting it after years of hard living and too frequent concussions suffered during substance-induced blackouts.
In an effort to preserve his identity (for what is identity if not memories?), Roberge records the most formative moments of his life—ranging from the brutal murder of his childhood girlfriend, to a diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, to singing and playing guitar with his band the Urinals as an opening act for famed indie band Yo La Tengo at The Fillmore in San Francisco. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile are the stories that lie at the heart of who we think we are.
As Liar twists and turns through Roberge’s life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll on its head. Darkly comic and brutally frank, it offers a remarkable portrait of a down-and-out existence scattered across the country, from musicians’ crashpads around Boston, to seedy bars in Florida popular with sideshow freaks, to a painful moment of reckoning in the scorched Wonder Valley desert of California. As Roberge struggles to keep his demons from destroying the good things he has built in his better moments, he is forced to acknowledge the increasingly blurred line between the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves.
A reflection on memory and an intimate look at recovery and redemption, Liar delves into the complications of the healing process and the challenges faced in trying to rebuild a life, all while Roberge infuses the narrative with candor and humor.Liar is a memoir that will provoke and engage.
Praise for Liar
“Roberge’s writing is both drop-dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart.” —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild
“Roberge is a modern master of the down-and-out-that-just-got-worse. His stories are dark and thrilling. They take hold of the reader like some bad, bracing dope and don’t let go until you feel the full measure of your own humanity. Prose this carefully wrought and true puts him in the tradition of Bukowski, Hammett, and Denis Johnson.” —Steve Almond
“Roberge is the bard of the rough road, singer of the long haul, both lyrical and ferociously realistic.”—Janet Fitch
“Roberge’s words bring it all back to life for me—the sounds, the sights, the smells, and the tastes. And it’s not always a pretty ride. I like that Roberge never takes the easy way out.” —Steve Wynn, The Dream Syndicate
Rob Roberge is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Cost of Living. He is a core faculty member at UCR/Palm Desert’s MFA program and has taught at several universities, including the University of California’s MFA programs at the main campuses of Riverside, Antioch, and Los Angeles, and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. His work has been featured in Penthouse, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, and his stories have been widely anthologized. Roberge also plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles–based band the Urinals.
David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. His novel, Ear to the Ground, will be published in April. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Thursday Feb 11, 2016
Thursday Feb 11, 2016
Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
As Ratliff sees things, there are both negative and positive aspects to the current landscape. Services like Spotify and Pandora can monitor our listening practices, feeding us back more of what we already know we like. At their worst, these services encourage musical comfort-listening, a surrender of agency to algorithms. On the flipside, we’re living in an age of unprecedented access, rendering old categories and hierarchies of taste obsolete. As Ratliff asserts, a huge wealth of music is out there for all of us to experience—all we need to do is listen better than the algorithms are listening to us.
And so, in a series of beautifully composed and originally conceived chapters, Ratliff gives us a refreshingly new framework for engaging with music—one that largely ignores genre categorizations or a composer’s intent and instead places the listener at center stage. Ratliff focuses on various qualities of music that we can listen for, exploring aural attributes like repetition or speed, as well as more subjective emotions and ideas such as sadness or “the perfect moment.” Along the way, Ratliff touches on a dizzying array of music, drawing surprising connections from João Gilberto and Frank Sinatra to Aaliyah and Erik Satie (and that’s just one chapter).
Ratliff has a lot of smart things to say about the changes of the past 20 years, and there is no doubt Every Song Ever will spur debate about our relationship to music, and its role as both culture and commodity. But at its heart, this book is a celebration—of the possibilities for pleasure within music, of the diversity of recorded sound, and of the act of listening at a time when listeners have never had it so good.
Praise for Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty
“In this insightful guide to contemporary music appreciation, genre limitations are off the table . . . Ratliff’s scholarship shines; there’s a lot to be said for a book on music appreciation that can draw apt parallels between DJ Screw and Bernstein’s rendition of Mahler’s ninth symphony.”—Publishers Weekly
“It’s fascinating how Ratliff can bring a fresh ear to such familiar music . . . and how inviting he makes some little-known music sound . . . [Every Song Ever] makes unlikely connections that will encourage music fans to listen beyond categorical distinctions and comfort zones.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Every Song Ever jumps into the grand adventure of losing yourself in music, at a time when the technology boundaries have blown wide open. Ratliff brilliantly makes connections between the arcane and the everyday, pointing to sounds you’ve never heard—as well as finding new pleasures in music you thought you’d already used up.” —Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape and Turn Around Bright Eyes
“Everyone knows we live in an age when most people can listen to anything, anytime, anywhere. Whether that’s depressing or mind-expanding depends ultimately on what kind of attention we pay. Ben Ratliff has the gifts to help us surf this wave of sonic information, not stand there mumbling at it in a grumpy-grampy way. After all, it’s presumably not going to end until the electrical grid does.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
“This is a book about one exemplary listener’s love for how many ways music can mean, set in sentences as forceful and subtle as Elvin Jones. Slayer and Shostakovich, Ali Akbar Khan and the Allman Brothers—none of them are the same once Ben Ratliff’s ears get through with them. And your ears won’t be the same once you get through Every Song Ever.”—Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex
Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996. Every Song Ever is his fourth book, followingThe Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). He lives with his wife and two sons in the Bronx.
Alex Ross has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the essay collection Listen to This, and the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
Object Lessons is an essay and book series published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from sardines to silence, juniper berries to jumper cables. Joining us will be four authors reading from their respective Object Lessons books.
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Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out in doctor's offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? InQuestionnaire, Evan Kindley investigates the history of “the form as form,” from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. In the process, he uncovers surprising connections between disparate fields (literature and science, psychology and business, journalism and surveillance) and asks fundamental questions about the questions we ask ourselves.
Evan Kindley is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a visiting assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College.
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We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results.
Alison Kinney is the author of Hood. Her writing has appeared online at The Paris Review Daily, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, and other publications.
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Waste focuses on those objects that most fundamentally shape our lives, and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, digital detritus, video game graveyards, space garbage, and more. But waste, as the book argues, is not merely the immense field of our discarded objects; it's also the concept we employ in an effort to define and understand our individual relationships to time and desire. Waste is every object, plus time.
Brian Thill is the author of Waste (Bloomsbury), recently named by Jeff VanderMeer in Electric Literature as one of the best books of the year. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, The Guardian, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. He's currently in the early stages of writing his next two books.
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The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/phone-booth-9781628924121/#sthash.AQ4IIoOU....
Ariana Kelly works as a writer and teacher in Los Angeles. She is currently completing a book of essays about health and place.
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and the Real Chinatown (Rare Bird Books)
Thirsty is an exploration of Los Angeles’ storied history and its fraught relationship with water. As a city on the make since the early 20th century, Los Angeles’ resources fought hard to keep up with its unchecked growth. The city’s water chief William Mulholland built an aqueduct to grab water over two hundred miles away in Owens Valley, but it wasn’t enough. Where Marc Reiser’s seminal 1986 book Cadillac Desert started, Marc Weingarten’s Thirsty continues. Weingarten delivers a gripping tale of Los Angeles’ epic battles for water, the larger-than life characters that shaped a city’s destiny, and the man-made tragedy that killed four hundred and forever changed the way water would be harnessed and allocated.
Marc Weingarten is the author of Station to Station and The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight; the co-editor of the anthologies Yes is the Answer and Here She Comes Now, and producer of the films God Bless Ozzy Osbourne and The Other One. He lives in Malibu.,CA.
Nina Revoyr is the author of five novels, including The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize;Southland, a Los Angeles Times best seller and “Best Book” of 2003; Wingshooters, which won an Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award and was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”; and most recently, Lost Canyon. Revoyr lives and works in Los Angeles.
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
Sunday Feb 07, 2016
All the Birds in the Sky (Tor Books)
From the editor-in-chief of io9.com, a stunning novel about the end of the world--and the beginning of our future.
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families. But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.
A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.
Praise for All the Birds in the Sky
"The very short list of novels that dare to traffic as freely in the uncanny and wondrous as in big ideas, and to create an entire, consistent, myth-ridden alternate world that is still unmistakably our own, all while breaking the reader's heart into the bargain--I think of masterpieces like The Lathe of Heaven; Cloud Atlas; Little, Big—has just been extended by one.”—Michael Chabon
Charlie Jane Anders is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, the extraordinarily popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, the mainstream Choirboy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was subsequently picked up for development into a NBC television series. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones and many other outlets.