Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology by David L Ulin

Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology by David L Ulin

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors, Aldous Huxley a city of dreadful joy. Where Jack Kerouac found a huge desert encampment, David Thompson imagined Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock.

In Writing Los Angeles, The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries by over seventy writers. This revelatory anthology brings to life the entrancing surfaces and unsettling contradictions of the City of Angels, from Raymond Chandler's evocation of the murderous moods fed by the Santa Ana winds to John Gregory Dunne's affectionate tribute to the deceptive perspectives of the pale subtropical light.

Here are fascinating strata of Los Angeles's cultural and social history, from the oil boom of the 1920s to the graffiti artists of the 1980s, from flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson to surf music genius Brian Wilson, from the German migr intellectuals chronicled by Salka Viertel to the hard-bitten homicide cops tracked by James Ellroy. Here are its fragile ecosystems, its architectural splendors, and its social chasms, in the words of writers as various as M.F.K. Fisher, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, and Mona Simpson.

Art Pepper discovers Central Avenue in the heyday of the 1940s jazz scene; Charles Mingus describes an early encounter with the builder of the Watts Towers; screenwriter Robert Towne reflects on the origins of Chinatown; John McPhee powerfully conveys the devastation of Los Angeles mudslides; David Hockney teaches himself how to drive in record time; and Pico Iyer finds at Los Angeles International Airport as clear an image as exists today of the world we are about to enter.

Writing Los Angeles is an incomparable literary tour guide to a city of shifting identities and endless surprises.

David L. Ulin contributes to the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly on a regular basis. GQ, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and the Atlantic Monthly have all published his work. Ulin is the editor of two critically acclaimed collections of Los Angeles-based writing.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781931082273
ISBN 10	1931082278
Title	Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology
Author	David L Ulin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	The Library of America
Year published	2002-09-30
Number of pages	880
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.