Clik here to view.
Shannon Ebner: The Continuous Present
From left: XSYST, 2011, 63 x 48 in.; EKS, 2011, 63 x 39.16 in.; EKSIZ, 2011, 63 x 42 in.; XIS, 2011, 63 x 48 in. All works black-and-white photographs. Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
L.A. Advice: Writers Dating, Fear of the Blank Page
Last night, seventy-five or so Angelenos gathered at the Standard, Hollywood to listen to Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, and Michael Tolkin answer audience questions on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Confidences
Photograph by Aftab Uzzaman. If you are a writer with any presence on the Internet, even a very obscure one, you often get e-mails from strangers. Sometimes these strangers are quite eccentric, like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Love Stories
Photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Moore. F. and I were introduced by a mutual friend while I was on a visit to L.A. I was living in D.C., newly single and working at a political magazine. I had given...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In My Father’s Kitchen
I used to joke that I have daddy issues with Jacques Pépin, because it was he who really raised me. My parents divorced when I was a year old and, until I was thirteen, they split custody in every...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Escape Artist
Graham Greene stole the title of my memoirs. Rueful and proud, ringing of a boastful confession, imaginary maps, and the magician’s exegesis, his Ways of Escape would have been a perfect header for my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hari Kunzru on ‘Gods Without Men’
Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Gods Without Men, is being released in the U.S. today. Set in the Mojave Desert, the novel is an echo chamber for stories divided across more than two centuries. The clever...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Original House of Pies: SoCal Comfort
When the waitress set the slice of strawberry pie in front of me, I tried to contain my excitement. This moment was the culmination of two years’ worth of waiting, two years of longing and imagining...
View ArticleClik here to view.
See You There: The Paris Review in L.A.
Los Angeles friends! Please join us tomorrow as we celebrate the art of the short story at the Hammer Museum! Author Mona Simpson, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and yours truly will discuss literary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wild Cats and Meadowlarks: Creating in L.A.
Hollywood was then a small town, quiet though excited. Just across our meadow, and across one more open lot, was a movie studio where they were using a troop of lions in pictures. The dreamlike...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Hollywood Subway: Against the Horizontal City
Last train 2, Toluca Yard, 1955, courtesy of the Metro Transportation Library and Archive. The entrance to Los Angeles’s original subway system lies hidden on a brushy slope next to an apartment...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Challenges, and Other News
“At times of tragedy, the mind goes to certain favored zones; mine goes automatically to poetry.” Dan Chiasson offers the tested comforts of William Langland. The Los Angeles Times brings us a nifty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beached
There is something brutal about Philip Glass’s opera. The way it stops and starts, the taunting tease of a story, then the way it’s anything but narrative. Composed of nine twenty-minute scenes, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
LA Story
I have just moved to Los Angeles from the Middle East, and everyone keeps asking me if the city is too quiet—Am I bored? Is it safe?—and the answer is, No, I am not bored; yes, it seems safe, and yes,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Characters Get Together
Wilshire Boulevard ca. 1959. Photo: Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it would be warm in California—hot,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Los Angeles Will Never Look the Same in Movies, and Other News
Photo: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting A strange but urgent side effect of LA’s switch from sodium-vapor to LED streetlights: in night shots, the city will look strikingly different on film. One...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Attention, Angelenos: We Are in Your Fair City
Photo: John Taylor As New York’s brutal winter wends its way onward, ever onward, two among us have had the good sense to go West: our John Jeremiah Sullivan and Lorin Stein have absconded to LA, which...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Death, and Other News
A depiction of one of Frederik Ruysch’s anatomical displays. Image via the Public Domain Review. Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die, is dead. In Los Angeles, a group of ghost hunters are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
See Me
Adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson girls. The Manson girls. Photographer unknown. When I was thirteen, I had a yearlong correspondence by mail and over the phone with Rodney Bingenheimer. A peculiar...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unhousing
Foreclosed homes as haunted houses. Photo: Casey Serin My wife and I began searching for a house in 2008, just as the market was crashing, just as those first waves of foreclosed homes and short sales...
View Article
