News flash: Next year the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is moving to Venice Pier.

Kidding. Kidding.

The Times announced plans last week to relocate from its storied 1st Street home downtown to El Segundo, just south of LAX and across the street from — but not in — the city of Los Angeles. This move has historic ramifications for both El Segundo and Los Angeles, the latter a town famously cloven along a razor-wired border that, somehow, nobody has ever quite pinpointed.

I’m a native Angeleno, and El Segundo has long been one of my very favorite local hamlets. The New York Times called it “the suburbs” last week, as if it were some sort of seaside Santa Clarita. In fact, El Segundo’s own local newspaper turned 100 fully seven years ago. Forgive me for encouraging New Yorkers’ endearing habit of seeing every place as a failed version of itself, but would they call Coney Island “the suburbs”?

Locally, where it counts, news of the move has met with a mix of hand-wringing and retroactive omniscience. Before we bookfolk start rending our garments too, first let’s check the literary record. What have good writers written about El Segundo?

At first glance, the literary history of El Segundo would not appear to be the longest shelf in the library. The L.A. Central Library’s sacred geographical “California Fiction Index” — subject of the first feature I ever wrote for this paper! — shows only three novels set even partly in El Segundo. None of them has had much of an afterlife except Manhattan Beach native Daniel Riley’s “Fly Me,” and that only came out last year. Read Rest of Article Here