By PAULA L. WOODS, Los Angeles Times

Crime writing is not easy, as Raymond Chandler noted some 60 years ago when reflecting on his early days writing pulp fiction: “[T]he demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

Phoef Sutton certainly knows the demands of the genre. A film and television writer (“Cheers,” “Terriers”) who has lately penned crime novels with Lee Goldberg and Janet Evanovich, Sutton goes it alone in “Crush,” the first of what appears to be a series.

Continue reading “Phoef Sutton’s Thriller, ‘Crush,’ Takes a Criminally Entertaining Cruise Around L.A.”

Poetry Workshop

Join the Westwood Branch library for a poetry workshop. Bring at least one poem you have written and one poem you really like.

Where: Westwood Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library

Date: Tuesday the 14th

Time: 6:30 pm – 8 pm

Address: 1246 Glendon Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/poetry-workshop-1 Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 7/13/15-7/19/15”

Speakeasy/Open Mic

It’s the first Monday of the month, and The Last Bookstore has got their open mic night happening! Enter your voice into the conversation. Be Heard. Come early to get a good spot in line!   NOTE: Sign up is at 7:45 pm

Where: The Last Bookstore

Date: Monday the 6th

Time: 8 pm – 10 pm

Address: 453 S Spring St – Ground Floor, DTLA, CA 90013

Website: http://lastbookstorela.com/events/speakeasy-open-mic-night-2/

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 7/6/15 – 7/12/15”

Taken from the VQR

Note: The Summer 2015 Issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review features many Los Angeles Writers.

“California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must,” David L. Ulin writes in our lead story. “It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.” Ulin reminds us that one of the most enduring qualities of the California zeitgeist is the marriage between a sense of arrival and, having arrived, an impatience to get down to the experiment at hand, whatever it might be.  Continue reading “Virginia Quarterly Review: California and the Imagination”

Author at Book Soup

Alexandra Petri will present the book “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.” Most twentysomethings spend a lot of time avoiding awkwardness. Not Alexandra Petri. Afraid of rejection? Alexandra Petri has auditioned for “America’s Next Top Model.” Afraid of looking like an idiot? Alexandra Petri lost “Jeopardy!” by answering “Who is that dude?” on national TV. Afraid of bad jokes? Alexandra Petri won an international pun championship. But Petri is here to tell you: Everything you fear is not so bad. Trust her. She’s tried it. And in the course of her misadventures, she’s learned that there are worse things out there than awkwardness–and that interesting things start to happen when you stop caring what people think.

Where: Book Soup

Date: Monday the 29th

Time: 7 pm

Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA

Website: http://www.booksoup.com/alexandra-petri-2015 Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 6/29/15 – 7/5/15”

by Scott Doyle,

From LA Review of Books

IN 1943, A DECADE BEFORE Brown v. Board of Education, an Orange County farmer named Gonzalo Mendez asked his sister to take his three children along with hers and enroll them at the local elementary school. It didn’t seem like a big deal; Gonzalo himself had briefly attended that very school. Yet while his sister’s children — light-skinned, with a French last name — were admitted, his darker-skinned children were not. Gonzalo and his wife Felicitas challenged the decision, eventually filing a class-action lawsuit that would reach the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and help pave the way for the more famous case overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Yet the case remains little known outside of legal circles, and isn’t even an official part of California’s K-12 school curriculum. Now, with the help of the nonprofit organization 826LA, Ben De Leon’s students at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School in Boyle Heights have written a book that examines the legacy of the case, and the related social and cultural issues they continue to confront in a state where Latino students are more segregated than in any other. Continue reading “Mendez on “Mendez”: High School Students in Boyle Heights Write About the Desegregation Case After Which Their School Is Named”

Aphasia Book Club of Mid Valley

The Mid Valley Branch is proud to offer a book club designed especially for adults with aphasia, because everyone deserves to enjoy a good book. Aphasia is a language impairment, usually due to stroke, that affects individuals’ ability to speak, understand speech, read, and write. The Aphasia Book Club provides its members with supportive materials to improve their reading comprehension and ability to discuss complex topics.  A single book will be discussed over a period of several weeks.  Our first book will be Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

The Book Club meets weekly and is open to adults with mild to severe aphasia.  This program is made possible by a grant from the Library Foundation.

Where: Mid-Valley Regional Library

Date: Monday the 22nd

Time: 1 pm – 3 pm

Address: 16244 Nordhoff Street, North Hills, CA 91343

Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/aphasia-book-club-mid-valley Continue reading “Los Angeles Events 6/22/15-6/27/15”