“In certain parts of South L.A., ‘wild’ was a power flex, a way to self-name. As writer and photographer Walter Thompson-Hernández illuminates in his ambitious new book, ‘The Compton Cowboys.'” Continue reading Review: The Cowboys of Compton, First a Curiosity and Then a Legacy
“Slouching Towards Los Angeles” is a collection about Joan Didion’s claim on California and its writers. 20 of the books 25 contributors are women. Continue reading Review: Writing in Didion’s Honor — And Her Shadow
A review of Lee Goldberg’s “Lost Hills,” a mystery about a tough as nails L.A. County Sheriff Dectective, Eve Ronin, assigned to solve a tripple murder. Continue reading Book Review: Lost Hills By Lee Goldberg
Distinguished Mexican American writer, Luis J. Rodriguez, meditates on the place of Xicanx culture in what he sees as a sick and increasingly fragmented global society. Continue reading FROM OUR LAND TO OUR LAND
By Scott Neuffer
FROM: Trampset
My wife tells me not to talk about it: her trauma. She survived the dirty wars in Peru. If you talk, you die, she tells me. People don’t talk about it. The dead are dead. The living go on. Sorry, it’s not my place, I say. But these ghosts. I can feel them.
Continue reading “Book Review: Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole”
By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
FROM: LARB
Award-winning poet Shonda Buchanan honors multiple literary traditions in her breathtaking new memoir, Black Indian. An educator, freelance writer, and literary editor, Buchanan is a culture worker with deep, decades-long engagement in communities of color. Her work honors the complexity and diversity of these Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. At once Indigenous, Black Female, Speculative, Feminist, Womanist, Urban, Southern Gothic, and counter to the Tragic Mulatto stereotype in American literature, stage, and film, Black Indian is a quintessentially American narrative.
Continue reading “Locs in the Sweat Lodge: On Shonda Buchanan’s “Black Indian””
By Lynell George
FROM: Los Angeles Times
The sequence is as predictable as the season itself: The calendar reads “fall” but the thermometer registers 90-plus. The Santa Ana winds kick up. Wildfires zipper across the landscape. Once again Joan Didion whispers in the Southland’s collective ear.
Continue reading “Joan Didion’s California Captured in Sweeping New Collection”
By Janet Kinosian
FROM: Los Angeles Times
The strained Los Angeles landscape in Steph Cha’s crime thriller “Your House Will Pay” is immediately recognizable to anyone who lived in the city during the traumatic period surrounding the 1992 riots.
Continue reading “Review: Thriller ‘Your House Will Pay’ Confronts the Legacies of L.A. Riots”
By Michael Nava
FROM: Los Angeles Review of Books
Cherríe Moraga has been an iconic figure in queer and Latinx literature since the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology she edited with the late Gloria Anzaldúa. Bridge was among the first explorations of how people and communities with multiple social identities — queer women of color, for example — are subject to intersecting discriminations that create complex and profound forms of oppression — what we now call intersectionality. In the decades since Bridge, Moraga has produced fiction, poetry, and plays, received awards and fellowships, and taught at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Even with these credentials, she, like other queer writers of color, has been patronized by a largely white, straight literary establishment, which often dismisses work like hers as special interest pleading, while hailing the work of straight, white writers for its universality.
By Janet Kinosian
FROM: L.A. Times
Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, “In the Country of Women.”
Los Angeles Literature 