L.A.’S UNKNOWN ORIGIN STORY IS VIOLENT AS HELL
BY TONY MOSTROMFrom: laweekly.com
Los Angeles suffers from (or enjoys) a kind of historical amnesia. In the popular mind, there’s an almost complete lack of an “origin story” for the city. That isn’t unusual as cities go, of course, but hey, Los Angeles is famous, L.A. has personality, and that implies, you would think, a generally known and worthy life story that everyone is hip to. The vague (and lazy) assumption that the birth of the movie industry and the birth of L.A. were one and the same obviously doesn’t cut any ice; we’ve all seen the year 1781 right there on the city’s official seal. The cliché that L.A. doesn’t care about its history seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy long fulfilled.
John Mack Faragher’s new book, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles ($35, W.W. Norton), clears some of the fog to reveal what laid slumbering for centuries in the archives: a record of pure, unrelenting bloody horror. L.A.’s history after statehood was one nasty business. “In the 1850s,” the book jacket warns us, “the City of Angels was infamous as one of the most murderous societies in America.” L.A. was nationally notorious, “a terrible place for murders,” as one prominent San Franciscan warned his fellow citizens. Taking its title from Calle de Eternidad, one of the original streets of the old pueblo, this book is a lean-and-mean slab of history at its most brutal. As a pure chronicle of criminality, Eternity Street pretty much qualifies as a true-crime book. More importantly, it is probably the most violent “origin story” of an American city that you will ever read.
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Submissions Call for Angel City Review
Issue 2 was amazing and they can’t wait to make issue 3 (To be released at the end of June) even better! Submissions are now open from until March 31st 2016.
Los Angeles Literature Events 2/29/16 – 3/6/16
Laila Lalami and Natashia Deon at Chevalier’s
This event is part of the Emerging Voices Author Evening Series to benefit PEN Center’s Freedom to Write Programs. Free to PEN Center USA members. Tickets available to the public.
Laila Lalami is the author of the novels: Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and was on the Man Booker Prize longlist.
Natsha Deon is a Los Angeles attorney, writer and law professor. Her debut novel Grace, is due out June 2016 with Counterpoint Press. Deon is the creator of the reading series Dirty Laundry Lit and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Prague’s Creative Writing Program among others, including the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship program.
Where: Chevalier’s Books
Date: Monday the 29th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Website: http://chevaliersbooks.com/ or http://penusa.org/author-evenings
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Palmetto Mornings: 2/16/16 Erin Aubry Kaplan – Author, “I Heart Obama”
Los Angeles journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan has 
just released her second book “I Heart Obama,” on February 9. The following is about the book:
In his nearly two terms as president, Barack Obama has solidified his status as something black people haven’t had for fifty years: a folk hero. The 1960s delivered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, forever twinned as larger-than-life outsiders and truth tellers who took on racism and died in the process. Obama is different: Not an outsider but president, head of the most powerful state in the world; a centrist Democrat, not the face of a movement. Yet he is every bit a folk hero, doing battle with the beast of a system created to keep people like him on the margins. He is unique among presidents and entirely unique among black people, who never expected to have a president so soon.
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Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists
Saturday, April 9, 2016Bovard Auditorium, USC campus
Since 1980, the LA Times Book Prizes have honored the previous year’s best books and their authors. This year’s ceremony — the 36th annual — will be held at Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus.
2015 Innovator’s Award Winner
James Patterson
James Patterson has left a singular mark on the literary community through his writing for adults and young people, as well as through his efforts to make books and reading a national priority. His support of libraries, independent bookstores, booksellers, teachers and students is unsurpassed with millions of dollars in grants and scholarships going toward encouraging Americans to read and supporting those who foster reading. A feature film based on his bestselling Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life series is set for release this fall.
2015 Robert Kirsch Award Winner
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera’s literary contributions include poetry, prose, young adult novels and children’s literature, and his work in all artistic forms highlights a life dedicated to giving voice to those who are not always heard.
A New Literary Journal With an Eye on Topanga Canyon
A new literary journal 
has surfaced in Los Ángeles. It’s called S-Curves and hails from the community tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains. The community one passes as they make the drive along State Route 27 as one heads to the Malibu coast from The Valley.
Topanga is still known as an artiest colony as it became known during the 60s with the likes of Neil Young and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys having lived there for a time. Once again it’s a community proving the creative juices are literary too. As Faith Currant, editor of S-Curves says of her magazine, “The focus of the journal is on featuring the literary community of the canyon, but while we do give priority to Topanga writers, we are open to submissions from LA writers/artists based outside of Topanga as well.” If you anyone wants to know the kind of literature that is being penned in the community of Topanga, this magazine is a good place to start.
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Los Angeles Literature Events 2/22/16 – 2/28/16
Ethan Canin at Book Soup
Ethan Canin discusses and signs his new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac. Ethan Canin, the bestselling author of America America and The Palace Thief, here explores the nature of genius, rivalry, ambition, and love among multiple generations of a gifted family. A Doubter’s Almanac is the story of how the flame of genius both lights and scorches every generation it touches, and is a suspenseful and deeply moving novel spanning seven decades, as it moves from California to Princeton to the Midwest to New York. (Random House)
Where: Book Soup
Date: Monday the 22nd
Time: 7 pm
Address: 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Website: http://www.booksoup.com/event/ethan-canin-discusses-and-signs-doubter%E2%80%99s-almanac
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The History of Black Poetry in Los Angeles
Saturday night, black Los Angeles poets gathered to celebrate at Beyond Baroque in Venice. Pam Ward, S. Pearl Sharp, V Kali and others came together to celebrate the history of black L.A. poets.
The theme of the night, as stated by Pam Ward, was that if no one is documenting our history, then we need to document it ourselves. As she explained at the outset, when she did some research on black L.A. poetry she didn’t find much. There were gaps, she knew, in the historical record.
The readings kicked off by documenting other, older contemporary and historic black poets. Each poet read a poem or two, starting with S. Pearl Sharp, channeling Ruby Dee, as she read Dee’s “Calling All Women.” With the same sass and attitude that appropriately captured the no-nonsense sassy strength of Dee’s call to action for all women to stand up for themselves, she displayed the strength of the words and message, kicking off he night in roaring fashion.
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A visit to the Floating Library in Echo Park Lake
by Carolyn Kellogg
From: The Los Angeles Times
On this sunny Friday, unseasonably gorgeous even for Los Angeles, I headed to Echo Park Lake to visit the new Floating Library. You don’t need a card to borrow books from the Floating Library, but you do have to reach it.
You can only get there by boat — a pedal boat, specifically — which luckily you may rent at the Echo Park boathouse.
Designed by Minnesota artist Sarah Peters and set loose in the Great Lakes region during the recent summers, the Floating Library is making its first visit to the West Coast. It’s a raft filled with art books and zines, presented by the Machine Project gallery as part of the L.A. Art Book Fair.
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Los Angeles Literature 