By Bethanne Patrick
FROM: L.A. Times
Christina Hammonds Reed vividly remembers witnessing the unrest in her city in 1992 after the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King — on television. She was only 8, after all, and the violence in South L.A. felt far away. She grew up in the comfortable suburb of Hacienda Heights.
The author of Pizza Girl talks about what she learned during her own wayward summer delivering pizzas, as well as the complexity of grief and the irresistibility of voyeurism.
Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier’s explosive debut novel, everything changes on a Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. Our nameless narrator is eighteen, pregnant, and feeling adrift as she stumbles through her days as a Los Angeles pizza delivery driver, all the while grieving the death of her alcoholic father and avoiding the smothering ministrations of her loving mother and boyfriend. When a suburban housewife named Jenny Hauser calls in with a peculiar order for a pepperoni and pickle pizza, Pizza Girl’s collision with Jenny sends her tailspinning into a psychosexual obsession with dangerous consequences.
Continue reading “Jean Kyoung Frazier Thinks Fiction Should Have More Hot Cheetos”
By Ada Tseng
FROM: LA Times OC
The first poem in Anatalia Vallez’s “the most spectacular mistake” is called “bond,” and it’s about honoring the generations of Mexican women who came before her.
Los Angeles Literature 