My El Monte Halloweens
By Michael Jaime-Becerra
FROM: Los Angeles Times
When I was a boy, we didn’t celebrate Halloween. I recall trick-or-treating once, the year I was 5, my mother taking my sister and me to our nana’s house in South El Monte, me in a cowboy costume, my caramel-colored corduroy vest and chaps fresh from my mother’s sewing machine, my sister’s ladybug costume too. We approached a few houses to collect whatever candy we could, and aside from a future Halloween party or two and our elementary school’s costume parade, that was it.
Kate Braverman a poet, novelist and short-story writer whose work was fueled by a sprawling Los Angeles, has died. She was 70.
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.
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.”
Friday night’s is an audience of readers, gente who have come on Friday night to the independent bookseller, Vroman’s, in Pasadena CA because reading matters to them. They want to hear Reyna Grande, whose stories to them mattered.
When you read Mean by Myriam Gurba, you’re going to laugh, and cry, at some really gross and mean things – but that’s kinda the whole point. Mean is a very introspective book, exploring Gurba’s childhood, adolescence, and early adult life. By analyzing her own memory, Gurba forces the reader to do the same. She describes the book as a “novel that is memoiristic,” meaning not exactly a memoir, but not exactly fiction — it blends the two genres through memory, analysis, and retrospection.
Los Angeles Literature 