Ryka Aoki discusses her new novel “Light from Uncommon Stars,” set in the San Gabriel Valley, about a queer violinist, immigration, aliens; her writing process; and her process in writing the novel. Continue reading We Do What We Can: A Coversation With Ryka Aoki
An interview with lawyer, activist and author, Natashia Deón, on her new novel “The Perishing,” set in 1930s Los Ángeles. Continue reading “The Perishing:”An Interview Between Natashia Deon and Meghana Mysore
An interview with Pulitzer Prize winning USC Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. Continue reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed” Is a Spy Thriller Where the Real Enemy Is Colonialism
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”
“Glorious Boy” is a tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail. Historical fiction set as WW II intensifies. Continue reading Glorious Boy Amiee Liu
What new L.Á. crime fiction will the Coronavirus Outbreak lead to? Continue reading Will The Coronavirus Outbreak Lead to New L.A. Crime Fiction? The Jury Is Out
By Jessica
Virtual Velocity by Anthony Mora is the story of the curious creation of pop phenomena, Jake Jenkins, America’s most renowned and successful literary novelist. Spanning six decades, through three interconnected stories, Virtual Velocity follows Jake from a sixteen-year-old learning about literature and women, to frenetic rock journalist, to struggling literary novelist, to world-famous author. Journeying through L.Á.’s rock and literary worlds, it is also an homage to the city, tracking its internal and external changing landscape and its cultural shape shifting.
By Denise Alicea
FROM: The Pen & Muse
Set against two distinct epochs in the history of Pasadena, California, Arroyo tells the parallel stories of a young man and his dog in 1913 and 1993. In both lives, they are drawn to the landmark Colorado Street Bridge, or “Suicide Bridge,” as the locals call it, which suffered a lethal collapse during construction but still opened to fanfare in the early twentieth century automobile age. When the refurbished structure commemorates its 80th birthday, one of the planet’s best known small towns is virtually unrecognizable from its romanticized, and somewhat invented, past.
Continue reading “Author Interview With Author of Arroyo, Chip Jacobs!”
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”
Los Angeles Literature 