By Sean Hooks
FROM: Full Stop

Author of articles and essays in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, GQ, Esquire, Salon, and Slate, Rosecrans Baldwin has published the novels You Lost Me There (2010) and The Last Kid Left (2017), and the nonfiction titles Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down (2012) and his newest release Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, published by MCD/FSG. It’s replete with cultists, wildfires, earthquake lore, working-class thespians, DIY survivalists, Border Angels, gamer collectives, labor trafficking survivors, and assorted Angelenos who could be said to be vagabonds (or wastrels). Despite reckoning with a litany of contemporary apocalypses, it remains a book levied with humor, including an inventive appropriation of Charles Bukowski’s character Henry Chinaski, an exposé of the lampoonable greed of investment trusts that view human suffering as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “buy low,” and a hilarious depiction of a screenwriting team’s meeting with Hollywood producers gone awry.

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