![]() ![]() No one takes satire farther, higher, lower or deeper than Beatty. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, 1996 The result is a fantasia about “a race of hard laughers, mystics,” who “lived through the destroying light, and on, into Light ages.” It ends with its own affirmation: “Believe me.” - DLU The key to the narrative is See’s decision to imagine a nuclear apocalypse as a kind of reset, in which we can cast off the vanities of society. Who other than See would write an end-of-the-world novel with a happy ending? The story of two friends who met in the early 1960s, the book is a social novel and also, in its way, a social satire, until it turns into something else. It peeled back the Republican, Reagan-era sheen of Los Angeles to show beautiful rich kids who were not all right - and who, like the heroes of noir and punk, were more inclined to self-destruct than to ask for help. “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” Ellis declares in the famous opening line of “ Less than Zero,” which Stephanie Danler says “belongs on this list forever and ever.” The privileged, sun- and cocaine-soaked teens of Beverly Hills use ennui to mask their fear of connection, but the book is as brave as it is bratty. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, 1985 it superannuated ‘The Day of the Locust’ and gave either a template or at minimum an inflection to the fiction that came afterward.” - BK novels originate with ‘Play It As It Lays.’ The simultaneous inward intensity of feeling and outward diffidence, the emotional and moral dangers of simulation, the hot alien beauty of the city. The story of Maria Wyeth’s disintegration, her freeway drives and her longing for her daughter, “captures the morally lost and unmoored feeling of the Californian creative class,” writes Jordan Harper, making it “both a time capsule and timeless.” Charles Finch adds: “The way Hemingway thought all American novels originated with Huck Finn, all L.A. One of the most beloved works of Angeleno literary fiction was written by a famous essayist. Lambert also writes with a keen eye for the city itself. In this underground classic, a screenwriter witnesses the hopes, confusions and corruptions of fame, from an aspiring starlet to an over-the-hill grande dame whose heirs await her demise. ![]() ![]() After moving to Los Angeles to work for director Nicholas Ray (they also had an affair), Lambert had access to the city’s film colony. The British author, best known now for his novel and film “ Inside Daisy Clover,” started out as a film critic. This is one of the city’s ur-texts, a precursor to the work of writers such as Wanda Coleman and Walter Mosley. “A bitter bite out of redlined, racist Los Angeles,” says Greg Goldin - and he couldn’t be more correct. The first-person narration is propulsive, driven by rage and loathing, and the portrait of the city as racially virulent is especially compelling, given the myth of Southern California as a land of opportunity. Himes’ debut novel was written out of the author’s experience in World War II-era Los Angeles, which he would later describe as having “shattered” him. Noted 20th century critics dismissed the book, but recent scholars have revisited it as a muckraking romance. Although it chronicled land theft, racism and murder, the idyllic descriptions of the natural landscape resonated so much that “Ramona” is widely credited with sparking L.A.’s tourism industry. policies had limited reach, so she wrote “ Ramona,” an interracial romance set in Southern California designed to turn popular sympathies to Native Americans’ plight. Marriage took her west, where she saw that Native Americans were subject to tremendous injustices. Raised in Amherst, Jackson was a widely-read travel writer, novelist and poet. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.literary novels, from “The Day of the Locust” to “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” “Play it as it Lays” to “Interior Chinatown.” ![]() Based on 95 responses, here are the 16 most essential L.A. Bookshelf, we asked writers with deep ties to the city to name their favorite Los Angeles books across eight categories or genres. ![]()
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