Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology

Everyone living in LA should take a look at this book. No matter where in the mini-country we call Los Angeles you've been living, you'll learn something you didn't know before. It was fun to show my parents the photos from the architectural article and see them recognize landmarks from the 60s that don't exist anymore. The short stories from Raymond Chandler and others are fantastic. This is a perfect book to while away a month with, reading on the balcony as the California sun bakes the soil around your patio chair.

Contains:
from Echoes in the city of the angels / Helen Hunt Jackson --
The land / Mary Austin --
from The rules of the game / Stewart Edward White --
from Sixty years in Southern California, 1853-1913 / Harris Newmark --
California and America / Vachel Lindsay --
from Laughing in the jungle / Louis Adamic --
Los Angeles. A rhapsody / Aldous Huxley --
Sister Aimee / H.L. Mencken --
from Oil! / Upton Sinclair --
from Queer people / Carroll and Garrett Graham --
from God sends Sunday / Arna Bontemps --
The City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels / Edmund Wilson --
Paradise / James M. Cain --
Golden land / William Faulkner --
Pacific village ; A thing shared / M.F.K. Fisher --
from Promised land / Cedric Belfrage --
Red wind / Raymond Chandler --from Ask show more the dust / John Fante --
from The day of the locust / Nathanael West --
from Diaries / Christopher Isherwood --
Last kiss / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
from Autobiography : Hollywood / Charles Reznikoff --
A table at Ciro's / Budd Schulberg --
Landscape of exile ; Hollywood elegies ; Californian autumn ; The democratic judge ; The fishing-tackle ; Garden in progress ; from Journals / Bertolt Brecht --
from If he hollers let him go / Chester Himes --from America is in the heart / Carlos Bulosan --
from Southern California country : an island on the land ; from North from Mexico / Carey McWilliams --
from America day by day / Simone de Beauvoir --
Hollywood / Truman Capote --
Death in Hollywood / Evelyn Waugh --
from The labyrinth of solitude / Octavio Paz --
The pedestrian / Ray Bradbury --
The mattress by the tomato patch / Tennessee Williams --
from The barbarous coast / Ross Macdonald --
from On the road / Jack Kerouac --
from "Ocian in view" / Lawrence Clark Powell --
The slide area / Gavin Lambert --
from Slum by the sea / Lawrence Lipton --
from Superman comes to the supermarket / Norman Mailer --
The lost world / Randall Jarrell --
The kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby / Tom Wolfe --
Goodbye surfing, hello God! / Jules Siegel --
Los Angeles notebook ; The Getty ; Quiet days in Malibu ; Fire season / Joan Didion --
waiting ; betting on now ; The death of my father / Charles Bukowski --
from The kindness of strangers / Salka Viertel --
from Los Angeles : the architecture of four ecologies / Reyner Banham --
from Beneath the underdog / Charles Mingus --
from Bike riding in Los Angeles / Marc Norman --
Autopia / Cees Nooteboom --
The city of robots / Umberto Eco --
from David Hockney by David Hockney / David Hockney --
Los Angeles : the know-how city / Jan Morris --
from The sexual outlaw / John Rechy --
Eureka! / John Gregory Dunne --
from Straight life / Art Pepper --
from Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees ; L.A. glows / Lawrence Weschler --
Preface and postscript to Chinatown / Robert Towne --
August, Los Angeles, lullaby / Carol Muske --
Angel baby blues / Wanda Coleman --
from Anywhere but here / Mona Simpson --
Night song of the Los Angeles basin / Gary Snyder --
from Golden days / Carolyn See --
from I was looking for a street / Charles Willeford --
Going up in L.A. / Ruben Martinez --
from The control of nature / John McPhee --
from City of quartz / Mike Davis --
City of specters / Lynell George --
from Devil in a blue dress / Walter Mosley --
Las vistas / Mary Helen Ponce --
Coming home to Van Nuys / Sandra Tsing Loh --
The tooth of crime / James Ellroy --
from Volcano / Garrett Hongo --
Where worlds collide / Pico Iyer --
Burl's / Bernard Cooper --
from The atlas / William T. Vollmann --
from Holy land / D.J. Waldie --
Beneath Mulholland / David Thomson. show less