Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, 1977
“You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost,” Babitz writes in her second book. The collection is steeped in the understanding of a native daughter, which means she doesn’t need to explain anything. How refreshing that is — and also Babitz’s voice, which is smart and funny, evoking excess as a way of life. Or not excess exactly, but a kind of ease, a lack of pretension and the ability or willingness to embrace Los Angeles for what it is. “Eve’s masterpiece,” says the author’s biographer, Lili Anolik. — DLU
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, 1985
“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. 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. — CK
Elsewhere, California by Dana Johnson, 2012
Part of the Great Migration, Avery’s family moves from the South to South L.A., then to West Covina, and she tries to make sense of it all as a painter and assemblage artist. “Simply the best evocation of what it is like to grow up in Los Angeles that I know,” writes Lou Mathews. Aimee Bender cites it “because of how it moves between worlds/neighborhoods via language.” And publisher Dan Smetanka sums it up: “An L.A. artist’s entire life revisited in one day, as if Mrs. Dalloway traded in her flowers for Dodger tickets.” — CK
Sidewalking by David L. Ulin, 2015
Since arriving from the East more than 30 years ago, Ulin has become a devoted and truthful voice on L.A. — self-consciously a non-native, no booster but a cautious optimist. His ambivalent survey of a city in transition begins with his defiant walking habit but quickly zooms both out and inward, like L.A. itself. From Bunker Hill to Watts to Miracle Mile to the Grove, Ulin examines promises of pedestrian renewal (some already broken today) but lands where all of us do: in a place we are redefining for our own use, whether we know it or not. — BK
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza, 2021
Fragoza’s first collection is a game-changer, 10 stories that grow out of a series of overlapping traditions: fantastical, feminist, always engaged with the complications of identity and place. In “Crystal Palace,” a woman recalls working in a Guadalajara shop, where she inadvertently witnessed her proper boss melt down over love. In “Me Muero,” a young woman lives (that’s the only word for it) through her own death. At the heart of each story here is the sense of something elemental underneath the surface. “She’s at the fore of the next generation of San Gabriel Valley writers,” Jaime-Becerra says. — DLU
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