-
1 week ago | 
thedailynewsonline.com | Anita Felicelli |Christine Brunkhorst
Anita Felicelli’s stories are masterfully unsettling. Combine your most eerie déjà vu moment with your most vividly prophetic dream and you have the tone of the 14 futuristic tales in “How We Know Our Time Travelers.” This is the new science fiction. Not so much Isaac Asimov’s techy gadgetry or Ursula K. Le Guin’s moral conundrums, Felicelli’s vignettes explore a world where time and consciousness — the last unexplored frontiers — have been conquered. kAm%96 DE@C:6D 2C6 D6E :? E96 q2J pC62 :?
-
1 week ago | 
thelcn.com | Anita Felicelli |Christine Brunkhorst
Anita Felicelli’s stories are masterfully unsettling. Combine your most eerie déjà vu moment with your most vividly prophetic dream and you have the tone of the 14 futuristic tales in “How We Know Our Time Travelers.” This is the new science fiction. Not so much Isaac Asimov’s techy gadgetry or Ursula K. Le Guin’s moral conundrums, Felicelli’s vignettes explore a world where time and consciousness — the last unexplored frontiers — have been conquered. kAm%96 DE@C:6D 2C6 D6E :? E96 q2J pC62 :?
-
2 weeks ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
It’s been a grim, chaotic, and difficult year for many, and we’re not quite to the halfway mark. The weather has been strange, too, at least where I’m writing from in the Bay Area—warm and clear one moment and cloudy the next. The dogwoods are in bloom, and the all-too-brief lilac season is still underway in some places. But the elements are showing the first signs of summer—public school closures and nights of theater and music in the park are just around the corner.
-
3 weeks ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
It’s a thrill to welcome acclaimed writer Karen Russell to the California Book Club this Thursday, May 15, to discuss Claire Vaye Watkins’s lyrical dystopian novel Gold Fame Citrus.
-
1 month ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
One of the interesting challenges of Ishmael Reed’s classic Mumbo Jumbo is how to conceptualize the detective story it is, at least in part, parodying, much as Reed’s earlier novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down parodied the Western.
-
2 months ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
chris hardyWhile the Golden State is often invoked in connection with freedom, reinvention, and choice, only Texas incarcerates more people. In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner, one of our greatest intellectual novelists, grapples with what it is to be a poor woman in a California prison, what it is to be part of a state’s underclass, to have one’s life, including one’s odds of going to prison, circumscribed and determined since birth.
-
2 months ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
chris hardyCalifornia is one of the most diverse states in the country, and it’s readily apparent when you walk out the door in one of the state’s most diverse cities: Los Angeles. Here, multiculturalism is more the reality of interpersonal relationships than an ideology. This can either lead to harmony or yield to ethnic tension and xenophobia.
-
2 months ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
chris hardyThe granddaddy of San Francisco noir, with its dark streets and moody fog and cynics, is surely Dashiell Hammett’s masterpiece. Hammett drew on his experiences as an investigator with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to write The Maltese Falcon, which was originally serialized in Black Mask, a monthly pulp that cost 20 cents, at the start of the Great Depression.
-
2 months ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
In Bret Easton Ellis’s doomy debut novel, Less Than Zero, widely believed to be a roman à clef, we’re brought into the anhedonic world of hyper-privileged Los Angeles young adults via a narrator who has returned home from his East Coast college for winter break. Clay is picked up from the airport by his former girlfriend Blair—his parents have split from each other, and nobody is at his childhood home in a gated community when he arrives.
-
2 months ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
Charles Yu’s moving and funny metafiction Interior Chinatown takes bold risks by using the screenplay format to balance formal innovation with tender storytelling. Willis Wu lives in a Chinatown single-room-occupancy apartment; he and his family members play roles in fictional Hollywood shows. Yu depicts how our society’s mistreatment of Asian Americans is normalized by the stereotypes broadcast by the entertainment industry.
