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1 week 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
View full post on YoutubeWhen author Rita Bullwinkel joined host John Freeman to discuss the California Book Club’s March selection, Headshot, he noted that her debut story collection, Belly Up, had a surrealist edge. Headshot, he went on, “is far less fantastical, yet it feels like hang gliding. It feels really daring. I wonder if you felt that as you were writing.
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1 month ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
A mysterious magic threads through novelist Eowyn Ivey’s well-wrought novels, each set near a fictional Wolverine River in what is otherwise the Alaska where Ivey grew up and where she lives. The books, each of them rich in landscape, are fascinated with the outer edges of humanness or, perhaps more precisely, with the liminal space where human desires meet wilderness and the unknown.
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1 month ago | 
altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli
We’re pleased to introduce Lucy Corin as the special guest to talk about Headshot, the California Book Club’s March selection, with the book’s author, Rita Bullwinkel, and host John Freeman. Corin is an accomplished, avant-garde novelist and short story writer. Her books include, most recently, the nonlinear, sprawling 2021 novel The Swank Hotel, which explores both mental breakdown and system breakdown in the aughts.
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1 month ago | 
latimes.com | Anita Felicelli
It’s overwhelming to think of how carefully tracked we are by private interests at this point in time: what we buy, what we watch, what we search online, what we want to know about other people — and who we know and how well. Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” describes the perfect storm of extractive profit-seeking and privacy erosion that drives so much of contemporary life.
