David Ulin

Los Angeles

Writer at Freelance

Editor at Air/Light Magazine

Contributing Editor at Literary Hub

Crafty southpaw. Editor, @airlight_mag. Books Editor, @AltaJournal.

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Articles

The Memory Palace

3 weeks ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

When is a novel like an archive? Or is it the other way around? On the most basic level, each represents a storage-and-retrieval system for information and memory. And yet, what does that mean in terms of narrative? Both the novelist and the archivist, after all, are storytellers, seeking patterns in the data and the details they have gathered. Both fulfill a necessarily subjective function in that regard.
John Fante’s Vision of L.A. in Transformation

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyJohn Fante’s second novel, Ask the Dust, helped to catalyze a vision of Los Angeles at the moment it shook off its 19th-century origins and became visible as the city we recognize today. Unfolding on Downtown’s Bunker Hill, once an upper-middle-class enclave that, by the 1930s, had seen its mansions carved into rooming houses, the novel is centered by a Fante alter ego named Arturo Bandini, who yearns to write.
Claire Vaye Watkins’s Desert Dystopia

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

The desert swallowing Los Angeles is, to adapt a well-known coinage, among the city’s deepest images of itself. How could it not be, given that this is a landscape that sits within an ecosystem marked by drought and other natural disruptions, which only highlights the evanescence of everything we humans have built? Such an idea plays its own role in the Southern California literary imagination, from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower to Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach.
Fire, Pandemic, and Grief—Manjula Martin’s Memoir Blazes With Truth

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

It’s tempting to call Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History timely, especially in California, where, in the wake of January’s Eaton and Palisades conflagrations, fire has ceased to feel seasonal at all.
The Dharma Bums: Kerouac, Zen, and the Beat California Dream

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyJack Kerouac’s breakthrough may have been his 1957 novel, On the Road, but I’ve always preferred his follow-up, The Dharma Bums, which appeared the next year. For one thing, there’s less baggage around the book. For another, it’s spare and self-contained, mostly taking place in Northern California and revolving around the author’s friendship with the poet Gary Snyder, fictionalized as Japhy Ryder.
How The Big Sleep Defined California Noir and Philip Marlowe

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyRaymond Chandler may not have invented noir, but he gave the form a Southern California edge. For him, literature emerged from voice more than from content or genre. “There are no vital and significant forms of art,” he wrote in 1950. “There is only art, and precious little of that.” Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, published (like Ask the Dust) in 1939, represents a case in point.
Inside Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne’s Private Archive

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

I like to think about a book as an iceberg,” Julie Golia was saying. “The published thing is just that little tip that sticks out.” This was on a Zoom call early in March to discuss the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Archive at the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue building, where Golia is associate director of the Rayner Special Collections Wing and the Charles J. Liebman Senior Curator of Manuscripts.
A Nuclear L.A. Novel Reimagined

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyGolden Days is the only Carolyn See novel that opens outside California. “Once, I remember, in an entirely different world,” she begins, “I interviewed that East Coast photographer who made a good living taking pictures of people as they jumped.” And yet, even here, that voice—gossipy, insinuating with its reference to that photographer—operates like a whisper in your ear. This is what I most admire about See’s fiction, the way its conversational qualities get us to drop our guard.
John Rechy’s Groundbreaking Queer Classic

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

Chris HardyLater I would think of America as one vast City of Night,” John Rechy writes in the opening sentence of his debut novel, City of Night, “stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.” The rhythms may be reminiscent of the Beat writers who were his contemporaries, but Rechy has long been a pioneer on his own terms.
Why You Should Read This: ‘Mumbo Jumbo’

1 month ago | altaonline.com | David Ulin

When I first encountered Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, shortly after its 1972 publication, I had no idea what to make of it. I was 12, and a precocious reader, but Mumbo Jumbo was unlike anything I had come across: a rollicking novel, written in almost pointillistic style, in which a virus called Jes Grew affects Black communities, although this may be less a matter of affliction than of release.