Story in the Air

A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932-1998

I co-edited this anthology with noted poet and editor Paul Vangelisti. You can find the book at Amazon.com.

There are cities writers have sought as inspiration; Paris in the ’20s, or New York or San Francisco in the ’40s and ’50s. Then there is Los Angeles, a place poets and writers have avoided or at least never expected to end up in. Once arrived, many found themselves remarkably productive, intrigued with the city and a life that often struggles to be heroically elsewhere. L.A. Exile is a guide to the literature, the writers and the physical spaces that have made for what composer Igor Stravinsky called “splendid isolation”. Ranging from the early-century writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Upton Sinclair to contemporary authors such as Gore Vidal and Frank Chin, L.A. Exile offers a grand tour of America’s great “lost city”.

Reviews for L.A. Exile:
“This collection of L.A. writings by the known and not-so-known surprised me, because geographic anthologies tend to be the dumbest. I don’t know why, because cities are perfect hubs for multiple-author thought, but maybe that’s just it. There’s something else going on beyond just a bunch of known-author names and a place, especially in a U.S. city where everybody’s atomized, and especially in L.A., and it takes a discerning mind to trace the routes along which that author-place exchange occurs. The editors of L.A. Exile have a good sense of the L.A. spirit, and every one of their selections says something unexpected and profound about southern California. Which is to say that the selections from the known quantities are almost always the unobvious ones, so authors, some of whom (Faulkner) might not be considered L.A., get illuminated in turn.
- Alvin Lu, The San Francisco Bay Guardian

“L.A. Exile illustrates just what one might have expected: that, for some, the change of venue led to lassitude and loss of focus, while for others, it provided a respite, an inspiration, an irritant, a sense of liberation, or all of the above.”
- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

“This valuable and exciting collection gathers pieces not only by the usual suspects (West, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Cain, Didion) but some decidedly non-usual ones: John Stenibeck (who lived in Eagle Rock and married in Glendale), Gore Vidal (who toiled on the script for Ben Hur: ‘My Tiberius resembled a hardworking but totally ineffectual chief executive of a lousy company like Chrysler’), Chester Himes (‘under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate’) and Thomas Pynchon.”
- Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle