Tuesday, April 26, 2022

 https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8182-1

 



  •  

     

The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel 

edited by Julia Stein

Cambridge Scholars Publshing

As this volume shows, Los Angeles novels changed greatly beginning in the 1960s as the population of the city became multi-national. For decades, Latino/as have written critical novels of resistance about LA, and, in the 1970s, their novels came of age while influenced by South American magical realism. The book also highlights that African-Americans have authored brilliant Los Angeles fiction for a number of years, while women transformed novels dealing with Hollywood, detectives, and science fiction. In addition, LGBTQ writers—both Anglos and Chicano/as—have created innovative works, while men’s novels that explored 20th century class conflicts have been recently rediscovered.


Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-5275-8182-9

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-8182-1

Release Date: 14th April 2022

Pages: 185

Price: £59.99

-
+

 

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

The new book I just edited "The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel" with Cambridge Scholars Press

 The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel

As this volume shows, Los Angeles novels changed greatly beginning in the 1960s as the population of the city became multi-national. For decades, Latino/as have written critical novels of resistance about LA, and, in the 1970s, their novels came of age while influenced by South American magical realism. The book also highlights that African-Americans have authored brilliant Los Angeles fiction for a number of years, while women transformed novels dealing with Hollywood, detectives, and science fiction. In addition, LGBTQ writers—both Anglos and Chicano/as—have created innovative works, while men’s novels that explored 20th century class conflicts have been recently rediscovered.


Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-5275-8182-9

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-8182-1

Release Date: 14th April 2022

Pages: 185

Price: £59.99

 

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Anthologies about the Los Angeles novel 1984-2003

 

Previous anthologies about the Los Angeles novel: all are interesting but out-of-date as the these anthologies were published from 1984 through 2003. A lot more good Los Angeles novels have been published from 2003-2021.

Fine, David, editor. Los Angeles in Fiction:  A Collection of Original Essays 1984-  L.A. literature as 1930s noirs.  Traces Boosters to Bust of 1930s to Hollywood novels, crime and detective, and then immigrant, ethnic, and apocalyptic fiction. Fine calls LA fiction begins with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and Mary Austin’s The Ford (1917)  and then 1920s novels—the “gentle satires” of Harry Lee Merton’s Merton of the Movies (1923) and Mark Lee Luther’s The Boosters (1923) and later in the decade Ryan’s Angels Flight and Sinclair’s Oil. Then he talks of detective/crime writers “focus on crimes committed and buried in past time” which detective discovers. Also Hollywood novels like Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer Dies a Swan (1939).

Fine, David. Imagining Los Angeles:  A City in Fiction. 2000. “First Literary History of LA in 50 years.” 80% After Ch. 1 intro,  ch 2 on boosters, ch. 3 on 1920s fiction on movies and oil; ch. 4 on hard-boiled 1930s; ch. 5 on Detectives; ch. 6 on Hollywood novels; ch. 7 on poor—Fante and Bukowski; black writers Arna Bontemps, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley; Chicanos Oscar Acosta, Ron Arias, Thomas Sanchez’s Zoot Suit; ch. 8 Black Dahlia post-war misogyny against women’s independence and zoot suits by Luis Valdez and h. 9 Surviving Apocalypse with Braverman’s Palm Latitudes; John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Cortez;  and T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain; and surviving apocalypse in Kadohata and Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Making History

Murphet, Julian.  Literature and Race in Los Angeles. 2001.- detective fiction (post-Chandler of James Elroy’s LA Quartet novels and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rollins series of novels), multi-cultural poets (Coleman, Luis Rodriguez, and Sesshu Foster), adolescent noir fiction (Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper—two wealthy young white males), and  Anna Deveare Smith, a black woman from NY’s take on 1992 L.A. uprising

Timberg, Scott and Gioia, David, editor. The Misread City New Literary Los Angeles   2003. Focuses Skenazy’s essay on detective novels (Cain, Chandler, Ross McDonald, and post-1970s James Ellroy, Joseph Hansen’s gay detective novels, Michael Nava’s gay Chicano investigator, Sue Grafton, Walter Mosley) and fictional apocalypse (David Fine says common theme of LA fiction from 1920s-present is “betrayal of hope and collapse of dreams” p. 66). Fine says women’s novels of LA show even in disaster reason for hope (Isherwood’s A Single Man, Braverman’s Palm Latitudes, Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Making History). I’d add Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City

 

 

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Hello,
'
On  March 18, 2005, on this blog I published "Top 40 Novels of Los Angeles."  If you grew up as a teenager I like did in L.A., the radio would have Top 40 rock 'n roll songs. Of course, the Los Angeles has had many fine novelists with strong voices published in the last 17 years.

Now I am pulling together an Edited Collection of essays called The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel and I would like to invite you to consider submitting one or more chapters.
 

The abstract/call for the Collection is here:
Los Angeles novels began with Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1888 novel Ramona on persecution of Native Americans. Latino/as, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans have written brilliant Los Angeles novels for decades. Women transformed the Hollywood, detective, and science fiction novels. Gay writers have refashioned detective novels while men’s novels show 20th century class conflicts.
Julia Stein was an oral historian of Los Angeles. She has published five books of poetry, two anthologies of poetry, and co-authored the book Shooting Women:  Behind the Camera, Around the World.  Stein has published journalism for decades and was an English professor at Santa Monica College.
A Chapter should normally be no longer than 6000 words, and should be original and previously unpublished. If the work has already been published (as a journal article, or in conference proceedings, for example), the Publisher Cambridge Scholars Press will require evidence that permission to be re-published has been granted.
To see the Call on the Publisher’s website, please click here:
and if you scroll down you see the announcement for my Los Angeles novel collection of essays.  Click the title The Many Voices of the Los Angeles Novel” and you will get the submission form to download and fill out.
 Please feel free to ask if you have any questions.  Send completed submission form to admin@cambridgescholars.com and one to me steinjulia44@gmail.com
Or you can just send the form to me, and I can send it on to the publisher.

Monday, December 10, 2018

The Fourteen Best Feminist Dystopian Fiction of 2018

Novels:

1. Leni Zumas. Red Clocks. 2018- four women’s lives changed when abortions made illegal
2.  Joyce Carol Oates’s Hazards of Time Travel . 2018.-The novel opens in a future autocratic America, where students are taught that men have higher I.Q.s than women, and centers on a young woman who is arrested for treason after she raises questions about the regime in school. As punishment, she gets teleported back to 1959 Wisconsin to be “re-educated” and rendered more docile.
3. Idra Novey. Those Who Knew. Heroine on island hears that rising politician she had an affair with and was beaten by when she was a student was involved with a woman who turned up dead. 2018. She teaches at Princeton.
4.. Binah Shah. Before She Sleeps. 2018.  In an Asian country cancer destroys women’s ability to get pregnant so men have government where women are forced to have multiple husbands to get pregnant all the time, but a few brave women form a resistance movement.
5.. Christina Dalcher’s recent debut novel, “Vox,” 2018- all females have to wear bracelets that shock them if they speak over 100 words. The heroine is afraid her six-year-old daughter will never learn how to speak so fights back
6 Ling Ma. Severance.2018. Drone in NY corporation tries to survived great plague in NY and horrible workplace.
7 Alyson Hagy. Scribe. Graywolf. 2018. In the future disease-ravaged, war-ravaged Appalachia the femalle Scribe, the only one who writes, writes letters for others.
8 Rachel Heng- Suicide Club. New  York 300 years in the future. 2018.
9 Thea Lin. 2018. An Ocean of Minutes. To save her ill boyfriend,, Polly agrees to voyage into the future to rebuild the U.S. but when she awakens five years later, she can’t find her boyfriend.
10. Peng Shepherd. The Book of M. 2018. People caught up in catastrophe try to save loved ones.
11.Sophie Mackintosh’s unsettling debut novel  “The Water Cure,” 2018. a story that feels both futuristic and like an eerily familiar fable. …What if masculinity were literally toxic
12. Helen Sedgwick. The Growing Season.2018. Babies incubated outside the body.
13. Justina Ireland. Dread Nation.2018. In Civil War dead start to walk on battlefields with a black heroine.
Short Stories:
14. N.K. Jemisin. How Long ‘Till Black Future Month.  Short stories about post-human and disaster-ridden worlds by an African-American woman who wrote award-winning science fiction novels

Monday, August 07, 2017



Here's Julia Stein's new article "Los Angeles and the Nation Need a New Deal for Affordable Housing":

Here’s Julia Stein's  review of brilliant poet Amy Uyematsu’s fifth book of poetry on Rain Taxi online:    http://www.raintaxi.com/basic-vocabulary/