Paperback L.A. Book 1

Style of Dress of the Wealthy Californios …...............................….William Heath Davis.
An appreciation of fashion-forwardness in the 1830s. Excerpted from the book Seventy-Five Years in California

Culture & Porn: L.A. Bookshops in the 20s and 30s ……………… Victoria Dailey
In Raymond Chandler’s L.A., the porn racket was part of the rarified world of the wealthy. Here’s the true history behind L.A. Prohibition Era bookstores with back rooms.

Mudtown: Watts Pastorale, 1915-20 ……………………Arna Bontemps
Former St. Louis jockey Little Augie finds the rural high life in L.A.’s “Mudtown” at Leake’s Lake on-trend dance pavilion. From the Harlem Renaissance writer’s novel God Sends Sunday (1931).

One-liners………………………………………………………………….Various writers
From H.L. Mencken’s “The whole place stank of orange blossoms” to Michael Connelly’s “Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary,” we’ve got you covered for punch lines.

A Day’s Work ……………………………………………………………………Carlos Bulosan
In Depression-era L.A., this poet, immigrant and labor organizer learned that it was a crime to be Pilipino. He describes his first day in town in the spare prose of a weary young migrant, frightened at every turn as L.A. cops make their violent way through the community. From America is in the Heart (1941).

Hollywood Agent Attire, Blacklist-Era style..................................................Clancy Sigal
In this excerpt from his 2016 memoir Black Sunset, young Clancy is broke in midcentury Los Angeles. He’s a movie buff and radicalized WWII vet with borrowed pants and a pair of FBI guys trailing, when he’s hired as rookie Hollywood agent. He needs haberdashery.

Pilgrimage ………………………………………………………………..Susan Sontag
Before Susan Sontag was America’s “social critic with verve” as the New York Times obit described her, before she was an internationally acclaimed intellectual, feminist and LGBTQ icon, she was a teenager in the Valley in L.A. In a piece for the New Yorker, she remembered how as a teen in 1958, she had tea with her literary idol German expatriate novelist Thomas Mann.

Frozen Looks…………………………………………………………………Eve Babitz
Eve Babitz’s bio often gets more attention than her incandescent, rapturous prose about her beloved L.A. After all, the Doors song "L.A. Woman" is about her, and well, there’s more. This account of her teenaged self at the beach from Eve’s Hollywood captures all the knowing, rough-edged angst of local youth in the Rebel Without a Cause era.

Call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game…………………………………………….. Vin Scully
Ask Angelenos what L.A. means to them and a significant percentage will answer “The Dodgers.” And for decades, the Dodgers experience meant Baseball Hall of Famer Vin Scully. We bring you his unforgettably dramatic broadcast call of the ninth inning of the perfect game pitched on September 9, 1965 by Sandy Koufax.

Route Riff I: The Ballad of Dave and Eddie……………………………………Dan Bern
Los Angeles singer-songwriter Dan Bern overhears what some might call a stoner moment. His ballad is also a spot-on expression of the beach-city mindset celebrated in the film The Big Lebowski. Basically, Dave and Eddie decide they need another freeway. First published in Zyzzyva, Summer 1991.

Children of Mayaguez………………………………………….......Victor and Mary Lau Valle
Pulitzer-prize winning Chicanx/Latinx iournalist and ethnic studies professor Victor Valle is an L.A. native who remembers his Uncle Teofilo showing him in the mid-1980s how to make pulque from backyard maguey. Excerpted from the cookbook/memoir Recipes of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine (1995), which he wrote with his wife, Mary Lau Valle.

Thirty-Ninth Street …………………………………………………………………………..Hector Tobar
Best-selling Chicanx/Latinx author Hector Tobar’s 2011 Barbarian Nurseries was named a New York Times Notable Book and Boston Globe Best Fiction Book that year for its masterful shaping of a widescreen view of L.A. In this excerpt, Araceli Ramirez, housekeeper and artist, on a quest through the city, steps to the end of one of L.A.’s billions of dead end streets and finds a portal to self-discovery.

Route Riff II: Exact Change…………………………………………………………………………..Paul Beatty
Forget car culture. A Metro bus turned amphibious landing vehicle is one of the vivid images from the Man Booker Prize winning The Sellout (2016) by African American novelist, poet and satirist Paul Beatty. Beatty, born and raised in L.A. uses echoes of history to re-dream of the present, as in this excerpt, in which we join a renegade party cruise up Pacific Coast Highway.