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The Story Behind the Raven: Mysterious Galaxy Sets the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:16:29 -0700

The Story Behind the Raven: Mysterious Galaxy Sets the Industry Standard

by Jeff Mariotte

Twenty years is a big chunk of most lives.

Twenty years ago, I was in a considerably different place in life. I had spent the previous decade working for the regional, independently-owned bookstore chain Books Inc., but they had recently consolidated their efforts into their Bay Area stores and closed the outlying stores, called Hunter’s Books, in southern California and Arizona. That included the store in La Jolla, CA that I had been managing.

I had sold a single short story, and written three novels that were - and will forever remain - unpublished.

Thanks to a connection made through the store, I had been offered the chance to write a trading card set for the Topps company. The cards were based on the comic book WildC.A.T.s, which was one of the original releases from a comic book publisher that was new at the time: Jim Lee’s Homage Studios (later to become known as WildStorm Productions). Writing the text for those cards led to more writing work, and eventually to a full-time job and a new career in publishing, and also to my first novel, which led to all the rest.

In the twenty years since then, I’ve had fifty-some books published, well over a hundred comic books and graphic novels, a couple of fistfuls of short stories, and other random goodies. I helped make WildStorm Productions an industry powerhouse that we sold to DC Comics, and I worked for DC for five years as a senior editor.

But the other thing going on twenty years ago was the creation of Mysterious Galaxy. When Hunter’s Books went away, it left a void in the San Diego bookselling community. There was a specialty mystery bookstore, but their focus was on “cozy” mysteries. Hunter’s was the place that sold science fiction, fantasy, horror, and hard-boiled mystery, and was the destination store for people who loved those genres and the authors who wrote them. And the mystery store that did exist was in its last days, anyway.

Recognizing that void, Maryelizabeth Hart (who I had met at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1990 and married during the con in ‘92) and our friend Terry Gilman and I put together a plan to open our own store, which would be called Mysterious Galaxy. We would sell all the aforementioned genres, have a staff that understood them and could talk about them to our customers, leverage the contacts we’d made as booksellers over the years with authors and publishers, and create the greatest genre bookstore San Diego had ever seen.

On Saturday, May 8, 1993, the store opened. Dozens of writer friends showed up to help us celebrate, and a huge crowd of local readers came and joined in the fun.

In the two decades since, the store has moved a few times, and we’ve opened a second location in Redondo Beach, CA. We’ve hosted hundreds of authors (thousands is probably more accurate, at this point), and put tens of thousands (or more) books into the hands of happy readers. We’ve exhibited every year at SDCC, and have been regulars at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, the Tucson Festival of Books, and other events, large and small, throughout southern California and Arizona.

Terry, Maryelizabeth and I spent most of a terrific week in New York City, where we were recognized by the Mystery Writers of America, at their annual Edgar Awards ceremony, with the prestigious Raven Award, which they give for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside of creative writing.” As Raven recipients, we join the likes of Edward Gorey, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock, Eudora Welty, and many other notables. It’s an honor to be feted in this way by the MWA, and we had an amazing time in the big, beautiful city of New York, enjoying perfect weather, good friends, and busy, bustling sidewalks.

Much has changed over the last twenty years. Mysterious Galaxy has grown. My list of publishing credits has grown. Our kids (David wasn’t even born yet when Mysterious Galaxy opened, and Holly was only 7) have grown. In that time I’ve made deep, lasting friendships that have changed my life and continue to enrich it every day.

On Saturday, May 11, we celebrated the store’s 20th birthday with our annual all-day party. Thirty authors were in attendance, along with hundreds of fans. The Raven Award was admired, and can still be seen on the back counter of the San Diego location

A lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge in the last twenty years. I thank everyone who’s bought my books, everyone who’s shopped at Mysterious Galaxy, every author who’s signed there (and if you’re an author who has signed there and bought my books there, triple props to you!).

Co-owner, author and bookseller Jeff Mariotte wears many hats, and blogs at http://jeff_mariotte.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Jeff’s website: http://jeffmariotte.com/

This weekend, LARB’s Naked Bookseller is very pleased to have 2013 Raven Award-winning staff from Mysterious Galaxy at the blog.

Learn more about the Naked Bookseller Program here.

The Naked Bookseller Bares All: Maryelizabeth Hart on Embracing...

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:00:51 -0700

The Naked Bookseller Bares All: Maryelizabeth Hart on Embracing her eBook

by Maryelizabeth Hart

Two decades have wrought a lot of changes in technology, not the least of which are the advent of the electronic commute, and the emergence of ebooks. While the former has more of a daily impact on my life (That whole “naked bookseller” could be more than an intriguing metaphor – who’d know?), as I work from my off-site office communicating with publicists, authors, and other publishing colleagues, I’ve discovered I’m enjoying the latter more than I initially anticipated.

Part of what took me a while to warm to ebooks was my own technological limitations. I am not always on the best terms with the inanimate or the electronic, so I was hesitant to get an ereader. And because I spend my workdays on my computer, I wasn’t interested in reading ebooks that way. And for the record, I don’t own a smart phone or tablet (I live in the boonies with limited interwebs access by choice, not in a major metropolitan area). So I wanted a dedicated ereader, one that wasn’t a Big Evil Internet Bully proprietary device, and probably one that wasn’t a chain, bricks-and-mortar store one. None of the alternatives really worked for me until last winter, when the IndieBound stores had the opportunity to partner with Kobo to provide ebooks and ebook readers to our customers. And now I enjoy my Kobo mini.

As someone who’s actually managed to run out of books while traveling, I love taking lots of books with me, while only having one or two physical books in my carry-on bag. (Hey, you can’t read ebooks during takeoff or landing, and the in-flight magazine’s only good for, like, one of those per month.) I love being in my office in the middle of nowhere and having a book recommended to me and “picking it up” immediately, if I am so inclined. I love that I just downloaded the severely under-appreciated Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces, the prequel to his dark rural fantasy trilogy, that was one of my favorite hand-sells of the past few years. I love a number of electronic only books and collections, whether new works or out-of-print physical books that would otherwise be unavailable for me to recommend via Mysterious Galaxy, where we only sell new books.

I don’t love that the aforementioned Big Evil Internet Bully and its device have achieved the status of Xerox, Kleenex, or Jello in too many people’s minds, but that’s a rant for another day.

Maryelizabeth Hart, Mysterious Galaxy’s Events Coordinator, Publicity Manager, and co-owner, works from an office located approximately 500 miles as the raven flies from the storefronts.

LARB’s Naked Bookseller welcomes the longtime booksellers at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego and Redondo Beach to the blog! Be sure to catch the rest of their posts this weekend.

Find out more about the Naked Bookseller Program here.

Light Sabers and Knitting Needles: The Naked Bookseller Lands at...

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:01:23 -0700

Mysterious Galaxy in Redondo Beach

Light Sabers and Knitting Needles: The Naked Bookseller Lands at Mysterious Galaxy

This weekend, LARB’s Naked Bookseller program hands over the keys of our blog to star-crossed sub-genre bookstore Mysterious Galaxy (with a flagship store in San Diego and a second outlet in Redondo Beach).

It sounds strange today, but when Mysterious Galaxy opened its doors as a multi-genre focused bookstore during the Clinton administration, not a few people voiced concerns that we would not only not find an audience for books of martians, murder, magic and mayhem, but actually might alienate readers of one genre by including the other. People conjured visions of Agatha Christie-devoted cozy readers stealthily backing away from costumed speculative fiction enthusiasts, and vice versa.

It wasn’t that there were no cross-genre works or authors in 1993, but they were few and far between. (The late and greatly missed Ray Bradbury immediately comes to mind.) And it wasn’t that we didn’t have customers shopping both sides of the store. But it wasn’t until years after we’d opened our doors that titles like Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita Blake novel by Laurell K. Hamilton; Storm Front, the first Dresden Files novel by Jim Butcher; Dead Witch Walking, the first Hollows novel by Kim Harrison; and Dead Until Dark, the first Sookie Stackhouse novel by Charlaine Harris, appeared on our shelves, and we were selling them to both our fantasy and mystery readers. Cross-genre books are the perfect books for many of our readers, and a great personification of our genre store.

Back in 2001, Mysterious Galaxy San Diego’s Linda Tonnesen dubbed the Sookie novels “southern gothic vampire romance mysteries,” which was a handy shorthand way to explain them back when there was no True Blood, no urban fantasy explosion, and readers wondered what to make of this new direction from the author of the Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard southern mysteries. Charlaine and the Sookie novels in particular are an integral part of Mysterious Galaxy’s story – staff members are Tuckerized in Dead as a Doornail and later books, and with her traditional early May release dates, Charlaine made regular appearances at many of Mysterious Galaxy’s annual Birthday Bashes.

During our twenty years in operation, we’ve seen the repeatedly announced death of horror (guess it’s undead? Ha ha!), the rise and leveling out of cyberpunk and steampunk, the growth of paranormal romance to appeal to the fantasy reader as well as the romance market, and the embracing of young adult novels by readers of all ages (thanks, J.K. Rowling). Whether a sub-genre is loved by our staff as a whole, or we just have one passionate bookseller who’s an advocate, we love being able to offer diversity to our community. And we are glad that those light-saber and knitting-needle bearing cross-genre readers are acquiring their books from us.

Through our Naked Booksellers Program, LARB wants to collaborate with bookstores to tell their stories, and help broaden their website’s reach so that fans of a store who may not necessarily even live in the same town can still support it.Yes people, believe it or not, bookstores have websites, and inside those websites are books you can order.

Read “What We Believe About Bookstores”

Rachel Kushner is a New York-based writer whose work has...

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:40:00 -0700

Rachel Kushner is a New York-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, and Grand Street. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

Watch this recent LARB interview with Rachel Kushner at the LA Times Festival of Books.

Southern literature scholar Michael Bibler interviews James...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:41 -0700

Southern literature scholar Michael Bibler interviews James Franco about his new adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:

Filmed on location in Faulkner’s northern Mississippi, the film follows the epic journey of the Bundren family as they battle flood, fire, injury, and insanity to bury the mother, Addie, in her hometown of Jefferson. The novel is told in a series of 59 monologues spoken by 19 characters, giving it the feel of both a fragmentary dramatic script and a series of internal meditations, making it exceedingly difficult to translate to other media. As Mr. Franco explains below, bringing the novel to film poses interesting opportunities and challenges for anyone trying to capture and reimagine both the peasant realism and the modernist surrealism of Faulkner’s self-proclaimed tour-de-force. The film has already generated a great deal of buzz and will no doubt be the subject of much discussion, academic and otherwise, in the years to come.

“So how to confront what happened in 1950s Kenya?”...

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:35 -0700

“So how to confront what happened in 1950s Kenya?” Katie Engelhart reviews Huw Bennett’s recent history of the Mau Mau Uprising:

The conceit is that bumbling Britain managed a more graceful exit from Empire than its imperial peers. Recently, this seductive logic has been challenged — not least by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have renewed interest in British counter-insurgency techniques. But it is still a dominant paradigm shaping Britain’s postcolonial self-history.

Read the whole thing here.

Image 1: Far away from the ocean, the New Century Global Center...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:54 -0700

Image 1: Far away from the ocean, the New Century Global Center in the Sichuan city of Chengdu nonetheless features a marine theme. Not only does its undulating roof call waves to mind, but the completed building will have inside it: an artificial beach, a water park and fountains, along with many other amenities. (© Tong Lam)

Image 2: A banner in an old Chengdu neighborhood reads: “Fortune Global Forum: A Global Event at the Doorstep.” The invitation only forum will be attended by the CEOs of the Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as political leaders from around the world. Many people in the neighborhood have heard of the forum, but few understand what it is all about. (© Tong Lam)

The Ultimate Pleasure Dome

by Tong Lam

In the immediate wake of World War II, George Orwell published a short essay called Pleasure Spots in which he predicted the arrival of large-scale pleasure facilities that people would be able to visit to escape from the real world. The “pleasure spots” of Orwell’s imagination would be enclosed and mediated environments with regulated temperatures, constant music, and endless entertainment. It would be a place where sensual pleasures and excitements were generated, while the individual’s thinking and curiosity was desensitized. In our times, pleasure spots such as resorts, theme parks, and cruise ships are no longer novel.

However, the ultimate pleasure spot exclusively for the super-rich and powerful has yet to arrive. The wait, though, is almost over. Roughly 1,000 km from the Chinese coast, a giant pleasure dome called New Century Global Center is rising from the bottom of the Sichuan basin in the new financial district of Chengdu. The building has 1.5 million square meters of floor space, or nearly three times that of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. It is now the world’s largest standalone structure, indeed, large enough to fit 20 Sydney Opera houses inside.

According to the plan, the building will have a water park, an artificial beach, commercial complexes, shopping arcades, an IMAX cinema, a skating rink, and two luxury hotels with “seaside views.” It is no coincidence that the complex will be one of the venues used when the Fortune Global Forum is held in the city next month. The annual conference organized by the Fortunate Magazine will be attended by the CEOs of the Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as Chinese and international leaders.

When these leaders arrive in Chengdu in early June, the pleasure dome will not only shelter them from the smog that often blankets the city, it will also insulate them from experiencing the rising social discontents and economic disparity of this aspiring megacity. The Foxconn plant in Chengdu, for instance, has had its share of riots and industrial accidents since its opening a few years ago. Then, during the first weekend of May (a politically sensitive time, as it included the anniversary of one of China’s most important early twentieth-century protest waves, the May 4th Movement of 1919) thousands of police officers swarmed to key locations in the city, including its central square, after some local netizens called for demonstrations against the construction of an oil refinery near the city. At the end, there was no Jasmine Revolution-like event, no significant rally, in part perhaps because, in addition to ramped up security, the authorities (in a touch NPR’s Louisa Lim called “Orwellian”) shifted the start of that week’s “weekend” to Monday, so that students had to attend school and some workers had to work on what might have been a protest day.

For now at least, China’s “economic miracle” is still enabled by heavy-handed state policies, low cost labor, diverting forms of consumption and entertainment, and an array of contradictions. For now, the Global Center, a simulacrum par excellence, will shield global business leaders and state officials from the mounting social pressures for change. The ultimate pleasure dome, in a way, is also a counter-pressure dome.

Next week at the New School: Dissent Magazine presents China’s 99%. A panel discussion featuring Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, and Megan Shank. Get more info here.

“To keep a person on the Scientology path, feed him a...

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:40 -0700

Tom Cruise at the opening of a new Scientology building.

“To keep a person on the Scientology path, feed him a mystery sandwich.” Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu on L. Ron Hubbard and the secret history of Scientology:

It was during these years at sea that Scientology adopted the malevolent, secretive character for which it is now infamous. The period left a “legacy of […] belittling behavior toward subordinates and […] paranoia about the government,” Wright writes. “Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.” During this time, Hubbard expanded his theories and instituted a new system of punishments to address disciplinary issues (including crew members who questioned his command or relationships of which he disapproved). When a Sea Org executive was unable to connect a steel cable on the dock during a storm, Hubbard ordered him thrown into the sea. After that, Wright reports, “overboardings became routine.”

Photo: Director Terrence Malick and actor Christian Bale at...

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:52 -0700

Photo: Director Terrence Malick and actor Christian Bale at Austin City Limits. Courtesy of Daily Motion.

Michael Nordine on celebrity and the elusive Terrence Malick:

“Now more than ever, it seems we still can’t conceive of a famous person who doesn’t want to be famous, and even caricatures are more satisfying than a note reading “not pictured” in the celebrity yearbook.”

Read the whole thing here.

Lisa Levy takes on self-help books and the...

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:00:45 -0700

Lisa Levy takes on self-help books and the “pseudo-intellectual” in her discussion of Alain de Botton’s series published by The School of Life:

Is the very idea of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat.

Find out How to Think More (But Not Better) here.

Colin Marshall interviews Anna Stothard, author of The Art of...

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:00:51 -0700

Colin Marshall interviews Anna Stothard, author of The Art of Leaving, about her latest novel, The Pink Hotel.

I lived in Thai Town and Little Armenia, in this apartment block full of just all different sorts of people. And I found that, not driving — I have never driven — I just found that I walked this version of Los Angeles that none of my friends seemed to know anything about. And I’d walk out of my apartment and there would be a huge Armenian wedding going on, and then you’d pass through the crowds of these Armenians and you’d get Thai children peeling oranges on a street corner for a Thai altarpiece. And the Armenian men never whistled at me, the Armenians never seemed to talk to the Thai people. There were all these different layers of the city that nobody seemed to cross over. And then a porn star would jog by and the Thai people wouldn’t notice the porn star. And I like this idea that everyone says that LA is all these suburbs looking for a city. But actually in every little bit of Los Angeles there are so many different layers. And you just have to look beyond the cliche of Los Angeles.

Listen to the LARB Podcast here.

Hey, what are Bob Dylan and Allen doing in a cemetery? Sign up...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:00:59 -0700

Hey, what are Bob Dylan and Allen doing in a cemetery? Sign up for the LARB newsletter featuring the week’s best essays and reviews and find out!

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Sat, 11 May 2013 12:01:00 -0700

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Rebecca Liao reads Niall Ferguson’s gay-baiting career:

During a Q&A session last Friday at the Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, California, noted economic historian Niall Ferguson asserted that John Maynard Keynes did not think long-term because he was homosexual, childless and effete, preferring to read “poetry” to his wife rather than procreate. Outrage came swiftly, and Ferguson responded Saturday morning with an unreserved apology for his “stupid and tactless” remarks.

As far as public apologies go, many have noted the skillful completeness of Ferguson’s. Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian went so far as to say that it was too good to be true. He turned out to be right: Ferguson lambasted those who were unsatisfied with his first apology as “insidious enemies of academic freedom” in an open letter to the Harvard community (Link).

Trouble is, Ferguson has made the same sort of bigoted, non sequitur argument before about Keynes. In his 1999 book The Pity of War, he had this to say of the economist’s (wrong) prediction in late 1915 that Britain’s economy would collapse if WWI did not end soon:

Though his work in the [British] Treasury gratified his sense of self-importance, the war itself made Keynes deeply unhappy. Even his sex life went into a decline, perhaps because the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up.

The suggestion is that Keynes had a particular hankering for the war to be over so that his pool of homosexual partners could be replenished.

Still, Ferguson should not be further punished for apologizing only after a public storm. Apology accepted. But no amount of contrition can close the door he had just opened to what were once merely disconnected and silent musings about the exaggerated masculinity of his work.

When a heterosexual man uses “gay” as a criticism, especially when leveled against a dead man, he is putting down another’s manliness as a means of beating his own chest. It does not help that the word “effete” would not make any sense in this context except to underscore how unmasculine gay people are. Ferguson therefore eliminated any chance to claim that he had meant for “gay” and “childless” to be redundant.

An unapologetic display of machismo has always been integral to Ferguson’s ideas. His gleeful provocation of leftists (i.e. the insufficiently strong and individualistic) began while a student at Oxford in the 80s with a Thatcherite hatred of “wet” Tories. He then strong-armed his way into intellectual legitimacy with a pro-imperialist economic history of the British Empire. His most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, reaffirmed his paternalistic belief that British colonialism had a largely beneficial effect on the colonized countries, not least because it civilized them through economic development and brought them under the wing of British humanitarianism. As author Pankaj Mishra and many before him have pointed out, Ferguson has made these points while rationalizing the great loss of life, culture, and national resources in former colonies. Not to mention that the inherently debilitating effects of subjugation barely register in his assessment. His faith in the inherent benevolence of robust, muscular intervention in less developed countries has attracted many accusations of white-male solipsism.

He more or less carries on that mantle in his current preoccupation with the decline of the West. The geopolitical threat of the Middle East had him lamenting the West’s “pusillanimity,” though he denies that he is a hawkish neoconservative. On the other hand, despite expressing concerns with the stability of its authoritarian regime, he has looked on China with admiration, especially when it comes to the country’s economic success. Never mind the threat that also poses to Western supremacy.

It is not surprising that Ferguson would favor China since he confesses in Civilization that he left Britain for America because that is where “the money and power actually were.” Among his many talents is a knack for finding an amenable home for an aggressive instinct. He stated in an interview in 2011 that he took his current position at Harvard because the American intellectual culture glorified his brand of “excessive vehemence” whereas the British would not tolerate it. He made the right bet with America, and his broad-sweeping ideas and unshakeable confidence have made him a star on the Davos-TED-Aspen circuit.

It remains to be seen whether last week’s remarks will dull the popularity of his intellectual output among that glamorous circle. Of all possible hints Ferguson has offered over the years of a source for his many ideological loyalties, there has never been one so visceral, and therefore with the same ring of truth. To finally blurt such strong evidence of a powerful urge to assert his masculinity in his ideas is the crack of vulnerability he’d been trying to avoid all along. Without that crutch of authority, one wonders if, from now on, he will be searching for a new hint of indifference from his audiences.

— Rebecca Liao

May 11, 2013

Rebecca Liao [bio here] is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books; her pieces on China’s 2012 yearbook is here; her piece on fashion here.

Ever wonder what editors really think when they receive...

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:00:48 -0700

Ever wonder what editors really think when they receive submissions? Curious about MFA programs but not sure what to expect? Feel like the state of publishing is so bleak you may just slowly Tweet your next novel? Writers’ Program student Clarissa Romano is here to help! As a Senior Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books with an MFA in creative writing and work published in The Los Angeles Review, South Carolina Review, and Wisconsin Review, among others, she brings a uniquely diverse perspective to the table. Here she discusses the value of writing education and shares her tips on getting published.

Read LARB Senior Fiction Editor Clarissa Romano’s interview for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program here.

We are excited to invite you to HoopLA, a new kind of variety...

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:01:08 -0700

Erika Schickel

Amy Simon

Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky

Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky

We are excited to invite you to HoopLA, a new kind of variety show that fuses story, song and spectacle! HoopLA is hosted by Erika Schickel and features performances by Amy Simon, Weba Garretson, Ralph Gorodetsky, and more.

Writing songs together since 1993, Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky have consistently explored the intersection of popular and contemporary musical ideas. They have written Woody Guthrie inspired songs for the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s production of “Utopia/Dystopia” at the Redcat in 2008; created contemporary arrangements of theater songs by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht as members of the Eastside Sinfonietta; combined deconstructed rock songs by AC/DC and the Rolling Stones with spoken word narratives in “Welcome to Webaworld;” and in “Puttanesca” they collaborated with guitarist Joe Baiza to manifest a surreal dreamscape in Punk Jazz.

Amy Simon is a 56-year-old mother, actress, playwright, humanist, improviser, published writer, online blogger, producer, and self-proclaimed Cultural Herstorian. Her fun and fabulous theatrical Los Angeles adventures include She’s History!, her solo play and school program about women who make and made history, Cheerios In My Underwear (And Other True Tales Of Motherhood)her first solo play (which holds the record as the longest running solo show in Los Angeles), and her work as a consultant on the 2008 launch of the Broad Stage Theater in Santa Monica. Amy is thrilled to be part of a variety show, having been the creative force behind Heroine Addicts, the four-year hit all-girl variety show at bang!, and co-produce, director and actor in the all-girl sketch comedy variety shows Gal-O-Rama and Ovaryaction at The Improv, The Laugh Factory, and The Upfront Comedy Theatre. Motherhood inspired Amy to create Motherhood UnpluggedandMoms Who Write,a mom written and performed story, music salon, and stage show. A frequent guest on local and national radio, her weekly segment Fabulous Female Facts can be heard on the Nicole Sandler Show Radioornot.com. Amy is proud to be a Women’s History expert for The Women’s Media Center SheSource.org, an online braintrust of female professionals, founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem. She is working on a She’s History! book, and is the mother of two daughters who can tell you all about the first woman to run for President.

Get more information and tickets here.

Michael Kammen reflects on his friendship with Jack Kerouac and...

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:01:00 -0700

From "Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster" by Steve Turner (Viking) Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

From "Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster" By Steve Turner (Viking). Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

From "Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg" by Carolyn Cassady (Black Spring Press) Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Michael Kammen reflects on his friendship with Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson’s new biography The Voice is All, with a never-before-published letter from Kerouac to Kammen:

Why do we need a substantial new look at Jack Kerouac now, that largely ends late in 1951 with the completion of his best-known book, On the Road, which did not actually appear until 1957 when his oeuvre was blossoming but his melancholy decline began? Why indeed. First, because all but one previous biography are highly unsatisfactory, misleading about meanings and events, and not adequately based upon the abundant Kerouac archive.

Read it all here.

We are excited to invite you to HoopLA, a new kind of variety...

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:27:00 -0700

Gayle Brandeis

Erika Schickel

Sandra Tsing Loh

We are excited to invite you to HoopLA, a new kind of variety show that fuses story, song and spectacle! HoopLA is hosted by Erika Schickel and features performances by Sandra Tsing Loh, Gayle Brandeis, and more.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young people, My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award. Her work has appeared in such places as Salon.com and The Rumpus and has been widely anthologized. Gayle teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University and lives in Riverside, CA, where she is mom to two adult kids and a toddler. She is serving a two year appointment as the new Inlandia Literary Laureate. She will be joined by Nancy Saahira Tedder, who owns the Body Temple Transformative Arts Studio in Riverside and is the director of Saahira’s Gypsy Soul Belly Dance Troupe.

Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of the New York Times notable book Mother on Fire, inspired by her hit solo show of the same name, which ran for seven months at 24th Street Theatre. During that time, she was named one of the 50 most influential comedians by Variety. Her other solo shows include “Aliens in America” and “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp” (both off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre), “Sugar Plum Fairy” (Geffen Playhouse, Seattle Rep), and “I Worry” (Kennedy Center, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville). Her short story, “My Father’s Chinese Wives,” won a Pushcart Prize in 1996, and is also featured in the Norton Anthology of Modern Literature. Loh’s previous books include A Year in Van Nuys, Aliens in America, Depth Takes a Holiday, and a novel, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, which was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the 100 best fiction books of 1998. She has been a regular commentator on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and on Ira Glass’ “This American Life”; currently, her weekly segment “The Loh Life”” is heard on KPCC and her syndicated daily minute “The Loh Down on Science,” is heard weekly by almost 4 million people. Excerpts from her solo piano CD Pianovision have been heard on several NPR shows, and she also scored the music for the 1998 Oscar-winning documentary Breathing Lessons. She is a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly, and is writing a new (humorous!) book on menopause for W.W. Norton.

Get more information and tickets here.

Brian Kim Stefans reviews the art of Llyn Foulkes, on view at...

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:48 -0700

Brian Kim Stefans reviews the art of Llyn Foulkes, on view at The Hammer Museum through May 19.

In some ways, this might leave us with a fairly simplistic message — Mickey Mouse bad, Nature (and the aging Llyn Foulkes) good — but it is rendered complex due to the very different techniques Foulkes uses to depict distinct categories of object, as if each were circulating in their own realm of being and not actually coming into contact with each other. Sure, Mickey Mouse seems to be glued to the face of George Washington in Mr. President (2006), but is it really possible to say that a portrait of Washington — whose aura, whatever it once conveyed, has long been dispelled by the ubiquity of the dollar bill not to mention paintings by Larry Rivers — stands for anything inspiring or complex these days that Mickey Mouse (who, lounging in retirement, seems rather useful as a dusty, ironic symbol of whatever stands for cultural antiquity in America) is simply getting in the way of?

Read the whole thing here.

Mountaintop Retreatby Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Toxic air...

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:35:02 -0700

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, May 2013

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, May 2013

Mountaintop Retreat
by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Toxic air pollution, avian flu, dead pigs floating down the river, rat meat sold as lamb in local restaurants, bottled water that might not be safe to drink… Life in Shanghai is starting to feel like it brings a daily revelation of threats to our environment and health. Even the hardiest city-dweller might want to escape the chaos from time to time, and so when a friend offered me the opportunity to join a weekend trip he had organized to the mountaintop retreat of Moganshan, one of my favorite places in China, I jumped at the chance.

Moganshan, a four-hour bus ride from Shanghai, has served as an escape from the city for more than a century. In the late 1890s, foreign missionaries and businessmen were also seeking refuge from environmental and public health dangers: in summers, a dense cloud of swampy heat and humidity descends on Shanghai, making heat stroke a constant danger in those pre-air conditioning days. Epidemics of measles, malaria, and cholera raced through the population, hitting children particularly hard. Shanghai’s foreign residents wanted a summertime retreat where their families could avoid the city’s worst season, and they found one on the cool, breezy top of Moganshan (or Mount Mogan; “shan” means “mountain”).

Moganshan, with its large missionary community, was more sedate and middle-class than the better-known hill station at Kuling, another summer outpost for foreigners in China. Moganshan’s visitors built over 300 modest stone villas — plain boxes with few architectural flourishes aside from a veranda or balcony — about 150 of which are still standing today. In the 1920s and ‘30s, several Chinese notables joined the foreigners on Moganshan: Shanghai gangsters Du Yuesheng (“Big-Eared Du”) and Zhang Xiaolin both owned vacation homes on the mountain, and Chiang Kai-shek made several trips to Moganshan, including one with his wife Soong Mei-ling on their honeymoon. After the foreign community left China following the Communist victory in 1949, the government took over many of Moganshan’s villas and turned the mountain into a sanatorium for cadres in need of a rest. Other villas were leased for a token amount of rent to Chinese families that had once worked for the foreign visitors, with up to four households moving into a single residence. And some of the houses were simply left to rot, their sturdy stone shells now a ghostly presence among the thick bamboo forests of the mountain.

My group spent the weekend exploring the villas of Moganshan, guided at first by Mark Kitto, an Englishman who fell in love with the largely abandoned resort town in 1999 and managed to rent and restore two houses there several years later. Kitto, as he explains in his memoir of life on the mountain, China Cuckoo: How I Lost a Fortune and Found a Life in China,* faced innumerable challenges in his quest to move to Moganshan; several government and military departments share oversight of the community, and all of them are happiest when they can preserve the status quo. This explains, in part, why so many of the beautiful old villas have fallen into disrepair: renovating them to their early-twentieth-century glory would require coordination and money from the various departments involved, and it’s easier to leave things as they are. Kitto and his Guangzhou-born wife, Joanna, have tried to spark tourism to Moganshan, operating a coffee shop and gathering spot called The Lodge, as well as three guesthouses in restored villas, but they’re soon preparing for a move to England.

Despite the impending departure of the Kittos, Moganshan, which received a write-up in the New York Times last year, is stirring to life after decades of stagnation. As our group hiked through bamboo groves and climbed the endless flights of stone steps that turn the mountain into an excellent StairMaster substitute, we seemed to be followed everywhere we went by the sounds of hammers banging and circular saws whirring. Construction crews hauled refuse out of the old villas, while new bathroom fixtures sat in overgrown gardens waiting to be installed. The smell of fresh paint wafted through the air whenever we approached a house under renovation, and workmen stopped what they were doing to watch us snapping photos of their efforts. A small stone church looks like a country chapel straight out of Downton Abbey, after its restoration by the local Christian community several years ago. And down the road from Moganshan town, in the nearby village of Wulingcun, construction is underway on a large new hotel, projected to open at the end of this year. At the base of the mountain, the naked Stables resort and Le Passage Mohkan Shan offer super-luxury accommodations; at the peak (where my group stayed), facilities are more basic, with a half-dozen tiny restaurants — all offering, I realized, the same menu — and another dozen or so low- and mid-range hotels. If the local government would restore the old public swimming pool (now closed, after a failed experiment with turning it into a fishing pond), the resort would have just about everything a weekend visitor could ask for.

I’d be perfectly content for the mountain to remain a semi-secret, a respite from the ultra-crowded conditions found nearly everywhere else in eastern China, but I know that Moganshan is too wonderful a summertime retreat to stay under the radar for much longer. It offers lovely scenery, smooth trails, and — perhaps best of all — as we hiked past streams, a small lake, and that abandoned swimming pool, I didn’t see a single floating dead pig. Really, that’s all I wanted.

* At The Lodge, I bought a second edition of the British version of Kitto’s book, which was published in the United States as Chasing China: How I Went to China in Search of a Fortune and Found a Life. The American version has not, as far as I can tell, been updated with Kitto’s new epilogue, which explains his decision to leave China — also covered in a famous-among-expats Prospect Magazine article titled “You’ll Never Be Chinese.”

Read the rest of LARB’s China Blog here.

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:00:56 -0700

The artist Joshua Abelow creates a drawing inspired by Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poetic encounter with a deer in the twilight.

LARB Senior Poetry Editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi reads her poem at the New York Times’ T Magazine.

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