Los Angeles' literary landscape

[Dave Monroe]

Los Angeles' literary landscape

By Thomas Curwen and David L. Ulin, Times Staff
Writers

In "Ramona," her 1884 novel of Southern California,
Helen Hunt Jackson did more than tell the story of the
illicit romance between a mestizo orphan and an Indian
sheepherder. Caught in the pages of her famous
melodrama is a picture of the land that is perhaps
more timeless than the tale itself.

[...]

Writers since Jackson have consciously — or
unconsciously — tumbled to similar truths. Whether the
backdrop is bucolic or sprawling, nostalgic or
postmodern, the drama of Southern California is often
caught up in the topography or the development of this
urban environment. Fiction writers portray it,
nonfictions writers explain it, and between the two is
a rich body of literature.

No list of these books is complete, but these 20
titles are a good starting point.

[...]

Fiction

[...]

The Crying of Lot 49

By Thomas Pynchon

When Oedipa Maas first beholds San Narcisco, a vast
sprawl of houses somewhere near L.A., it is all
dystopia sheathed in smog — and ripe for a conspiracy
as dark as any Jacobean tragedy But what matters most
is that Pynchon in a little more than 100 pages
captures a topography straight out of our local past.
The high jinks at Yoyodyne, the cavorting at Echo
Courts, and the pink glow of the sky at night — we
fail to recognize this world at our own risk.

[...]

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-re-125books30apr30,0,6783777.story?coll=cl-art

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