Los Angeles' literary landscape

[Paul Mackin]

A kind of interesting thing about the fiction entries is that, of the  
authors'  names' I recognized, no one  was originally from the L.A  
area.  Joan Didion was from California, but up north in Sacramento.

I wonder if it might be necessary to be from somewhere else to fully  
sense the by-now widely perceived "strangeness" of the place.

On May 1, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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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