Back in the days when I was a young, impressionable college student, one of my Literature professors told a story in class that really stuck with me. We were talking about Los Angeles literature, something I found interesting but didn’t know much about yet. He told the class about how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West came…
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A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of a Free Kindle promotion for Take Back Tomorrow, my book made up into the Top 5 on Amazon’s “Free Science Fiction” list. For about a day, I was hobnobbing with the likes of David Drake and Jules Verne in terms of downloads. And, absurdly, I heard…
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I first came across a reference to Don Ryan when I was reading Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series, a remarkable history of California. Starr identified Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight as one of the first novels about Los Angeles and Hollywood, and since that was the focus of my dissertation, I sought out…
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I’ll think of this as the summer I became an audiobook convert. I had never really had anything against audiobooks before, but had just thought of them as “not my thing.” Years ago, while studying for the GRE in literature, I remember listening to cassettes (I did say “years ago,” remember?) of George Bernard Shaw…
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