In a follow-up to his masterful Say Her Name, The Interior Circuit is Goldman’s emergence from the grief of his wife’s death as he embraces Mexico’s capital as his home—a city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. Yet as the narco war rages on and…
In their groundbreaking book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers describe how they arrived at a pan-species approach to medicine. Animals do indeed get diseases ranging from brain tumors and heart attacks to anxiety and eating disorders, just like we…
“Dear ONE,” illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1967, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay and lesbian periodical in the United States. Looking for love, friendship, advice or understanding, readers wrote of loneliness and…
The work of British writer Geoff Dyer is frequently classified as “unclassifiable;” his writing is wildly eclectic yet gorgeously coherent. His new book, Another Great Day at Sea—about life on an American aircraft carrier—is at the same time a travelogue, unerring social observation, and honed…
For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern American theater, with a major trilogy focused on the Cassandra family, a clan so star-crossed that several members are incarcerated, institutionalized or…
New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectives. As their characters variously struggle to forge lasting connections, they evoke issues long familiar to the psychoanalyst. Is it possible to…
Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels is one of the most acclaimed fiction cycles in English literature. Michael Silverblatt talks with St. Aubyn about his first novel since completing his series hailed for its satirizing of the English aristocracy. In…
In 1939, Union Station opened on the former site of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown—displacing thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans. The new station fulfilled the vision of civic leaders who believed that an impressive gateway was critical to the growth of Los Angeles. In place of Chinatown…
Form is an Extension of Content, wrote Charles Olson. What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing writers explore the power and influence of structure, starting with the sentence, in revealing and shaping their material.
On the occasion of her new memoir, one of America’s most beloved and accomplished classical singers shares her life story: a descendant of generations of hardworking slaves and free ancestors who grew up amid the challenges of Jim Crow racism in the south as the civil rights movement was at its…
Whitehead, the bestselling author of Zone One and an amateur player, lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. In this raucous social satire—equally exhilarating for those who’ve played cards their whole life or who have never picked up a hand—he…
