Paperback LA is a surprising and witty collection of some of the best writing ever about Los Angeles. More than a dozen major selections include new work and fresh discoveries: a radio broadcast, a ballad, a magazine article, excerpts from prizewinning novels and memoirs. These pieces are punctuated by perceptive photo essays, a quotable lineup of one-liners, and other quick hits. In the company of a virtuosic band of storytellers, Paperback LA roams across the decades, from just after the Mission era to just after Hollywood’s golden age, from the post-hardcore punk scene to a reimagined today. With Susan Sontag, we visit Thomas Mann. With Paul Beatty, we turn a Metro ride into a PCH party. With Héctor Tobar, we search for people who lived somewhere around here. With Victoria Dailey, we look in on the boys in the backroom. Photographers share vivid moments of street sights, skaters at play, and activists on the march. Paperback LA’s contributors have attitude, and they have information. Each inspired work illuminates some aspect of the city’s rich, spread-out reality. Some shine a quick klieg light on a moment or person, others gradually reveal a dawning sense of place—in settings that range from a 1920s rural dance pavilion to 1960s Dodger Stadium, with subject matter that sprawls from bookselling to bodysurfing. Contributions from Eve Babitz • Paul Beatty • Dan Bern • Arna Bontemps • Carlos Bulosan • Cecil Castelucci • Victoria Dailey • William Heath Davis • Robert Landau • Justin Andrew Marks • Steve Martin • Hugo Reid • Vin Scully • Susan Sontag • Clancy Sigel • Hector Tobar • Victor and Mary Lau Valle • Elysa Voshell/Venice Arts

Drawing upon more than two hundred years of images and human experience in Los Angeles, Jon and Nancy Wilkman have gathered a telling array of newspaper photos, historical snapshots of the movie industry, and photos that offer a glimpse into the sports, politics, industry, social change, crime, disasters, arts, and everyday life of each decade in Los Angeles.

Jonathan Gold has eaten it all. Counter Intelligence collects over 200 of Gold's best restaurant discoveries--from inexpensive lunch counters you won't find on your own to the perfect undiscovered dish at a beaten-path establishment. He reveals the hidden kitchens where Los Angeles' ethnic communities feed their own, including the best of cuisine from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Burma, Canton, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Middle East, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam and more. Not to mention the perfectly prepared hamburger and Los Angeles' quintessential hot dog. Counter Intelligence is the richest and most complete guide to eating in Los Angeles. The listings include where to find it and how much you'll pay (in many cases, not very much) with appendices that cover food types and feeding by neighborhood.

The debut title in a new city-based anthology series featuring all-new stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes—each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad. “A stimulating anthology of 14 futuristic L.A. fables . . . Some of the best of these tales seem illumined by the humanistic spirit of the late Ray Bradbury, poet laureate of Southern California fantasy literature.” —Wall Street Journal As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways. In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you’ll find here. Featuring brand-new stories by: Charles Yu, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.

Schwartz examines Ruscha's diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop.

Available Now: World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories.