Imagining Los Angeles

The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California.

"The promotional literature that lured sun-starved Midwesterners to Southern California in the 1880s hyped the region as the New Eden. But the novelists who created our vision of Los Angeles soon began to see it as Dystopia rather than Utopia, a corrupt, unreal city foreshadowing and reflecting all that is wrong with America. David Fine traces the history of the place through the work of the authors who have defined it in our imaginations." --Book Jacket.

“Remarkable . . . deeply inventive . . . Thorton has imagined Argentina truly; his inspired fable troubles and feeds our own intriguing imagining.”—Los Angeles Times Imagining Argentina is set in the dark days of the late 1970's, when thousands of Argentineans disappeared without a trace into the general's prison cells and torture chambers. When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift: In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of “the disappeared.” But he cannot “imagine” what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit. Praise for Imagining Argentina “A harrowing, brilliant novel.”—The New Yorker “A powerful new novel . . . Thorton seems to have wedded his study of such writers as Borges and Marquez with thy his own instinctive gift for metaphor, and in doing so, created his own brand of magical realism”—The New York Times “Imagining Argentina is a slim volume filled with beautiful writing. It is an exciting adventure story. It is a haunting love story. And it is a story for all time.”—Detroit Free Press “The writing is crystalline, the metaphors compelling . . . Its central theme is universal.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “In a time when much North American fiction is contained by crabbed realism, Thorton takes for his material one of the bleaker recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human spirit and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit.”—The Washington Post Book World “A powerful first novel and a manifesto for the memorializing power of literature.”—The New York Times Book Review “A profoundly hopeful book.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Using an analysis of the history of Los Angeles's streetcar and highway systems, Sikivu Hutchinson argues that the cultural geography of transportation has had a compelling influence upon the construction of race, gender, and urban subjectivity in the postmodern city. She highlights the influence of American anti-urbanism upon visions of the city during the Great Migration and World War II eras. Proceeding from the premise that the creation of city spaces are informed by collective cultural memory, Hutchinson explores how the decline of public transportation and the rise of the automobile have shaped African American communities and cultures in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author’s direct observation and experience of the city’s social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can’t Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the “real place” in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto’s monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States’ most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.

Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles -- these define "the city" in the world's consciousness. James Donald takes us on a psychic journey to these places that have inspired artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers for centuries. Considering the cultural and political implications of the "urban imaginary, " Donald explores the pleasures and challenges of modern living, contending that the imagined city remains the best lens for a future of democratic community. How can we think of Chicago without recalling the grittiness of The Asphalt Jungle's back alleys, or of London without the dank, foggy atmosphere so often evoked by Dickens? When de Certeau explores what it means to walk through a city, or Foucault dissects the elements of the modern attitude, what are they telling us about modernity itself? Through a discussion of these and many other questions about urban thought, Donald demonstrates how artists and social critics have seen the city as the locus not just of vanity, squalor, and injustice, but also of civilized society's highest aspirations. Imagining the modern City also looks at how artists have shaped cities through their creation of public spaces, sculpture, and architecture -- art forms that help determine our ideas about our place in the urban environment. Planners and architects such as Otto Wagner, Le Corbusier, and Bernard Tschumi present us with real and possible cities, showing a way forward to alternative social futures, Donald asserts. The modern city provides both a culturally resonant imagined space and a physical place for the everyday life of its residents. Imagining the Modern City is a rich and dazzling exploration of theways cities stir and shape our consciousness.

One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017" A Grace Paley Reader compiles a selection of Paley’s writing across genres, showcasing her breadth of work as well as her extraordinary insight and brilliant economy of words. "A writer like Paley," writes George Saunders, “comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.” Best known for her inimitable short stories, Grace Paley was also an enormously talented essayist and poet, as well as a fierce activist. She was a tireless member of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the tenants’ rights movement, the anti-nuclear-power movement, and the Women’s Pentagon Action, among other causes, and proved herself to be a passionate citizen of each of her communities—New York City and rural Vermont.