Southland Writers

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Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. —Winner of a 2004 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Award in Literature —Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award —Nominated for an Edgar Award The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page. —Los Angeles Times Jackie Ishida’s grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve. —New York Times Book Review, included in “Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels” Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965—and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys’ deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family’s history—and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.

America has an array of women writers who have made history--and many of them lived, died and were buried in Virginia. Gothic novelists, writers of westerns and African American poets, these writers include a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first woman writer to be named poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the first woman to top the bestseller lists in the twentieth century. Mary Roberts Rinehart was a best-selling mystery author often called the "American Agatha Christie." Anne Spencer was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. V.C. Andrews was so popular that when she died, a court ruled that her name was taxable, and the poetry of Susan Archer Talley Weiss received praise from Edgar Allan Poe. Professor and cemetery history enthusiast Sharon Pajka has written a guide to their accomplishments in life and to their final resting places.

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Although the novels of Walker Percy represent some of the most prominent work in 20th-century Southern fiction, the Percy family itself has a history that is arguably as compelling as anything he could have created. Behind Percy's prose lurks a legacy of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and suicide that spans two centuries. In this compelling biography, Wyatt-Brown skilfully combines intensive research and telling insights to produce the unforgettable story of this gifted family. 48 halftones.