ONE of the best and most unpredictable memoirs I've read in years is The Adderall Diaries, which is a weird hybrid of a murder trial, S&M chronicle, and document of drug abuse. I just bumped into its author, Stephen Elliott, who is a far more level guy than you'd expect given that previous description, at the local coffee shop. Elliott, who's an editor at the excellent literary site The Rumpus, is … [Read more...]
The Wide World of David Mitchell
If there's a more inventive, most linguistically alive mid-career writer than David Mitchell, I've not read him. Best known as the author of the century-jumping, continent-hopping cult novel Cloud Atlas, he'll be appearing at Skylight Books on July 23 to read from his new novel, set mostly in the late 18th c., The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I was able to speak to the English-born, … [Read more...]
Slake Tells LA’s Stories
PORN, celebrity, poetry and sharp graphic design: It’s got a little of everything, just like the city it chronicles. I’D heard enough good things about the new LA-centric quarterly, Slake, to have high hopes for it. But so far, to my initial assessment, Slake – a publication of fiction, art, photography and journalism -- has exceeded he high expectations I had for it.Part of the reason for my high … [Read more...]
The Killer Inside Jim Thompson
WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton’s The Killer Inside Me opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author's biographer for insight into this very complicated pulp figure. If there is a better biography of an American writer than Robert Polito’s Savage Art, I’ve not read it. (The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.)Polito’s book describes Thompson as a “profoundly … [Read more...]
The Twisted Mind of Geoff Nicholson
THE Los Angeles-based novelist and recovering Englishman Geoff Nicholson had a smart, counter-intuitive and oddly funny essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about his passion for old Guinness Books of Records and "the joys of outdated information."Geoff, whose book The Lost Art of Walking I like very much, was part of a small posse I ran with at Guadalajara’s International Festival of … [Read more...]
The Agony and Ecstasy of Daniel Clowes
I GUESS I expected one of those harsh, shriveled social misfits with which he he populates his books. But the comics artist I met in Los Feliz recently was a very cool, reasonably well adjusted guy.But as I write in a piece in Sunday's LA Times: "In person, Clowes — who has created an oeuvre marked by hard-edged social criticism, over-the-top satire and obnoxious, confrontational characters — is … [Read more...]
Neck and Neck Over Nabokov
WELL gang, Misread City readers seem to be equally split between Pale Fire fans and Lolita fans -- there is a joke here I can't quite summon. In any case, because the vote ended in a dead tie, I have put up this blog's first ever runoff to break the tie.Please vote for one OR the other and please tell your friends.All my best,Scott … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem to the Southland
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along … [Read more...]
BARACK OBAMA AND EZRA JACK KEATS
Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration... i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it -- i've learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning about talking about politics and religion across the dinner table. but … [Read more...]