The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles
Co-edited with Scott Timberg, was published by Red Hen Press, 2003.
From the cover: "This new and necessary book — a collection of author profiles, literary journalism, and speculative pieces about the Southland’s writing and publishing scene — aims to capture the Southern California of here and now. We want to get at the Los Angeles that came after the gumshoes, the wisecracking Englishmen, after the Boosters, the Beats, and the boozers, after the despairing heroines of Joan Didion and the coked-up rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis. What is literary Los Angeles about now? Do these old templates survive, the way Hawthorne’s Puritans still echo through the fiction of New England and Cooper’s frontiersmen still stalk the literature of the mountain West? Without ignoring the city’s rich past, we have tried to focus on the present-living writers active in the final decade of the last century and the first few years of the new one. One guiding conviction is that the literary arts have taken their own shape in Southern California; from its poetry to its ! pulp fiction, a shape that often baffles its Eastern and British visitors."