skopia
A Los Angeles magazine asked architects how postwar America should live, and Eames, Koenig, and Neutra answered in steel and glass on hillsides. Julius Shulman's photographs sold California modernism to the world.
A husband hires Lew Archer to find the bride who fled their honeymoon, and the trail runs back decades into two families' history. In Macdonald's California, crimes are inherited rather than committed.
Oakland spent a third of what the Yankees spent and won as many games, buying the hitters scouts despised. Every team in baseball now runs on the arithmetic Lewis watched Billy Beane use.
Fame arrived and Kerouac could not survive it. His narrator retreats to a friend's cabin above the Pacific to dry out, drinks instead, and comes apart in a night of delirium.
Stephenson coined the word Metaverse in these pages, and Facebook renamed itself after the idea. His sword-carrying hacker delivers pizza for the Mafia and fights a virus that infects minds through language.
Abandoned in Depression-era Glendale, Mildred bakes pies and builds a restaurant chain, spending every dollar on the gifted, glacial daughter who despises her for working. Cain needs no corpse to write noir.
Los Angeles, 1948. Easy Rawlins, a Black veteran fired from the aircraft plant, takes a white man's hundred dollars to find a missing woman, and Mosley rebuilds postwar Watts around the search.
An undercover narcotics agent is assigned to watch a suspect who is himself, and the drug splitting his brain hemispheres keeps him from noticing. Dick closes by naming the friends he lost.
Los Angeles read as a machine for excluding people: Davis strips the sunshine myth to find speculators, bum-proof benches, and a police force patrolling from helicopters. Two years later the city burned.
Thrown off a hay truck, a drifter takes work at a California diner and wants the owner's wife enough to help her kill her husband. Cain does it in a hundred scalding pages.
Ray Smith takes up Zen and mountaineering under Japhy Ryder, drawn from the poet Gary Snyder, who foresees a rucksack revolution. Young Americans read it and went to the mountains by the thousand.
Four women who fled China met over mahjong in San Francisco, and when one dies her daughter takes the empty seat. Tan's sixteen interlocking stories carry the mothers' buried lives across.
Kingston's aunt drowned herself in the family well, and no one may say her name. Out of that silence and the legend of a woman warrior, Kingston remade what American memoir could do.
Arturo Bandini starves in a Bunker Hill hotel in Depression Los Angeles, wanting to be a great writer and loving a Mexican waitress he cannot stop insulting. Bukowski called Fante his god.
Vietnam comes home in a suitcase. A correspondent buys heroin in Saigon and ships it to his wife in California, where the deal collapses into a chase through a country the war broke.
Rick Deckard hunts androids across a San Francisco emptied by fallout, separating them from people with a test for empathy. At home he keeps an electric sheep and is humiliated by it.
Out of prison and hunting the girl he lost eight years ago, Moose Malloy sets the private detective Philip Marlowe loose on Bay City, where the police belong to whoever is paying.
Chandler said Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. His detective Sam Spade loses a partner, trusts nobody, and chases a black statuette worth killing for.
Fifteen years after the Axis won, dealers in Japanese-occupied San Francisco sell forged Americana to the conquerors. Dick's people consult the I Ching and pass around a novel where the Allies won.
Two generations of a Salinas Valley family repeat Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck stakes everything on one Hebrew word: timshel, thou mayest, which leaves a man free to choose against his blood.