The Big Sleep
1939 · 231 pages
A dying general among his orchids hires Philip Marlowe to settle a blackmail debt, and the job opens into pornography, missing husbands, and Los Angeles money. Chandler's sentences became an American standard.
★ 6.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Farewell, My Lovely
1940 · 230 pages
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.
★ 6.5
Ask the Dust
1939 · 165 pages
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.
★ 6.2
City of Quartz
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
1990 · 512 pages
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.
★ 5.3
Devil in a Blue Dress
1990 · 240 pages
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.
★ 5.1
Mildred Pierce
1941 · 298 pages
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.
★ 5.1
Snow Crash
1992 · 440 pages
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.
★ 4.8
Case Study Houses
Elizabeth A. T. Smith
2002 · 440 pages
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.
★ 4.3