![]() Because for me the most literary place in Los Angeles is a bungalow in Santa Monica Canyon on E. Other Huneven books include “Round Rock” and “Off Course.”īest literary places: I often think of places that don’t exist anymore, or places that are personal to my own literary journey. A few writer friends work there too, and occasionally we’ll lure one another out for a brisk tramp around the gardens, or a cheering cup of tea. I hope my next book will be about the eugenicist who invented marriage counseling - who once lived on my property.īest places to encounter other writers: I like to go to the Huntington and work in the library among all the scholars whose concentration and stillness are contagious and conducive to writing. I don’t need to look far afield for subject matter. My new novel, “Search,” takes place where I live - Altadena - as did parts of “Blame,” my third. Los Angeles is an open book, just waiting to be filled in.īest places for literary inspiration: In my second novel, “Jamesland,” the urban wilderness of the Los Angeles River and Griffith Park loosed their wildlife on my characters, changing their lives. I recently had a student at UCLA who wrote about Armenians in Glendale. I was there every day for more than a year.īest literary places: All of Los Angeles is fair game, from Michael Jaime-Becerra’s El Monte to Mona Simpson’s Santa Monica. Someday I hope they’ll put up a plaque over one of the booths in the takeaway section accordingly. I work mostly at home, but I wrote an entire (long) novel at Kings Road Cafe in West Hollywood. back when my writer friends and I used to hang out in meatspace, we’d go to Musso & Frank or (if we were feeling upscale) the Tower Bar. In some sense I am always trying to resurrect that Los Angeles: the coastal, but not fancy, worlds of Venice and Santa Monica as they used to be.īest places to encounter other writers: Pre-pandemic. But I was raised in Santa Monica, back when it was still something of a working-class neighborhood (impossible to imagine today, but it was a bedroom community for the aerospace workers in the South Bay, rather than an island of the super rich). It’s some of the places staked out earlier in the city’s literary history - John Fante’s Bunker Hill, Raymond Chandler’s Los Feliz - that somehow strike me as “most literary.”īest places for literary inspiration: My book “Always Crashing in the Same Car” seems to circle around and around the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. By no means exclusively, but: Echo Park = Kate Braverman, Malibu (+ Franklin Avenue) = Joan Didion, West Hollywood = Bret Easton Ellis, Long Beach = Myriam Gurba, Pasadena = Octavia Butler, Beverly Hills = Bruce Wagner, Walter Mosley = West Adams/Leimert Park, etc. Best literary places: Los Angeles is so sprawling that I consider different neighborhoods as belonging to different writers.
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