A reporter's cherished past collides with his mentally ill millennial son's anguished attempt to claim his own season in the sun in this striking new novel about the rapids of the 21st century.Richard Leviton is an aging romantic, twice divorced, with visions of literary grandeur. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazines and a period of unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the convulsions of the 2010s, Leviton faces a harrowing crucible of circumstances...

In a series of strangely resilient personal adventures—often beginning with breakups, and fueled by a sense of "invincible longing"—essayist Alan Rifkin flings himself at the last vestiges of the Southern California Dream. He chases summer with a pool man, lives with monks in a Santa Barbara monastery, joins a dysfunctional Los Angeles writing club, communes with wild dolphins, traces the steps of Otzi the Iceman, emulates a Bible-based marriage, and confronts his mother's last season in h...

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact.The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read f...

Global Backlash is the first book to move beyond the monolithic portrayal of the globalization protests that have escalated since Seattle and are not likely to abate soon. With trenchant analysis and dozens of primary documents from a variety of popular and uncommon sources, Robin Broad explores proposals and initiatives coming from the backlash to answer the question, 'But what do they want?' A range of sophisticated propositions and a vibrant debate among segments of the backlash emerge....

The dawn of folk rock comes to life in Jerry Burgan’s unforgettable memoir of the pre-psychedelic 1960s and the summer that changed everything.As a naïve folksinger from Pomona, California, Burgan was thrust to the forefront of the counterculture and its aftermath. The Byrds, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and Papas, Barry McGuire, Bo Diddley and many others make appearances in this 50th Anniversary reminiscence by the surviving cofounder of WE FIVE, the San Francisco electro-folk e...