I have always been drawn to stories of miserable rich people, especially tales of how old money contorts lineage into something rotten. I grew up in Northern California, and while my family was comfortable, we weren’t part of the tennis club and yachting elite. During my childhood, we spent a lot of time exploring abandoned properties. It was a passion that I kept when I moved to Los Angeles as an adult and started to explore forgotten parts of Hollywood’s past. Los Angeles has always fascinated me because it embodies extreme wealth and extreme poverty: like the American dream itself, it straddles both extremes and promises everything while guaranteeing nothing.
I read this book for the first time when I was in high school, and it made me realize that main characters aren’t always good people. Maria Wyeth is a selfish, broken actress who stumbles through a series of bad decisions. She cares about nothing, not even herself, but the language is so beautiful and evocative of a 1960s Los Angeles that you can’t help wondering what happens.
If nothing else, pick it up for the laissez-faire attitude of the extremely wealthy and beautiful before the age of social media.
A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies' room and never came back.
Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires…
This was another book that I read in high school, and I revisit it every few years. Block’s language is sheer poetry, and every line is perfection. I have to content myself with knowing that I will never write this well, and that’s okay.
The book centers around narrator, Laurel, who lives with her mother and father in a perfect dream house in Los Angeles. When Laurel’s father falls sick and goes to the hospital, and her life begins to unravel, she begins to have visions of a skeletal lover who visits her when no one else is around. Is he real, or just a projection of her nightmares? Read this book if you want to fall in love with the Los Angeles canyons and a different view of the city. Perfection.
After the death of her father, Laurel is haunted by a legacy of family secrets, hidden shame, and shattered glass. Immersing herself in the heady rhythms of a city that is like something wild, caged, and pacing, Laurel tries to lose herself. But when she runs away from the past, she discovers a passion so powerful, it brings her roundabout and face-to-face with the demons she wants to avoid.
In a stunning departure from her enormously popular Weetzie Bat books, Francesca Lia Block weaves a darkly exhilarating tale of shattered passions and family secrets.
I’ve read this book a few times, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a praise or a damning critique of Los Angeles. I think that West–like myself and so many others–is addicted to Los Angeles and is still a bit critical of it.
Tod Hackett is a trained artist who comes to Hollywood to work in set and costume design. Like most outsiders, he sees the city as a projection of all his dreams and nightmares. Set in the 1930s, this book is a moving carnival of outsized stereotypes and winning caricatures. The entire thing feels like a carnival. Read this if you love the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the "Best 100 English-language novels" by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song "Day of the Locusts" in homage and Matt Groening's Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes - actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it's the…
This book is gorgeous. It’s about a group of spoiled-rotten high school friends who have started to drift apart after attending college. There’s an interesting backstory to this novel, too: Ellis wrote the first draft in eight weeks while high on crystal meth (don’t believe me? Read the Rolling Stone interview).
The minimalist prose and haunting theme of how overindulgence leads to chronic emptiness make a nihilistic meditation on excess.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches,…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
Astrid and her mother, Ingrid, live a glamorous life in Los Angeles. Everything seems perfect until Ingrid poisons her boyfriend, Barry, leaving Astrid without any family. Astrid gets thrown to the mercy of the foster care system and finds herself torn away from everything she once held dear: art, beauty, music, and childhood.
Fitch has done the impossible: she has made a beautiful, compelling story out of something that could be written off as tragedy. This is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, and I’m constantly pushing it on people: “You must read it, really, it’s so much better than the movie!” I’ve read this book so many times there are parts that I have committed to heart.
White Oleander is a painfully beautiful first novel about a young girl growing up the hard way. It is a powerful story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, their selfish love and cruel behaviour, and the search for love and identity.Astrid has been raised by her mother, a beautiful, headstrong poet. Astrid forgives her everything as her world revolves around this beautiful creature until Ingrid murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life. Astrid's fierce determination to survive and be loved makes her an unforgettable figure. 'Liquid poetry' - Oprah Winfrey 'Tangled, complex and extraordinarily moving' - Observer
Four years ago, a beautiful young heiress survived an attack that claimed the lives of both of her parents. The crime made headlines all over Los Angeles, both for the vicious nature of the killings and the seemingly random nature of the attack: nothing was stolen, and the van Aust family had no obvious enemies.
Private Investigator, Rainey Hall, agrees to help the heiress–Melia van Aust–find the culprit, but soon finds her life thrown into chaos as the two women become closer.
The Good Woman's Guide to Making Better Choices
By
Liz Foster,
A heart-warming and hilarious novel about the highs and lows of marriage, fraud, and goat’s cheese.
Libby Popovic is a country girl who’s now living a golden life in Bondi with her confident financier husband Ludo, and their two children. When Ludo is jailed for financial fraud, and Libby’s friends…
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing…
