‘Baseball in Long Beach’ full of wonderfully hazy memories

There’s a scrapbookishness to Baseball in Long Beach, the recently released retrospective of this city’s contributions to America’s grandest old game. Author Tom Meigs has assembled a lot of mostly old photographs of once-young ballplayers—faces both familiar and forgotten—who either claimed their fame in Long Beach or [...]

Biographer David Rensin drops in on Miki Dora’s wave

A board-paddling member of the generation that transformed surfing from the pursuit of a handful of salty loners to a big business with its “own” music, clothing, lingo and TV shows, Malibu’s Miki Dora (1934-2002) was the California surfer of the 1950s and ’60s.
He set the [...]

Author Dan Fante almost lightens up about LA
Anyone who understands LA literature even a little bit knows that this region produces angry writers. From Raymond Chandler to Charles Bukowski, our authors have burned with a self-possessed rage that is unparalleled.
Perhaps the angriest, though, is Dan Fante (yes, the son of writer John Fante). Through novels [...]

One book’s look back at the founding of the Port of Los Angeles

Phineas Banning pulled up some deep dreams from the bottom of San Pedro Bay. There, he imagined the greatest shipping center in the world, built upon the purest port land he had ever seen. But if railroad tycoon Collis Huntington had his way, [...]

Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske’s ‘Rosie the Riveter’ reveals a long-gone Long Beach

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARCADIA PUBLISHING
There’s no who’s who of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, no declassified maps of Allied supply routes—and unlike in, say, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, you can’t actually hear the bombs falling in Poland as you read Rosie the Riveter in Long [...]

When you’re not committing multiple felonies in ‘Grand Theft Auto IV,’ consider the art

Okay, okay, The Art of Grand Theft Auto IV?
From Rockstar Games, the same people who (cover your eyes) made it possible for us to have videogame sex with a hooker in a stolen car and not pay—and yank a traffic cop off [...]

You can read Kurt Anderson’s ‘How to Back Up a Trailer’…or you can just back up a trailer

If you don’t know how to back up a trailer, change a tire or shuffle cards like a pro, you may not be from this planet. In which case, Kurt Anderson’s How to Back Up a Trailer . [...]

Paul G. Maziar and Matt Maust’s new book makes you make sense of it

The ideas and personal revelations about the mundane in What It Is: What It Is won’t make sense if you don’t want them to.
That’s because writer Paul G. Maziar’s and graphic artist/photographer/Cold War Kids bassist Matt Maust’s collaboration feels like an existential [...]

Long Beach author David Mark Dannov talks about writing, and reading at Acres of Books
Most writers are thankful to publish three books in a lifetime. Long Beach-based author David Mark Dannov accomplished that feat in one day, dropping three volumes of poetry via his own imprint, Black Joke Press, then reading selections at Acres of [...]

‘Proud to Be An Okie’ explains the subtext behind all that hee-ing and haw-ing

If ever a book needed a soundtrack, it’s Peter La Chapelle’s Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. He manages to write about some of the best times and hot bands of the past century [...]