In the aftermath of a reality TV deal gone wrong, Fiona Alison Duncan asks the question, Can you rewrite your life? The answer, her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa, follows a cast of housemates as they navigate questions of art making and economies, breakups and breakdowns, and the internet and its many obsessions.

The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community...But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis...The...

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating L.A. PI John Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses: the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan's own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he's...

Documents the kaleidoscopic year during which transformative talents from Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills heavily influenced pop culture, politics, and social movements.

South Central Los Angeles is often characterized as an African American community beset by poverty and economic neglect. But this depiction obscures the significant Latina/o population that has called South Central home since the 1970s. More significantly, it conceals the efforts African American and Latina/o residents have made together in shaping their community. As residents have faced increasing challenges from diminished government social services,...

"An epic, mesmerizing oral history of Hollywood and Los Angeles by the author of the contemporary classic Edie; Jean Stein influenced the art of oral history in her groundbreaking book Edie : American Girl, an indelible portrait of Andy Warhol 'superstar' Edie Sedgwick. Now, in West of Eden, Stein turns her lens toward the city Sedgwick came from--Los Angeles--and a mythic cast of fortune hunters and aspiring moguls whose quests for fame and power...

"The story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into reality. Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California--bone-dry, harborless, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges--seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world's iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles's meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant...