Children of the New Flesh by Chris Kelso

Alexandrine Ogundimu (author of the novellas Desperate, Agitation, and Zeke, and the forthcoming novel The Longest Summer).I adore The Loved One because it’s dry as fresh cremains, morbidly hilarious, and features a love triangle between a British expat poet who’s a total cad, an uncultured mortuary beautician who consults a newspaper columnist for all her important life decisions, and her creepily gleeful middle-aged boss who lives over the thumb of his overbearing mother. My favorite LA novel doesn’t feel like an LA novel– it doesn’t go the Hollywood route despite the references to movies and filmmaking scattered throughout, and it’s not another noir detective novel. Alexandra Naughton (author of A Place A Feeling Something He Said to You, 2020 Spooky Girlfriend Press).Life is too short to read shitty books, so I asked some of my favorite authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, and friends to tell me their favorite LA novel. Everyone and everything naked.īy way of introduction, I love an LA novel. Helter Skelter, Kato Kaelin, The Viper Room, Skid Row, the Musso and Frank Grill, flop houses, and infinity pools. And in both there is a grotesque Los Angeles.Īnd oh, those canyons, with their literary names and the way sound does (and does not) reverberate. There are two kinds of LA novels, and maybe even more than that. Los Angeles is our last try, and the greyhound busses still drop off fresh cornhuskers and hillbillies every day, to dream and propagate and populate our imaginations. It is like this for any place, but it is like this more with Los Angeles. When an author sits down to write a Los Angeles, they are wrestling always with our own store of images. Images of Los Angeles, through the years, saturate our shared consciousness, direct from the lens of the finest and flimsiest auteurs. Los Angeles is both real and not, ephemeral and enduring. I was born and raised and live and raise my own children and will die in an American South, far removed from the Chateau Marmont. By way of introduction, I will not define a Los Angeles. By way of introduction, I will not bombard you with my own relationship with Los Angeles.

27 Writers Answer: Your Favorite LA Novel

Children of the New Flesh by Chris Kelso