Anthologies

For many years the "Paris Review" interviews have been justly famous for giving deeper insight and understanding of the creative process. In this selection from the interviews, 15 writers discuss what they think of their own, and other people's work, their lives and the problems of writing in the contemporary world.

Includes tales of horror and suspense by such masters as Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft and many others

Classic and contemporary writing on California culture, society, history, and politics. California: Wallace Stegner calls it "America, only more so." Moguls and migrant workers; primal natural beauty and the artificial glitz of neon-lit cities; high-tech prosperity and grinding poverty; religious fervor and insistence on personal freedom; the triumph of the new frontiers and the weariness of a final destination; madness; exotic; and heartbreak. There is not one California; there are many. As Unknown California demonstrates, the conflict, divergence, and juxtaposition of California's cultures have given birth to writing of resonant richness--some of the best America has known. Unknown California offers Mark Twain "roughing it" in San Francisco, Norman Mailer exposing the corruption at the heart of the film industry, and John Steinbeck reporting on the miseries of the migrant camps. Thomas Pynchon measures the aftershocks of the Watts riots, Evelyn Waugh explores Hollywood's bizarre burial practices, and Henry Miller evokes the majesty of Big Sur. Equally revealing are voices of writers yet to be discovered. As they express the dreams and fury of the Latino community and describe life in Silicon Valley and Harvey Milk's San Francisco, they add the shadows and highlights that mark California's ever-changing landscape. In Unknown California , history and commentary, parody and polemic come together. In letters from a woman describing life in the mining camps in 1852, in a disturbingly familiar portrait of turn-of-the-century Chinatown, in an account of a summer spent in that quintessentially Californian phenomenon called the Magic Kingdom, witnesses from North, South, East, and West testify to a remarkable place. Unknown California is a feast of good writing and a voyage of discovery to a state and state of mind that are as all-encompassing and mysterious as America itself.

A collection of tales featuring aliens, zombies, and everything in between

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic “hall of mirrors,” Aldous Huxley a “city of dreadful joy.” Where Jack Kerouac found a “huge desert encampment,” David Thompson imagined “Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock.” In Writing Los Angeles , The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries by over seventy writers. This revelatory anthology brings to life the entrancing surfaces and unsettling contradictions of the City of Angels, from Raymond Chandler’s evocation of the murderous moods fed by the Santa Ana winds to John Gregory Dunne’s affectionate tribute to “the deceptive perspectives of the pale subtropical light.” Here are fascinating strata of Los Angeles’s cultural and social history, from the oil boom of the 1920s to the graffiti artists of the 1980s, from flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson to surf music genius Brian Wilson, from the German émigré intellectuals chronicled by Salka Viertel to the hard-bitten homicide cops tracked by James Ellroy. Here are its fragile ecosystems, its architectural splendors, and its social chasms, in the words of writers as various as M.F.K. Fisher, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, and Mona Simpson. Art Pepper discovers Central Avenue in the heyday of the 1940s jazz scene; Charles Mingus describes an early encounter with the builder of the Watts Towers; screenwriter Robert Towne reflects on the origins of Chinatown; John McPhee powerfully conveys the devastation of Los Angeles mudslides; David Hockney teaches himself how to drive in record time; and Pico Iyer finds at Los Angeles International Airport “as clear an image as exists today of the world we are about to enter.” Writing Los Angeles is an incomparable literary tour guide to a city of shifting identities and endless surprises.

A boon for booklovers, this audio set features funny, fantastical and poignant stories about people with unique and passionate connections to the written word. Tony Roberts reads a hilarious Walter R. Brooks story about how Ed - a talking horse - became a voracious reader of adventure tales and mysteries. In a story by Italo Calvino, read by John Shea, a man tries to make the most of his beach holiday by reading and making love at the same time. Leonard Nimoy performs a dark, vintage Evelyn Waugh tickler about a stranded jungle explorer forced to read Dickens aloud. Plus more memorable stories by Ray Bradbury, Molly Giles and Adam Haslett, read by Rochelle Oliver, Blair Brown and Isaiah Sheffer.