LA Fiction Anthology: Southland Stories by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press)
Editors John Brantingham and Kate Gale bring together many of Southern California's finest storytellers in this celebration and exploration of Los Angeles and its surrounding environments. Bonus: Every mother who attends this event will receive a free Mother's Day Gift!
Los Angeles may be best known as the hub of the film and television industry, but this collection of short fiction proves that beyond the beach and the glamour of Hollywood there is much more that makes the City of Angels special. Featuring an eclectic mix of fiction from a variety of talented literary minds--including TC Boyle, Ron Carlson, Judith Freeman, Percival Everett, and more--this anthology defies genre or easy categorization. Topics explored range from the deeply personal, such as a lesbian couple's loss of a child and the reaction of a young man to a natural disaster, to the larger-than-life, including a vivid tale of a robot-infested dystopian Long Beach. This allows the creativity and vivacity of the Los Angeles literary scene to be put on display, with a powerful sense of place as the core of this ambitious and insightful project.
Readers include:
John Brantingham is the Writer-in-Residence at the dA Center for Cultural Arts, and his work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. His books include the short story collection Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods and the crime novel Mann of War. His newest poetry collection is The Green of Sunset. He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, and is the president of the nonprofit San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival.
Kate Gale is the Managing Editor of Red Hen Press and Editor of The Los Angeles Review. She is author and editor to several books, most recently The Goldilocks Zone and Echo Light, and her work has been featured in a variety of literary journals and blogs. A resident of Southern California, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska.
L.A. Times Bestselling Author Stephen Jay Schwartz spent years as Director of Development for film-maker Wolfgang Petersen, where he worked with writers, producers and studio executives to develop screenplays for production. Schwartz's novels, Boulevard and Beat, follow the dysfunctional journey of LAPD detective Hayden Glass as he fights crime while struggling with his own sex-addiction. The series was optioned by producer Ben Silverman for development as a television series. Schwartz was a judge for the 2012 Edgar Awards, the 2012 ITW Awards, and is currently judging the 2015/2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery-Thriller category. His work has been recognized by authors as diverse as Michael Connelly and Elie Wiesel. Schwartz recently completed his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and, in addition to editing an anthology for Rare Bird Books, is busy writing his third novel, a standalone thriller set in Los Angeles.
Ruth Nolan writes about California desert culture and the environment for KCET Los Angeles, News from Native California, Inlandia Literary Journeys, and Sierra Club Desert Report. Her writing has been published recently in Rattling Wall, New California Writing-Heyday, Lumen, and Pacific Review. Ruth teaches creative writing and American Indian literature at College of the Desert, where she is Professor of English. She is editor of No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts. She holds her M.F.A. from the UCR Palm Desert low residency Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts program.
