Gendy Alimurung

Photo/Illustration by Hedayatzadeh/Handsone

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

Gendy Alimurung
One of the best and worst parts of having parents who are both doctors is the stories they tell. From my mother and father, a dermatologist and a cardiologist, there were tales told at the dinner table — some thrilling, some gruesome or sad, all of them fascinating — that......
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The Bookish Set

Gendy Alimurung
Like Darwin’s finches, the booksellers of Los Angeles have found niches and creative ways to stay alive in a tough business and an even tougher town. We may be the largest book-buying market in the country, but is there a city in the world that offers more competition for our......
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Christmas in April

Gendy Alimurung
A novelist friend once told me that the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is like Christmas for him, and that he looks forward to it all year with a kind of childlike glee. On the eve before the fest, for $65 you can dine buffet style with the authors......
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T.C. Boyle, Aimee Liu, Barry Glassner

Gendy Alimurung
{mosimage} He lives and writes in Santa Barbara, but there is no more quintessentially “L.A.” novelist than T.C. Boyle, whose iconoclastic oeuvre plays like a John Galliano fashion show: stylish, satirical, elegant and heartbreaking at times, a fabulous but doomed parade of con men and gorgeous losers, where art and......

What Makes Zoey Run?

Gendy Alimurung
The fastest hamster on L.A.’s Westside runs a distance of eight feet in under 15 seconds, which is, comparatively speaking, just a couple of small steps for a human, but a giant step for rodentkind.“We practiced on a track every night,” says Nibbles’ owner and coach, 13-year-old Josh Dassa, at......
Judy Drood

When Clowns Attack

Gendy Alimurung
{mosimage} Everything is going wrong for girl detective Judy Drood. First her car breaks down outside the creepy, clown-infested burg of Obidiah’s Glen, where every telephone is out of order and the townsfolk have all gone missing. Then she gets harassed by the gang of teenagers who’ve taken over the......
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Jodi Picoult, Ishmael Beah

Gendy Alimurung
{mosimage} This is a week for kids with guns. In Jodi Picoult’s new novel, Nineteen Minutes, Peter Houghton, a 17-year-old who gets bullied one time too many, shoots up people at his high school (the title refers to how long it takes him to commit the bloody rampage). Though she’s......
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Kurt Andersen's Heyday

Gendy Alimurung
Lots of stuff happened in 1848. Darwin came up with his evolution theory. James Marshall discovered gold in Coloma. Wars were kicking around all over Europe — the French, for one, overthrew their king in the name of democracy. It is in this momentous year, the pinnacle of the Victorian......
John Banville

John Banville, Tara Ison, Dennis Cooper

Gendy Alimurung
{mosimage} Crime fiction written by a Man Booker Prize winner is that rarest of creatures: gorgeous, good fun and smart to boot, like a buxom blonde with a 200 IQ. Such is the case with the new novel from literary heavyweight Benjamin Black, the pen name of Irish novelist John......
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Noel Alumit

Gendy Alimurung
Noel Alumit’s first novel, the semi-epistolary Letters to Montgomery Clift, was a darkly sweet tale of a young Filipino gay boy named Bong Bong who comes to Los Angeles to escape torture in the Philippines’ repressive Marcos regime of the late 1970s. In his just-released Talking to the Moon, Alumit......