Danny Boy O'Connor, the former rap star, and Knocko Nolan, a current police detective, are prowling the Spahn Ranch, looking for a cave where the Manson Family once posed for a picture. The two men are on a trail in Chatsworth just south of the 118 freeway, a spot where......
In Los Angeles, celebrating 10 years of a television show, a restaurant or the rerelease of a classic film tends to bring about red carpets, limousines and the pop of Champagne bottles, but when a literary event turns a decade old, it's often just a footnote in the city's consciousness:......
At Union Station on the Gold Line platform this past Saturday, the commuters and sojourners of the Los Angeles weekend are greeted by the unfamiliar sound of...poets. A group of men and women -- all ages and ethnicities -- are reading lines in Spanish and English, blaring out their tropes......
Mark Twain said a classic book is a work that everyone wants to have read but no one actually reads. For many Angelenos, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is just such a classic. It's a book set in New England at a time when whaling was an enterprise and tattoos were......
"This is the shelter," Joe Clifford says. He's standing outside the Los Angeles Mission on Fifth Street with his best friend and former running buddy, author Tom Pitts. A car backfires. Then a group of transsexuals struts by and waves. "I never thought I would see this place again." Clifford,......
For the last nine months, L.A. Weekly has conducted a tournament to determine the best L.A. novel ever -- but we wanted to know what others thought as well. We asked a number of our favorite writers, booksellers, publishers and critics to tell us about their favorite L.A. novel. Here's......
Poet and publisher Chiwan Choi had just finished a reading in Highland Park and was riding the bus back to his downtown L.A. apartment when something changed. It was one of those picturesque days when the city seemed too perfect; the sky looked as if it had been painted by......
"I never intended to come ," says Kevin Bradley, founder of the letterpress design and print studio Church of Type, which opened this Sunday on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. "I was going to New Orleans," Bradley continues as his intern works the Vandercook Universal III letterpress to make prints......
When I was 16 years old, about a week or two after the planes crashed into the twin towers in 2001, I went to a Red Sox game with my father and my little brother. My father refused to give the tickets away, even though the Sox weren't playing well......
When most people envision the Beat Generation, they probably start with a vision of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, stumbling into a bar in New York City, rambling on about Nebraska and staring into the electric religion of the American plains. Or perhaps people think of Lawrence Ferlinghetti,......
