Joseph Lapin

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:......

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......

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,......