Kirjahaku

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS“L.A. is where you reside. Shaky Town is where you live.”Welcome to Shaky Town, a place invisible on maps and found only in the secret heart of its citizens.In this masterwork of panoramic style, Lou Mathews—a former mechanic and street racer—weaves together the tragedies and glories of one eastside neighborhood in the 1980s. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war, to an Irish priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous fault line but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.A luminous achievement of peerless authenticity, Shaky Town captures the grit and gold of working-class Los Angeles and lays down Matthews's marker as one of the city’s great chroniclers.

A 1999 LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOKDELUXE EDITION, WITH NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN RECOVERED CHAPTERS—Los Angeles, 1967—With gleaming detail and blinding precision, Lou Mathews freeze-frames a hidden corner of L.A.’s outlaw culture in the moments before it becomes extinct. The heart of the culture is the drive-in, where street racers meet to challenge their rivals and place their bets. This world comes to life after dark, lit by headlights and street lamps, a moveable feast of drag races, peopled with its own lost generation: young men and women who have left high school but have no thoughts of college.Drifting from one dead end job to another, supplementing their income through thieving, doing the occasional stint in prison, and reluctantly entering the armed services when there is nothing else left, they live, and sometimes die, for the excitement, the danger, the money of racing. In the world of drag racing—fleeting and bittersweet, like the end of summer—the stakes the stakes grow higher and higher as, one by one, each player spins out and disappears from the scene:Here, we meet Vaca, crippled in soul and body, prefers the armor of his car to a wheelchair. The ex-con Brody—Vaca’s driver—is the best street racer in town. Reinhard, a loner who has no one and nothing but the exquisite machines he builds and races. Charlie, the race organizer who tells the story. And Connie, who rolls her eyes at the whole parade, never without a sarcastic riposte, but who can’t stay away from the boys and their toys.Stunning, bleakly beautiful, and laugh-out-loud funny, L.A. Breakdown paints a riveting portrait of 1960s Los Angeles, frozen in time yet disintegrating before our eyes with all the reckless speed of romantic era.“Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil.” —Los Angeles Times

A compelling novel-in-stories, Hollywoodski showcases a self-described “faded” screenwriter’s forty-year career.Dale Davis is a man encumbered by a natural writing talent, corrupted by early success, and reduced to scrambling for crumbs. He arrives in Hollywood, unbattered and innocent, with a novel about his days as an almost Olympic-caliber swimmer. But his faith in the prevailing powers of talent and justice in Tinseltown leaves him essentially black-listed and unemployable, a talented writer who just can’t get paid. Despite the fading of a once-promising career, Davis still believes that his talent will propel him back into prominence. But that belief, in Hollywood, is about as realistic as the belief that “Someday my prince will come,” and as likely to make you depressed and crazy.Hollywoodski is a nonlinear journey through Davis’s life, weaving his memories with stories he’s written over the years, charting how his hopes and dreams have changed over time. Featuring stories originally published in prominent publications such as The New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Black Clock, Hollywoodski is a sweeping and inventive telling of the strange avenues that a life follows.

A compelling novel-in-stories, Hollywoodski showcases a self-described “faded” screenwriter’s forty-year career.Dale Davis is a man encumbered by a natural writing talent, corrupted by early success, and reduced to scrambling for crumbs. He arrives in Hollywood, unbattered and innocent, with a novel about his days as an almost Olympic-caliber swimmer. But his faith in the prevailing powers of talent and justice in Tinseltown leaves him essentially black-listed and unemployable, a talented writer who just can’t get paid. Despite the fading of a once-promising career, Davis still believes that his talent will propel him back into prominence. But that belief, in Hollywood, is about as realistic as the belief that “Someday my prince will come,” and as likely to make you depressed and crazy.Hollywoodski is a nonlinear journey through Davis’s life, weaving his memories with stories he’s written over the years, charting how his hopes and dreams have changed over time. Featuring stories originally published in prominent publications such as The New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Black Clock, Hollywoodski is a sweeping and inventive telling of the strange avenues that a life follows.

Shaky Town, a novel, explores 100 years in the life of a Los Angeles neighborhood of the same name, where Lou Mathews grew up. Shaky Town got its name because of the fault line--the most active seismic fault in California--that runs beneath its hills. A series of earthquakes in the 1920s and continuing aftershocks destroyed the real estate market--assessed values stayed low and remained so, even today. It's the only neighborhood in Los Angeles where poor people live on hills. Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Pat Barker's Union Street, Shaky Town tells the stories of people linked by place