Paperback L.A.

UPDATE: Thanks for a great interview, Andrew, which aired but can still be heard at @KPFK archives.

Announcement from Bibliocracy host host Andrew Tonkovitch: My guest this week (Sunday, 5 PM on KPFK) is a longtime writer, editor and cultural worker, working in many forms and collaborating on previous books about travel, food and the arts.  As a vigorous booster of our region, Susan LaTempa has now edited the first in a series titled Paperback LA:  A Casual Anthology.  In the handsome multi-form collection that makes up Book 1 — with terrific design elements, color and black and white photography — we are invited to consider “Clothes, coffee, crushes and crimes.”  While the format is perhaps casual, and the book accessible, this first volume’s thematic focus is intense, vivid and thoughtful, obviously informed by research, affection and a critical editorial process.   There’s a careful curation of voices here, each elaborating on, complicating, arguing for a perhaps previously unconsidered part of the Los Angeles story.  Eclectic and revisionist, brave and, yes, incredibly fun, LaTempa has in Paperback LA assembled excerpts of urgently necessary fiction, nonfiction and poetry from the legendary to the now-forgotten built, as she says in her introductory notes, “on joy.”  For more on the book, future volumes and the project visit the website.

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