'Heavy' by Kiese Laymon may be the most important memoir you read this year

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 17 OCTOBER 2018

 “At our house,” writes Kiese Laymon — recalling a Mississippi childhood in a startling, essential new memoir, “Heavy” — “there was no pantry. There was hardly any food other than spoiled pimento cheese, the backs of molded wheat bread, a half-empty box of wine, and swollen green olives.” When he thought of places like the “rich-white folk houses” his grandma cleaned for, he “imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep.”

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In 'The Browns of California,' Miriam Pawel shows how Pat and Jerry Brown shaped a state and a nation

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 19 SEPTEMBER 2018

A man from Germany settles in rural California. Nearly an adult, his daughter seeks more in San Francisco, where her son eventually mounts a successful campaign to defeat Richard Nixon. He’ll later telephone the disgraced president, offering condolences. With no love for the impeached, the governor’s son replaces his dad in Sacramento, and soon, everyone hears how the new man in town consorts with rock stars and visits secret societies and insists space is the future. There’s a difficult nickname, a run for president and two more. His sister rises to State Treasurer but misses her own bid for governor.

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Fire lookout Philip Connors' reckoning in 'A Song for the River'

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 7 SEPTEMBER 2018

“Fire Season,” published in 2011, felt like an instant classic. A soulful and surprising mediation on the life of a fire lookout, the book placed Philip Connors on a shelf beside giants of Western literature, including Norman Maclean, Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.

A few years later, a second book appeared, “All the Wrong Places,” which seemed quieter and more complicated but no less successful and stirring. This time the focus is on New York, where Connors was a reporter, working to process his younger brother’s devastating suicide.

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Learning To Take A Stand

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE - 3 MARCH 2017

I’d just moved to Venice from the Middle East, where my wife was a foreign correspondent. For years I played a supportive role, mostly raising our young daughter around the region—from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Turkey to Lebanon—always in a kind of panicked hypervigilance because of the shoot-out on our block in Beirut, more than one car bomb elsewhere in Lebanon, and all the other rigors of being a parent in a faraway place.

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Wayne Barrett, The Best Reporter I Ever Knew

THE NEW REPUBLIC - 20 JANUARY 2017

 My first day working for Wayne Barrett in the fall of 2004, I was one of six terrified interns, all of us sitting in a windowless room at The Village Voice, listening to a man in Brooklyn barking orders over a speakerphone. I was somehow nominated the stenographer and tapped furious notes—pausing to stare at the others in bafflement—as this loud and blunt man, Wayne Barrett, rattled off assignments.

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Loss haunts Rabih Alameddine's new novel, 'Angel of History'

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 16 OCTOBER 2016

A man awaits his fate at a San Francisco psychiatric hospital. His partner is dead. Nearly an entire generation is gone. But not all is lost for our hero, Jacob, born Ya’qub; he is the product of a brief tryst between a powerful man in Beirut and a woman from Yemen who later takes her gifted son to live in a Cairo whorehouse to thrive under the care of a voluptuous auntie named Badeea. Back in Lebanon, more or less ignored by his father, he’s so savagely beaten by bigger boys at a Catholic orphanage that his battered body must be sent to Sweden. In San Francisco, years later, he’s an Arab male and a homosexual and one of the last of his kind — everyone else felled either by the great calamity of AIDS or the furious meat grinder that is life as an Arab. Oh, and he talks regularly with Satan. And the Devil.

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Jonah Lehrer returns with 'A Book About Love.' Can it rescue his reputation?

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 14 JULY 2016

What do we want from the disgraced among us? Atonement, or at least an accounting, and perhaps some sense they’ve learned from their mistakes. No meticulous mea culpa is on offer from Jonah Lehrer in “A Book About Love,” his first title since the last was hurriedly withdrawn. Instead of an apology, in a cunning move Lehrer has written a new book that purports to be about love — but is ultimately a reflection on the inevitability of failure.

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Bob Shacochis travels the world in 'Kingdoms in the Air,' but doesn't always enjoy it

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 2 JUNE 2016

Over more than 30 years, Bob Shacochis has gained a reputation as a swashbuckling, fish-catching man’s man capable of a certain kind of rugged reportage for Outside, Harper’s and other magazines.

Not as widely known as big-hearted Bill Bryson, wandering Paul Theroux or the ravenous Anthony Bourdain, longtime author Shacochis is something of a writer’s travel writer. He teaches at Florida State and has won awards for his fiction – “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize — and so his latest book of essays, “Kingdoms in the Air,” could serve as a kind of career-defining collection of magazine writing from 1989 to today. It starts powerfully enough in Kathmandu in the spring of 2001.

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Right by the beach, and the bus depot

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 6 MARCH 2016

The house my wife found in Venice was close to the beach. It was also alarmingly close to Division Six: a 3.5-acre bus depot ringed by tall fencing and barbed wire. On the sidewalk out front, happy people walked by, carrying surfboards or shopping bags. Just as continuously, in and out of the depot, the variously numbered orange city buses lumbered and wheezed.

I wanted the house, yet I did not want the house. And then it didn't matter, because it was ours.

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In the age of Google Maps, why walk the 4,000 mile Nile River? Levison Wood's book explains

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 18 FEBRUARY 2016

The Nile, from its disputed source, runs for as many as 4,000 miles. In recorded history, no man has ever walked its full course — and in April 2014 former British paratrooper Levison Wood set out to do just that.

"To some, the very idea seems archaic," Wood writes of his journey, "and, in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration has always been about more than pure discovery or of being the first to do something."

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'The Narrow Door' is a stirring memoir of friends at their best and worst

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 15 JANUARY 2016

"Our feet are warm," writes Paul Lisicky, describing an evening in Philadelphia with the novelist Denise Gess. "Our faces shine. The room is getting dark, the night coming a little sooner these days. Should I turn on a lamp?"

But no light can fix the darkness in Philadelphia. Gess, the oldest and dearest of Lisicky's friends, is sick.

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Stealing a few shady hours in an offramp's not-park

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 27 DECEMBER 2015

The other morning, I needed to get some reading done for work. I could've driven to my office. Or sat on a bench at the beach. Or taken the Big Blue Bus to Powell Library at UCLA, where I teach. What I did instead was set up a folding chair next to the freeway.

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Self and concept collide in experimental collection 'When the Sick Rule the World'

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 27 DECEMBER 2015

Stunned, the animals obey." This is an early line from "Whistle While You Dixie," the opening piece in Dodie Bellamy's "When the Sick Rule the World." It's emblematic of Bellamy's ability to overturn expectations with language that is by turns hilarious and sometimes almost cruel.

In Bellamy's view, the animals in the animated film "Snow White" do as the title character bids but incorrectly: "Even though Disney has given some of the animals opposable thumbs," she writes, "… [a] deer licks dinner plates, and a squirrel dries them with its whirling tail. … [T]he Seven Dwarfs are real slobs."

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Against Travel

THE NORMAL SCHOOL - 15 OCTOBER 2015

So deep was my sleep on a recent flight from Moscow to L.A.— a complete darkness, as if I was where I should be—and yet when I opened my eyes, seeing instead the hard light of a plane and not that place I suppose I hoped I had finally found, I clenched my teeth, it having become clear yet again that we were neither here nor there, and it was with a bit of anger, some disappointment, and not a little bit of regret that I found myself thinking again about the Rome of a day before as much as I was anticipating the heat of the California I’d see tomorrow, all the while attempting to forget a Phnom Penh that had started it all, not to mention the various cities in between that my wife and I had tried and failed over 15 years of roaming—this long and more or less continuous effort to make some place the place.

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Letter of Recommendation: New Balance 990s

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE - 23 JULY 2015

The first time I even considered buying a pair of New Balances, I was 27, bronzed and lean, standing in a frigid sporting-goods store in Biloxi, Miss., having walked there from New York. The year was 2007. Four months earlier, I had experienced that spiritual crisis stereotypical of young people — the one in which you can’t seem to square the scope of your ambitions with the limits of your daily life, which in my case was spent in a Midtown Manhattan cubicle. So I packed a bag and said goodbye to everyone I loved, including my wife, who was ecstatic to see me go.

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I WALKED FROM MARINA DEL REY TO MALIBU — AND IT WAS A LOT LIKE BEIRUT

LA WEEKLY - 11 JUNE 2015

After five years in the Middle East, my wife, daughter and I moved last year to Los Angeles, which turned out to have more in common with Beirut or Baghdad than I might have imagined. The specifics here were, of course, different — malnourished sea lions, homelessness, gentrification, tourism, nimbyism — but the manner by which I began to grasp them was similar. To find out more about where I lived and why it felt so insane, I decided, as I'd done many times (from Sanaa to Beirut, Baghdad to Doha), to take a long walk, in this case from Marina del Rey to Pacific Palisades.

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THE TRUE FICTIONS OF JOAN DIDION: REVISITING 'MIAMI' AND 'PLAY IT AS IT LAYS'

LITHUB - 8 JUNE 2015

On the 45th anniversary of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Nathan Deuel reexamines that novel alongside her eponymous non-fiction portrait of Miami.

I first read Miami as a junior at Brown, in a class about the Cuban-American experience. I hated growing up in South Florida, feeling as I did that the place lacked history, or in any case I had never been given an adequate guide to make its history matter as much as the older, grander history up north or across the ocean.

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'Children of the Stone' a moving look at music's power in Palestine

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 24 APRIL 2015

 A shipping container bound for Palestine holds cargo worth half a million dollars — not military hardware or food aid but musical instruments. This is the gripping material of Sandy Tolan's moving and diligently told new book, "Children of the Stone." Whereas his 2006 book, "The Lemon Tree," told the story of Israel and Palestine through a single fruit tree and the way it brought together two families, in this new book, Tolan methodically retraces a Palestinian boy's journey from a refugee camp to Europe and finally back to Palestine, where he becomes head of a network of musical conservatories in areas bordered by Israel.

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Where We Used to Live

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE - 22 APRIL 2015

My wife and I lived in a tiny co-op here for years, then we moved to the Middle East. My dad died and Kelly moved to Iraq and then we tried to make it work in Beirut. On leave one winter, I decided to walk from Eldridge Street all the way to the Rockaways. It was snowing and sleeting. I drank a lot of coffee. What death hadn't ruined, the hurricane had taken care of. I've tried to figure out how to come back to New York. Still looking for a way. But not that hard.

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Party Bus

THE BUTTER - 7 APRIL 2015

We live in the future, so I’m on a bus in Los Angeles and log onto Twitter to write a note to the author of a book I’m reading: “Loving yr novel. Managing to focus on its pages during a manic bus ride to Venice Beach, during which a drunk guy fell on me”

“Thank you so much,” writes the author, Rabih Alamaddine. “Haven’t had a drunk guy fall on me in ages!”

This is a story about a bus ride on a Saturday night just before sundown. Things get intense. The bus to Venice Beach is no joke. Neither is life, writing, or a good book.

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