My California

In Novelist Edan Lepucki’s Home State, the History Is Fictional, the Terrain Is Otherworldly, and the Population Is United by Difference

In the story about myself, I was born in Santa Monica, in a rental on Sunset Ave. (yes, Avenue, not Boulevard). Early February, which is a bleak month elsewhere, but not in L.A. In my mind, I conjure the salty air, the white Volkswagen Rabbit in the driveway, and my mother’s round belly. My family has recently moved here from small town New Jersey.

A decade after I’m born, on another street in L.A., farther from the beach, a neighbor will take a camcorder to my front door. I answer, …

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Isn’t Just Fiction Anymore

Today's Sweden Has Come to Resemble the Dark World Stieg Larsson Created for His Hacker Heroine

We are standing in front of a magnificent building at Fiskargatan 9 in Södermalm, Stockholm’s bohemian southern island. The penthouse once belonged to a controversial businessman, Percy Barnevik, the former …

The Serious Business of Pulp Fiction

How Paperbacks Helped Forge Our Modern Ideas about Sex, Race, and War

Cheap paperback books are like sex: They claim attention, elicit memories good and bad, and get talked about endlessly. The mid-20th century was the era of pulp, which landed in …

My Country ’Tis a Book

Are We Still Searching for ‘The Great American Novel’?

Most credentialed literary critics disdain it as a grandiose hyperbole, and creative writers tend to speak of it in jest. But for almost 150 years, all of us—writers, readers, cultural …

Language is Not Always a Question of Logic

Some people keep artificial plants, others artificial hearts.
Some keep nothing. It does not matter. The truth of the world
has nothing to do with the real. Every day the …

The Gift

An L.A. Christmas Story

New York has