MORE THAN THREE DECADES ago, the novelist Carolyn See sat in her Topanga Canyon home and made a prediction to the writer David Ulin about the literary landscape of Los Angeles: In the year 2020, she said, or at least “in that decade, Los Angeles will be to the world what Paris was in the 1920s.”
Maybe? We do have great croissants here. And our river, like the Seine, is not as clean as we would like, but it’s getting better. And, of course, we are a city of readers and writers. Here are four spring books you should know about.
By Karen Tei Yamashita
Yamashita, the author of acclaimed novels including Tropic of Orange, lives in Santa Cruz now, but grew up in Los Angeles; another Los Angeles-based writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, said of her: “If anyone is deserving of the title of the great American novelist, it’s Karen Tei Yamashita.”
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