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.”
Her latest book takes its title and jumping off point from two items on the “loyalty questionnaire” that Japanese Americans interned during World War II had to answer in order to be considered for release. But the novel sprawls forward and back from the internment camps, becoming a story about Japanese Americans and the process of making sense of the past.
By Annakeara Stinson
This is the story of a young woman who turns the tables on her stalker, setting off a dark and at times hilarious journey. The narrator, Clarice, has fled New York for Southern California to avoid her ex-boyfriend/stalker, PT, only to glimpse him at a party. The encounter sends her on an odyssey to confront her ex and her demons. The debut novel by a Los Angeles-based author roams across the city with settings that only someone who knows and loves this place could conjure. And the New York Times noted that beneath Stinson’s “acerbic, madcap humor is a sobering narrative about the emotional cost of surviving abuse.”
By Kelly Yang
“The Take,” set in Los Angeles, is the first book for grown-ups from Kelly Yang, an L.A.-based author previously best known for her massively popular books for children and teens (including the Front Desk series, about an immigrant family managing a motel). The new novel features a young Chinese-American writer, Maggie, who agrees to sell her blood to an aging Hollywood producer for $3 million. The catch: While the producer becomes more youthful, Maggie ages. As the weeks of treatments unfold, the two women grow closer, then betray each other, in part over a piece of writing. In the words of one of the characters: “She wrote with the fury of someone who was seconds away from committing murder before realizing she had something even sharper than death. She had words.”
By Jonathan Vigliotti
This volume is one of the first of what will eventually become a shelf of books about the L.A. firestorm of 2025. Vigliotti, a national correspondent for CBS News, opens with an author’s note revealing that his own home was under an evacuation order on January 7, and that he watched the Palisades disaster unfold “from beginning to end.” Then he leans hard into the accountability angle. Why didn’t officials learn better lessons from previous fires? Why wasn’t the fire department better funded? And what does it mean that so many fire-cleared lots were being sold to developers? He also captures the aching loss that remains for so many, including a woman whose office burned in the Palisades fire. “To picture the space where it once stood was to feel the phantom ache of an amputation,” he wrote. “She had not yet found the strength to face it fully.”
