David L. Ulin is the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of nine books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” the novella “Labyrinth,” “The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time” and the Library of America’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” which won a California Book Award. He left The Times in 2015.
Latest From This Author
Review: Ed Smith was an unsung hero of L.A.’s poetry world. The punk poet is finally getting his due
“Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World” showcases the late L.A. poet’s work in a compilation by David Trinidad.
It took 28 years of living in Los Angeles before I finally went to a yoga class.
Leanne Shapton’s “Guestbook: Ghost Stories” reveals its intentions from the outside in.
Writing is an act of transgression. At least it ought to be, if it aspires not to waste our time.
This weekend, Union Station — the last classic rail terminal to be completed in the United States — will mark its 80th birthday with live music, a model train exhibition, food trucks and a crafts fair.
When I was young and cynical, a friend and I came up with a plan to make reading easy.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
The novel takes place across decades and tells overlapping stories as it tries to piece together a fallen world.
I can’t stop thinking about a photograph that has been making the rounds on social media: David Hockney and Joni Mitchell, holding hands earlier this month as they walk through Hockney’s new exhibition at L.A.
“If you really want to erase or distort a story,” Khaled Khalifa declares in his astonishing new novel “Death Is Hard Work,” “you should turn it into several different stories with different endings and plenty of incidental details.”