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Matthew Specktor's books include the novels That Summertime Sound and American Dream Machine, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize; the memoir-in-criticism Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, and The Golden Hour, forthcoming from Ecco Press. Born in Los Angeles, he received his BA from Hampshire College in 1988, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Paris Review, Tin House, Black Clock, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Matthew Specktor's website
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American Dream Machine is set strongly in Los Angeles. It portrays the city in a way that's incredibly vivid--it looks like LA, it feels like LA, a city that is famously hostile to writers. What role does place play in your writing?
LA seems to have suffered over the years as the object of satire, derision, and hostility. In fact, with the possible exception of Chandler, it's hard to think of a great writer who's treated Los Angeles without pronounced ambivalence. Less Than Zero, The Day of the Locust, Play it As It Lays, The Player, What Makes Sammy Run. These books all organize themselves around a pretty jaundiced view of LA, or certainly of Hollywood. That's fair: they're all great books, and I think literature isn't where you go for false optimism. At the same time, I wanted to treat Los Angeles very differently. I grew up here, and I wanted to shower as much thoughtful affection upon it as I could, the way that Philip Roth did upon Newark or Saul Bellow did upon Chicago, etc. I wanted to paint a more comprehensive picture of this place in its warmer, and more human, dimensions. To address not just glamor and disillusion, but also the more homely aspects of the movie business, which in so many ...
Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in Lancashire and studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Lancaster universities. He is the prize-winning author of In Beautiful Disguises. He has lived in London, Manchester, Suffolk, Kathmandu, and... (more)
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Edward Bloor (born October 12, 1950) is an American author best known for his work in teenage and young adult fiction. Born into a diverse community in Trenton New Jersey, Bloor enjoyed an active lifestyle as a child, often ... (more)
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