Speculative Los Angeles

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Los Angeles Noir, which is also edited by Denise Hamilton, is one of the best-selling in the Noir Series; with sales of roughly 20,000 copies to date it is currently in its 8th printing. Los Angeles Noir featured "The Golden Gopher" by Susan Straight, which won an Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics,Hamilton is very well-connected within the Southern California book world, and does numerous events at libraries, bookstores, etc. Speculative Los Angeles will come out just before the 2021 Los Angeles TimesSimilar to the city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Speculative Los Angeles features brand-new stories by: Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.

Reviews

"14 writers explore the fantastic in short stories that crisscross LA county, taking readers into alternate pasts, supernatural presents and dystopian futures...Speculative Los Angeles shows the breadth of worlds that can be created inside Los Angeles."
--Los Angeles Daily News

"The 14 narratives Hamilton has gathered present us with a vision of Los Angeles refracted, grounding the fantastic in the real."

--Alta Journal

"As a city, Los Angeles is, itself, a bit stranger than fiction, all at once it is both a major American metropolis sprawling hundreds of square miles across Southern California and a collection of smaller, multicultural neighborhoods that can change from block to block. It's a place where there is both great wealth and abject poverty, where natural disasters are only a moment away and where you can go skiing and hit the beach all in the same day, if you're especially intrepid."
--AirTalk with Larry Mantle (KPCC)

"Los Angeles is a particularly appropriate and broadly appealing place to begin the series, given its outsized role in the American imagination...This appealing and varied collection offers 14 speculative stories set in neighborhoods around Los Angeles, but with interests that go beyond the local."
--Shelf Awareness for Readers

"Many [stories] have a distinctly gritty and postapocalyptic flavor that takes advantage of a uniquely L.A. vibe."
---Library Journal

"The contributing authors skillfully capture the presences of different Los Angeles neighborhoods that become characters all on their own, teetering on the precipice of many possibilities...An excellent collection of what-ifs that will pique readers' imaginations."
--Booklist

"The stories here move among all of Los Angeles' gritty and bright corners."
--Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Edgar Award finalist Denise Hamilton is the author of seven crime novels and the editor of the best-selling anthology Los Angeles Noir (which includes the Edgar Award-winning short story The Golden Gopher by Susan Straight) and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics. She is a former Los Angeles Times journalist, a Fulbright Scholar, a noir and sci-fi/fantasy geek, and a proud LA native who refuses to speak only in English.