LA Literature (Fiction)
Explore the best LA fiction literature with our curated list of top books. Discover captivating stories set in Los Angeles, from classic novels to contemporary works.
Book
What Makes Sammy Run?
by Budd Schulberg
The classic book that shaped two generations’ view of the movie business and introduced the archetypal Hollywood player Sammy Glick. He’s got a machete mouth and a genius for double-cross. As Budd Shulberg—author of the screenplay On the Waterfront—follows Sammy’s relentless upward progress, he creates a virtuoso study in character that manages to be hilariously appalling yet deeply compassionate. “Sammy Glick remains at the top of the Hollywood sleaze heap, a hustler nonpareil…. What Makes Sammy Run? Is still the quintessential novel about “the all-American heel.’” – Moredcai Richler, GQ
Book
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
by Aimee Bender
"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire "Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.
Book
The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires-from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.
Book
Get Shorty
by Elmore Leonard
Mob-connected loan shark Chili Palmer is sick of the Miami grind. So when he chases a deadbeat client to Hollywood, he decides to stay. This town of dream makers, glitter, and gorgeous, partially-clad starlets seems ideal for an enterprising criminal with a cinematic taste.
Book
The Player
by Michael Tolkin
A senior vice president of production at a major Hollywood studio receives a death threat from a rejected writer, plunging him into a nightmare that threatens both his life, his job, and the woman he loves in this devastating portrait of contemporary Hollywood.
