"L.A. JOURNAL"
some stories about some guys doing the best they can in the Nowhere City
by
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He looked out the window and northward, to the San Gabriel Mountains looming in the near distance. They were beautiful. So beautiful. So close he could practically reach out through the window of his office and touch them. Practically every day of his life he had gazed upon them, even if some of those days it was only for a few seconds. Oh sure, there were days when he was a kid—those strange, science fiction days before automobile emissions controls—when he could barely even see the mountains through the smog. Some days he couldn’t see them. But he knew they were there. They were always there. As the northern picture-border of every town in Los Angeles County he had ever lived in—from Altadena in the early years, to Pasadena, to a Downtown L.A. high-rise right after college, from Van Nuys and Studio City to the west to Bradbury and Arcadia to the east and half a dozen towns in between—they were always there. They were the mountains which had been the controlling mistress-landmark of his entire life....
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About the Book
There has always been a lot of confusion and misconception regarding the short-story. What exactly is it? What exactly defines it? And if a true literary artiste is capable of churning out a whole novel, why waste time on a bunch of stories in the first place?
C. Bradford Eastland, author of the groundbreaking novel Where Gods Gamble, answers all these questions and more in his masterwork collection of short fiction, “L.A. Journal”.
Throughout the twenty-two stories of this nostalgic, regionally driven volume, Eastland the artist’s lifelong mission becomes clear; to leave behind a handful of powerful, original, timeless vignettes of the times and places in which he lived. Along the way, he takes a stab at making sense of many of the great issues—love, lust, war, religion, friendship, betrayal, craziness, joblessness, homelessness, homophobia, racism, patriotism, terrorism, and the Giants versus the Dodgers—we humans brush up against every day of our lives.
So take a look at Los Angeles through the eyes of a bum, a bartender, a disillusioned writer, an old Negro Leagues ballplayer, and a little boy angry at God—among others. You might wind up seeing one of the greatest and most mocked cities on Earth in a wholly different light.
About the Author
C. Bradford Eastland has lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly five decades—although he was actually born in Iowa, of all places. He is also the author of the “modern-day epic” novel Where Gods Gamble
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