Los Angeles

Wainwright talks about his tenth studio album, the “anemic” state of pop lyrics, and why Leonard Cohen—not Bob Dylan—should have won the Nobel Prize.

Accessing the interiority of sounds.

The life of mutant-pop songwriter Peter Ivers was really something.

The novelist on living in liminal spaces, Los Angeles in the `90s, and using Ponyboy as inspiration.

I first encountered Sesshu Foster through his cotranslation of Juan Felipe Herrera’s masterpiece Akrilica and an anthology he coedited, Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry. It was 1990: I’d just returned from six years of intense political and cultural involvement outside the US. The Gulf War was right on the horizon, and in the hyper-stratified world of US poetry, where class and cosmos had taken backseats to an almost purely theoretical politics and poetics, I was in search of allies and kindred spirits. With Foster’s work, I felt I’d struck pay dirt.

The author discusses her forthcoming novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, fiction as impetus for personal change, and the inhumanity of the creative class.

On the release of Al Di Là, a collection of her sound works, Forti guides us through her decades-long practice of observation, intuition, and kinaesthetic awareness.

A globe-hopping novel ruminates on drift and disaster.

“The idea is that you have to find it—and you have to walk to discover what’s there.”