Saturday Matinée | Books Abroad


		Saturday, November 5, 2011 ~ 2:00pm Out of My Skin ‘A journalist leaves New York in the wake of a failed love affair and heads to Los Angeles, hoping to write about movies. He winds up interviewing a Steve Martin impersonator and is inspired to try “being Steve” himself... What at first seems like just another novel about L.A. anomie turns out to be something more transfixing: a kind of pop Zen parable, at once whimsical and austere. Haskell cultivates a winking deadpan to chronicle his narrator’s twilight of the soul, inserting revelations in unexpected places.’ –The New Yorker
		Saturday, January 7, 2012 ~ 2:00pm White Jazz Los, Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it’s standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He’s a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer—a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption and everything goes haywire. ‘White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss.’ –San Francisco Examiner
		Saturday, February 4, 2012 ~ 2:00pm The Day of the Locust Included in both the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and Time’s list of the 100 best English Language novels from 1923-2005. ‘West depicts the film industry from its margins, the lame cast-off vaudevillians and extras, the aspirants and show-biz parents, grasping intuitively that these figures articulate the brief continuum between manufacturing and merchandising bogus dreams, and lining up to buy them.’ –Jonathan Lethem
		Saturday, March 3, 2012 ~ 2:00pm Less Than Zero A portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money… ‘One of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality.’ –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
		Saturday, April 7, 2012 ~ 2:00pm Play It as It Lays Also included in Time’s list of the 100 best English Language novels from 1923-2005, in the novel an unfulfilled actress recounts her life while recovering from a mental breakdown in an exclusive Neuropsychiatric Institute. ‘There hasn’t been another American writer of Joan Didion’s quality since Nathanael West… A terrifying book.’ –John Leonard, The New York Times
		Saturday, May 5, 2012 ~ 2:00pm A Single Man After the sudden death of his longtime lover, George must adjust to life on his own as a professor in Southern California in the early 1960s. ‘One of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement.’ –Edmund White
		Saturday, June 2, 2012 ~ 2:00pm The Little Sister A movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure Marlowe into the less-than-glamorous and more-than-a-little-dangerous world of Hollywood fame. ‘Chandler wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.’ –The New Yorker


		Saturday, November 5, 2011 ~ 2:00pm Out of My Skin ‘A journalist leaves New York in the wake of a failed love affair and heads to Los Angeles, hoping to write about movies. He winds up interviewing a Steve Martin impersonator and is inspired to try “being Steve” himself... What at first seems like just another novel about L.A. anomie turns out to be something more transfixing: a kind of pop Zen parable, at once whimsical and austere. Haskell cultivates a winking deadpan to chronicle his narrator’s twilight of the soul, inserting revelations in unexpected places.’ –The New Yorker
		Saturday, January 7, 2012 ~ 2:00pm White Jazz Los, Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it’s standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He’s a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer—a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption and everything goes haywire. ‘White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss.’ –San Francisco Examiner
		Saturday, February 4, 2012 ~ 2:00pm The Day of the Locust Included in both the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and Time’s list of the 100 best English Language novels from 1923-2005. ‘West depicts the film industry from its margins, the lame cast-off vaudevillians and extras, the aspirants and show-biz parents, grasping intuitively that these figures articulate the brief continuum between manufacturing and merchandising bogus dreams, and lining up to buy them.’ –Jonathan Lethem
		Saturday, March 3, 2012 ~ 2:00pm Less Than Zero A portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money… ‘One of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality.’ –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
		Saturday, April 7, 2012 ~ 2:00pm Play It as It Lays Also included in Time’s list of the 100 best English Language novels from 1923-2005, in the novel an unfulfilled actress recounts her life while recovering from a mental breakdown in an exclusive Neuropsychiatric Institute. ‘There hasn’t been another American writer of Joan Didion’s quality since Nathanael West… A terrifying book.’ –John Leonard, The New York Times
		Saturday, May 5, 2012 ~ 2:00pm A Single Man After the sudden death of his longtime lover, George must adjust to life on his own as a professor in Southern California in the early 1960s. ‘One of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement.’ –Edmund White
		Saturday, June 2, 2012 ~ 2:00pm The Little Sister A movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure Marlowe into the less-than-glamorous and more-than-a-little-dangerous world of Hollywood fame. ‘Chandler wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.’ –The New Yorker