Twelve titles about losing perspective in Los Angeles

Luke Goebel is an American novelist, screenwriter, producer, and publisher.

He is the author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and the novel Kill Dick.

He co-wrote the films Causeway and Eileen, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway; for Causeway, Brian Tyree Henry received an Academy Award nomination.

At Electric Lit Goebel tagged twelve books about losing perspective in Los Angeles. One title on the list:

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Real violence, the kind that Your House WIll Pay is concerned with-–specifically the shooting of a Black teenager in the early 1990s (echoing the real-world killing of Latasha Harlins)—is different from the fictive unrest and ultraviolence essential to the LA novel. Different from the fun and games of Pynchon or the riot-as-trope of LA literature that stretches back even before the riots we all know off the top of our heads. YHWP is about how the past resurfaces as fever pitch. Underneath are years of violence that never leave, never go anywhere. This LA doesn’t disappear, it gets glossed over by soundbytes. Steph Cha understands the way people look at each other beyond what they say. There’s less performance here, and no escape hatch. This novel isn’t about LA erasing you through illusion or ambition, it’s about how LA uses sleight of hand in POV when it comes to race and inequality.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Your House Will Pay is among Addison Rizer's eight top revenge thrillers, the thirteen most essential Los Angeles books of mystery or crime, Jordan Harper's three top novels in the new L.A. crime canon, Erin E. Adams's seven titles that use mystery to examine race, María Amparo Escandón's eight books about living in Los Angeles, Alyssa Cole's five top crime novels that explore social issues, Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced take on race, class, gender & community, and Karen Dietrich's eight top red herrings in contemporary crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue