Like Darwin’s finches, the booksellers of Los Angeles have found niches and creative ways to stay alive in a tough business and an even tougher town. We may be the largest book-buying market in the country, but is there a city in the world that offers more competition for our attention — and our money? Despite this, we are blessed with some world-class bookstores, staffed by some world-class booksellers. In this issue, we celebrate those stores — from east to west, Vroman’s, Skylight, Book Soup and Dutton’s, along with two relative newcomers, Family and Diesel — and the book buyers, owners, event planners, publicists and sales clerks who work in them.
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Stuck in Asia, Dreaming of Hollywood
Getting roughed up in China is just part of the ride for many young Asian-American actors, who have been finding it easier to get started abroad than at home. But while Ms. Q — who grew up in Mililani, Hawaii, and moved to Tokyo in her teens to model — managed to leverage foreign stardom into a shot at a Hollywood career, few others have done so.
Another who has is Yunjin Kim of ABC’s “Lost,” who studied drama at Boston University and the London Academy of Performing Arts before becoming a film star in Korea.
Yet scores of other Asian-American actors are still waiting for their big break back home. Among them are Daniel Henney, a Korean-American who grew up in Carson City, Mich., and became a star in Korea playing a kindly radiologist in the hit television series “My Lovely Sam-Soon”; Daniel Wu, a native of Orinda, Calif., who won the Golden Horse award in Taiwan as best supporting actor in 2004; and Allan Wu, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who has become a television star in Singapore.
For Asian-Americans, who are seldom greeted with open arms in Hollywood, the trans-Pacific route to big-screen success is an old one.
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Has to be all words or all moving pictures.
books
Family – Hipsterland bookstore. Buy zines, comics, and carefully curated books.
The Book Rack – A bookstore in Arcadia. Buy, trade, rent.
Vromans – A fullscale bookstore in Pasadena. Good reading events.
movies
Laemmle Theaters – Arty films, with locations all over Los Angeles
The American Cinemathecque (The Egyptian Theater)
http://www.vcfilmfest.com
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I love stories set in Los Angeles, and especially in the San Gabriel Valley.
Pasadena novelist wins the Edgar Award
PASADENA – The atomic bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. In local author Naomi Hirahara’s novels, its effects still course through the contemporary world of the West San Gabriel Valley. Set more or less in the present, Hirahara’s Mas Arai mystery series looks to the past for answers.
“I do think there’s a continuum in terms of history and today,” Hirahara said. Her writings explore “how history reverberates and echoes.” Hirahara recently won the most prestigious mystery-writing prize – the Edgar Allen Poe award, known as an Edgar – for Best Paperback Original for her third and latest Mas Arai installation, “Snakeskin Shamisen.”
Also, you can read an excerpt from her book Snakeskin Shamisen on her site.
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100% Perfect Girl by Haruki Murakami
Fleep by Jason Shiga
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