LA Shorts, edited by Steven Gilbar
Oct. 23rd, 2013 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essentialsaltesAn uneven anthology of largely mainstream short stories. With Los Angeles as the organizing theme, I hope for the city, or the feel of the city, to be a prominent part of the story. But I was disappointed by many of them on that score. And by the lack of a point. If your story doesn't really have a point, please don't try to wrap it all up with an ambiguously poetic paragraph in an effort to look deep. But a number of them delivered.
One of the particularly good points of the book was the wildly varying perspectives and cultures: Hollywood, Disneyland, black and Latino LA, sure, but also the recent Russian immigrants, the Korean court interpreter (in a barely fictionalized version of the Latasha Harlins case), and the Chinese father looking to remarry (but haven't you used your father as material enough, Sandra Tsing Loh?).
One of the particularly good points of the book was the wildly varying perspectives and cultures: Hollywood, Disneyland, black and Latino LA, sure, but also the recent Russian immigrants, the Korean court interpreter (in a barely fictionalized version of the Latasha Harlins case), and the Chinese father looking to remarry (but haven't you used your father as material enough, Sandra Tsing Loh?).
