Twelve books 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 titles about losing perspective in Los Angeles. One novel on the list:

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Fitch maps Los Angeles through the instability of Astrid, a teen who’s suddenly parentless in every practical sense when her mother goes to jail. She moves between foster homes and identities, adapting to survive each new environment. Beauty appears throughout the novel, but it offers no protection, like the relationship between mother and daughter that is both floral and poisonous. Still, flowers are pretty, right? Isn’t beauty a protection of its own? Isn’t beauty enough? LA sharpens some people and dulls others. In Fitch’s telling, LA becomes a sequence of tests, each one demanding a version of the self that may not survive the next transition.

Read about another entry on the list.

White Oleander is among Allison Gibson's eleven novels expectant parents should read and Michelle Sacks's top five novels with complex and credible child narrators.

--Marshal Zeringue