Where Literature Coincides with Art
The Hammer Museum – Santa Monica, CA
3/4 thru 3/6/12
East L.A.’s favorite bookstore/lending library, Libros Schmibros, is back at the Hammer Museum with a free monthly book club led by co-directors David Kipen and Colleen Jaurretche. Convenings will focus on books related to the museum’s exhibitions and programs. Here is Kipen’s take on their first selections:
The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem, coinciding with the author’s free reading at the Hammer on Tuesday, March 13 at 7pm. The terrific word on Lethem’s new, artfully selected nonfiction collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, proves more than justified. It reads like a library of his many obsessions, which makes it the perfect title to inaugurate a book club curated by another cockeyed library, Libros Schmibros.
Already Dead by Denis Johnson, coinciding with the author’s free Hammer reading on Tuesday, April 17 at 7pm. Any novel subtitled A California Gothic gets our blood racing, and Johnson’s noirish 1998 Already Dead keeps it racing all the way through. It’s the story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., a pot grower who double-crosses a cocaine smuggler and finds himself in a crossfire of hit men, vengeful lovers, and one dangerous philosopher.
The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, selected as a prelude to the June 2 opening of Made in L.A. 2012, the Hammer’s Los Angeles biennial. The stories focus on a hapless screenwriter who just can’t catch a break and probably doesn’t deserve one. Fitzgerald wrote these stories on the side to pay his bills while working on the L.A. novel he’d never finish, The Last Tycoon.
***
For more on Hammer events visit: http://hammer.ucla.edu/
For more on Libros Schmibros: http://librosschmibros.wordpress.com/
