A compendium of historic crimes and strange occurrences in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles

In 'Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir', historian Nathan Marsak tells the story of the Hill, from the district's inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its present day. Marsak commemorates the poets and writers, artists and activists, little guys and big guys, and of course, the many architects who built and rebuilt the community on the Hill - time after historic time. Any fan of American architecture will treasure Marsak's analysis of buildings that have crowned the Hill: the exuberance of Victorian shingle and spindlework, from Mission to Modern, from Queen Anne to Frank Gehry, Bunker Hill has been home to it all, the ever-changing built environment.

An ex-con struggles to adjust to life outside prison walls in “one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years” (James Ellroy). After eight years spent locked up, Max has gotten very good at being a prisoner. He knows the guards, the inmates, and how to survive. But the parole board has decided that he has sufficiently reformed, and it’s time for him to say goodbye. When Max reaches the outside world, he finds that freedom doesn’t make anything easier. Based on his own experiences in prison, Edward Bunker first drafted No Beast So Fierce in the 1950s, while incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison. He spent the next two decades in and out of jail, writing essays for various magazines and working on the novel, which was finally published in 1973. Eighteen months later, the book was used as evidence that he was fit to leave jail. He received parole, and spent the rest of his life a free man. Rooted in real-life experiences and hailed by Quentin Tarantino—who cast Bunker in his film Reservoir Dogs—as “the best first person crime novel I have ever read,” No Beast So Fierce is a gritty and compelling read like no other.

DIVSix stories from the papers of one of America’s finest crime authors /divDIV/divDIVRoger doesn’t mean for the preacher and his wife to die. Released less than a year earlier from San Quentin, he’s trying to make a living the only way he knows how: theft. His latest heist goes perfectly until his car breaks down. Sirens are closing in when an old black preacher stops to give him a lift. The police at the roadblock kill the elderly couple, but in the eyes of the law it’s Roger’s fault. And he will die in the gas chamber at San Quentin—unless he can break out first./divDIV /divDIVRoger’s incredible story anchors this collection of short fiction by Edward Bunker, who knew better than anyone what it means to be a criminal, inside and outside of prison. In these stories, which were unpublished at the time of his death in 2005, he shows again the talent that made him such a remarkable writer./div

Under the new California "three strikes" law, three ex-convicts attempt to live normal lives, but when they find it impossible to do so, they devise a plan to do one more collaborative job that will either land them in prison or put them on easy-street for the rest of their lives

When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already been there exploring the real-life "mean streets" that his hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe, prowled in the writer's exacting prose. But the biggest crime was going on behind the scenes, run by the city's power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson enlarges the record of L.A. history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears- from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now, an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

Available Now: World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories.

This full-length anime action thriller follows the story started in the Sengoku Basara TV series, telling the story of a league of generals, who banded together to defeat an evil overlord, who threatened to dominate Feudal Japan. Now, their nemesis's loyal servant is on the warpath to avenge his fallen leader, and the fate of a nation once again hangs in the balance. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi

This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city’s unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.