He used to date her roommate's sister, but now he's single and she's ready to jingle... his balls. A California Christmas is all Nora's ever known. She's got everything she needs in Los Angeles - a part-time nannying gig, roommates who might as well be her family, and an acting career in the making. The last thing she's looking for is a relationship. So why does this redheaded Brit suddenly have her tinsel in a twist? Bowie has a nasty habit of falling too hard, too quickly. When he finds himself suddenly single (yet again) just before the holidays, he decides to take his friends' advice and try something new: a holiday fling. Seems easy enough until he meets Nora, the hypnotic, purple-haired goddess with curves for days, who just so happens to be his ex's sister's roommate. She just wants something casual for Christmas. He doesn't think he'll be able to let her go come Boxing Day. Can they turn their naughty month together into something nice forever? Meet Me in Los Feliz is a low-angst, high-heat holiday romance novella. This book features a "Soft Dom" short king with painted nails, a plus-size, tatted baddie who loves her body, one adorable wiener dog, and twelve-ish days of holiday shenanigans.

Poetry. This new edition includes interruptions that focus on dismantling rape culture. "By turns violent, political, romantic, incestual, cerebral, bodily, and personal, this second full-length from Tamayo (RED MISSED ACHES) bears the formal markings of the hypermodern in its deployment of digital, pop, and intertextual elements. Written after her first trip back to her native Colombia in 25 years, the book is indebted to Rihanna, Barthes, and Aim� C�saire, whose texts she mines voraciously. Those influences, as well as the spectres of Alfred Molina and the author's father, haunt the page, intermixed with screen captures, cheap internet advertising, deliberate misspellings, and pun-ridden Spanglish."--Publishers Weekly

Read Me, L.A. by Katie Orphan (manager of the famed Last Bookstore in Los Angeles) is an illustrated guidebook to all things literary L.A. past and present, featuring interviews with current Los Angeles writers, maps, day trips to follow the paths of your favorite fictional characters from Marlowe to Weetzie Bat, lists to expand your L.A. reading horizons, and a look at where writers have lived and worked in the City of Angels.

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards “A smart and accessible cultural history.”-Los Angeles Times A portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America's most iconic institutions, from an author who “might be the most influential design critic writing now” (LARB). Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated? In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

Following her prize–winning collection Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson returns with a collection of bold stories set mostly in downtown Los Angeles that examine large issues –love, class, race – and how they influence and define our most intimate moments. In "The Liberace Museum," a mixed–race couple leave the South toward the destination of Vegas, crossing miles of road and history to the promised land of consumption; in "Rogues," a young man on break from college lands in his brother's Inland Empire neighborhood during a rash of unexplained robberies; in "She Deserves Everything She Gets," a woman listens to the strict advice given to her spoiled niece about going away to college, reflecting on her own experience and the night she lost her best friend; and in the collection's title story, a man setting down roots in downtown L.A. is haunted by the specter of both gentrification and a young female tourist, whose body was found in the water tower of a neighboring building. With deep insight into character, intimate relationships, and the modern search for personal freedom, In the Not Quite Dark is powerful new work that feels both urgent and timeless.

In book five of the award-winning Austin Family Chronicles young adult series from Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, Vicky Austin experiences the difficulties and joys of growing up. After a year in New York City and a summer with her grandfather, Vicky Austin returns to the rural connecticut village she grew up in-- and feels totally out of place. Then she meets Adam Eddington's Great Aunt Serena, who reminds her of her beloved grandfather, and she begins to find a comfortable, if not exciting, routine to her days. At Christmas, Serena gives Vicky a trip to Antarctica, to visit Adam. Vicky can't believe her luck. But the trip is not what Vicky imagined it would be. First of all, she doesnt know where she stands with Adam. He's pulled back, saying they are just friends. But weren't they more than that, Vicky thinks. And Vicky's fellow passengers are not what they seem or they are more than she knows. Finally, even Aunt Serena's motives are suspect, as Vicky discovers a journal that belonged to Adam's famous uncle who disappeared many years earlier. As Vicky becomes more and more caught up in a mystery involving drugs, nuclear waste, and international espionage, she discovers that her assumptions about the world are hopelessly naive and that life, hers included, is as fragile as the ecosystem of Antarctica, the world's most remote continent. Books by Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time Quintet A Wrinkle in Time A Wind in the Door A Swiftly Tilting Planet Many Waters An Acceptable Time A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel by Madeleine L'Engle; adapted & illustrated by Hope Larson Intergalactic P.S. 3 by Madeleine L'Engle; illustrated by Hope Larson: A standalone story set in the world of A Wrinkle in Time. The Austin Family Chronicles Meet the Austins (Volume 1) The Moon by Night (Volume 2) The Young Unicorns (Volume 3) A Ring of Endless Light (Volume 4) A Newbery Honor book! Troubling a Star (Volume 5) The Polly O'Keefe books The Arm of the Starfish Dragons in the Waters A House Like a Lotus And Both Were Young Camilla The Joys of Love

“Craig wields powerful and vivid prose to illuminate a country and a family trapped not only by war and revolution, but also by desire and loss.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, husband and wife, and their daughter Louisa. After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history. Years later, Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her newfound fame, she is forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in her country, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people. Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom. “At once beautiful and heartbreaking . . . An incredible family saga.” —Refinery29 “Miss Burma charts both a political history and a deeply personal one—and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.” —Los Angeles Times

Somebody in Pacific Point is guilty of a kidnapping, but what probation officer Howard Cross wants to find most is innocence: in an ex-war hero who has taken a tough manslaughter rap, in a wealthy woman with a heart full of secrets, and in a blue-eyed beauty who has lost her way. The trouble is that the abduction has already turned to murder, and the more Cross pries into the case the further he slips into a pool of violence and evil. Somewhere in the California desert the whole scheme may come down on the wrong man. Somewhere Cross is going to find the last piece of a bloody puzzle—a mystery of blackmail, passion, and hidden identities that might be better left unsolved.

Jeannie Cheatham is a living legend in jazz and blues. A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, she has played and sung with many of the greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway, Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary Three Generations of the Blues. Her music, which has garnered national and international acclaim, has been described as unrestrained, exuberant, soulful, rollicking, wicked, virtuous, wild, and truthful. Cheatham's signature song, "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On" is a staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and Japan. In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained in a flash of light. Cheatham's autobiography is also the story of her fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.