Nestled between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, Venice is a Los Angeles community filled with apparent contradictions. There, people of various races and classes live side by side, a population of astounding diversity bound together by geographic proximity. From street to street, and from block to block, million dollar homes stand near housing projects and homeless encampments; and upscale boutiques are just a short walk from the (in)famous Venice Beach where artists and carnival performers practice their crafts opposite cafés and ragtag tourist shops. In Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles, Andrew Deener invites the reader on an ethnographic tour of this legendary California beach community and the people who live there. In writing this book, the ethnographer became an insider; Deener lived as a resident of Venice for close to six years. Here, he brings a scholarly eye to bear on the effects of gentrification, homelessness, segregation, and immigration on this community. Through stories from five different parts of Venice—Oakwood, Rose Avenue, the Boardwalk, the Canals, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard— Deener identifies why Venice maintained its diversity for so long and the social and political factors that threaten it. Drenched in the details of Venice’s transformation, the themes and explanations will resonate far beyond this one city. Deener reveals that Venice is not a single locale, but a collection of neighborhoods, each with its own identity and conflicts—and he provides a cultural map infinitely more useful than one that merely shows streets and intersections. Deener's Venice appears on these pages fully fleshed out and populated with a stunning array of people. Though the character of any neighborhood is transient, Deener's work is indelible and this book will be studied for years to come by scholars across the social sciences.

A captivating memoir of living on the streets along California’s Highway 1, for fans of Mistakes to Run With and Nearly Normal. At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through countercultural communities along California’s coast, from Venice Beach to Slab City to Big Sur. This restless and turbulent time began when she was sleeping on her sister’s couch in Vancouver and decided to become a yoga disciple in California. Denied entry at the US border in Washington state, and stuck overnight in the Greyhound station, her already shaky pilgrimage began to take another direction, away from the inward sanctuary of an ashram and toward the sea and light and noise of Venice Beach, and eventually up Highway 1 to the desert. Having spent much of her youth outrunning family turmoil, the peripatetic lifestyle once key to Michelle’s survival is now a habit she can’t or won’t break—unless it breaks her first. Sleeping in parking lots, camping out in abandoned beach cottages and mansions, she finds community, easy and fraught, with fellow travellers: musicians, veterans, ex-cons, addicts, drug dealers, artists and con artists. Still, dreams and fleeting notions of home fuel and shadow every encounter, haunting the places she stays, offering moments of both grace and violence. Told with deadpan humour and insightful lyricism, Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.

Robert "'Cali" Callahan is a teen runaway, living on the streets of Venice Beach, California. He's got a pretty sweet life: a treehouse to sleep in, a gang of surf bros, a regular basketball game...even a girl who's maybe-sorta interested in him. What he doesn't have is a plan. All that changes when a local cop refers Cali to a private investigator who is looking for a missing teenager. After all, Cali knows everyone in Venice. But the streets are filled with people who don't want to be found, and when he's hired to find the beautiful Reese Abernathy--who would do anything to stay hidden--Cali enters a new world filled with mysterious characters, dangerous choices, and his first chance at real love.

In this fascinating book, John Arthur Maynard tells the story of the poets and promoters who invented the Beat Generation and who, in many cases, destroyed themselves in the process. In this look at the least remembered (but in its time, most publicized) beat enclave, Maynard focuses on two of Venice's most newsworthy residentsÐÐLawrence Lipton and Stuart Z. Perkoff. Lipton began as a writer of popular detective stories and screenplays, but was determined to be recognized as a poet and social critic. He eventually published The Holy Barbarians, which helped to create the enduring public image of the beatnik. Stuart Perkoff was a more gifted poet; with fascination and horror, we follow his failed attempts to support his family, his heroin addiction, his first wive's courage and mental fragility, his sexual entanglements, his imprisonment, and the development of his own writing. Other characters who move in and out of the story are Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as lesser-known poets, artists, hangers-on, and the many women who were rarely treated as full members of the community.

Travis Lett's new American cuisine from Los Angeles's most talked-about restaurant. Standout cookbook featuring 125+ rustic and delicious dishes: Gjelina in Venice Beach, California is lauded by critics from London to New York to San Francisco. It is beloved by stars, locals, and out-of-towners alike for its seductive simplicity and seasonal New American menu created by talented chef Travis Lett. • With 125 rustic and utterly delicious salads, toasts, pizzas, vegetable and grain dishes, pastas, fish and meat mains, and desserts that have had fans clamoring for a table at Gjelina since the restaurant burst onto the scene in 2008. • More than 150 color photographs from acclaimed photographer Michael Graydon and stylist Nikole Herriott. The tactile and artisanal packaging of this recipe book evoke the vibe of Venice Beach and the Gjelina (the G's silent) aesthetic, and showcase the beautiful plated food of chef Travis Lett's ingredient-based, vegetable-centric cooking. Much like cookbook best sellers from Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, Plenty, and Ottolenghi, Gjelina is the cookbook for the way we want to eat now. • Gorgeous cookbook will be a go-to for inspiring recipes as well as for simply admiring the photographed plated dishes. • Mouthwatering recipes include broccoli rabe pesto, grilled kale with shallot-yogurt dressing and toasted hazelnuts, mushroom toast, baby radishes with black olive and anchovy aioli, ricotta gnocchi with cherry tomato Pomodoro, farro with beet and mint yogurt, cioppino, steaks with smoky tomato butter and cipollini, strawberry-rhubarb polenta crisp, and more.

Mr. Lipton’s book is the first complete and unbiased survey of the beat generation and its role in our society. Here are the intimate facts about these people and their attitudes toward sex, dope, jazz, art, religion, parents, landlords, employers, politicians, draft boards, the law and, most important, toward the “square”. The author presents a picture of their way of life, their individual backgrounds, the language they have appropriated, in terms made clear for the first time to those of us who have been confused and puzzled about them. He also provides a balanced discussion of their literature, art and music, of what they produce and fail to produce in the arts they practice.—Print Ed.

Visit VirtualVenice.info Pat Hartman´s first book, Call Someplace Paradise, was concerned with the public face of Venice, California - the boardwalk and boutique Venice visited by between one and two hundred thousand tourists each weekend. Ghost Town is about the other Venice. There is a book genre described by Russ Rymer as "inspecting America´s racial trauma through the lens of private experience, as it plays out in the daily difficulties of particular persons in one or another microcosmic place." Here the microcosm is Oakwood, a hotbed of diversity and danger called Ghost Town by its own citizens. The particular persons are a white single mother, age 30, and her 11-year-old, half-black daughter, along with a stellar cast of roommates, boyfriends, and neighbors. Ghost Town: A Venice California Life is a psychological adventure story that takes place in a challenging environment where many people would never consider trying to live. Much has been said and written about racial dynamics by people who, however well-informed and well-intentioned, may talk the talk but haven´t walked the walk. Whether by lack of inclination or of opportunity, many experts on race relations have never actually lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, let alone where their own group is a minority. In an environment that forces thought about race issues every single day, it´s a different world. How are attitudes about race formed? Why is it that even the most willing participants of the melting pot sometimes can´t take the heat? These and other questions are precisely as relevant now as they were in the period covered here, 1978-84. Unfortunately the subject of race will probably continue to be relevant into the next millennium and beyond, given that the human race as a whole is still around that long. Despite being burglarized, mugged, vandalized, menaced, caught in the black/chicano crossfire, and visited by men in suits who travel in pairs, the author found existence in Oakwood rewarding and positive an many ways. (Film director Barbet Schroeder, who lived in Oakwood during the same time period, told an interviewer it was "the best year of my life so far.") Like the diary of Samuel Pepys in London, like Alexander King´s memoirs of Greenwich Village, Ghost Town is a record of a fascinating and frightening urban environment through the eyes of an articulate and meticulous observer. Visit VirtualVenice.info