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  “With coolness and precision, Specktor comes across as a West Coast Saul Bellow in this sweeping narrative, but his energetic, pop-infused prose is markedly his own.” —Booklist “Specktor’s book deserves a special space in the L.A. canon, somewhere looking up at Pynchon and Chandler. Even as the narrator searches through his past to uncover the truth about his family, the author is searching, too.” —LA Weekly “…Matthew Specktor’s American Dream Machine [is] a big and generous novel that functions both as elegy for a recent past and fictional anthropology . . . .it evokes a world with casual ease and unexpected tenderness, recalling and referencing lots of other fiction (both Hollywood and non) while contriving to establish its unique authority.” —LA Review of Books “Specktor’s great achievement is to make familiar territory original, the Hollywood novel born anew. It’s bold, weird, an d unforegetable, as startling as a poke in the eye.” —The Sunday Telegraph Magazine “Specktor does for L.A. what Hemingway did for Paris and what Hunter S. Thompson did for Las Vegas: create a character that lives and breathes a city. Like hotels in Vegas, we see characters rise, grow dusty, and collapse.” —Daily Beat, Hot Reads “American Dream Machine takes readers into situations that might seem familiar: the drug-fueled party at a star’s house in the hills, tense meetings between executives, dimly-lit wood-paneled bars filled with players and movie stars. Yet Specktor’s lyrical writing and insights into human nature elevate the novel into fresh territory.” —Kirkus “[American Dream Machine] is a vivid evocation of the entertainment business from the 1960s to the near present, an L.A. bildungsroman and a murder mystery, all wrapped in one . . . entertaining package.” —New York Daily News “American Dream Machine is grand, complex, lush, intelligent and lively, funny as hell and generous in ways you don’t often find. It’s also a strikingly original portrait of Los Angeles. People speak of Chandler’s Los Angeles, or Didion’s, or Nathaniel West’s. Someday, they’ll speak of Specktor’s the same way.” —Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine and The Devil in Silver “American Dream Machine may be the first literature I’ve read in which Los Angeles is assumed as London is assumed by Dickens and Paris by Proust and New York by a host of twentieth-century American writers. There is nothing ironic, ambivalent, or apologetic about Specktor’s relationship to Los Angeles — as it is and was, as myth and as a thriving capitol city. Los Angeles provides an animate pulse under the lives of these men and boys, a source of permanence that lends their struggles gravity.” —Mona Simpson, My Hollywood “Matthew Specktor has created a great American character in Beau Rosenwald. He is full of contradictions, full of ambition, full of raw life, and yet he manages to seduce us. This riveting novel shows us the existential desperation that lurks in the dark hunger of Hollywood power mongers. Specktor gets every detail right, and American Dream Machine‘s sentences are suffused with an elegiac beauty.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia and Eat The Document “American Dream Machine is the definitive new Hollywood novel. It’s...
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This is Beau Sia and Amber Tamblyn reading at GR2. Beau Sia’s new book The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time. (Sorry about the delay in getting these up. It does take a long time to upload an HD video even if it’s a cellphone video. Enjoy the readings. We’ll keep trying to add video as much as we can!) [youtube]ZC6DZlfopRA[/youtube] [youtube]1qWYXTm93mc[/youtube] [youtube]JZ5jEf1HOyI[/youtube]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tongue and Groove – Author Readings Friday 5/25 8pm Giant Robot 2  2062 Sawtelle Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90025 310-445-9276 In celebration of National Asian American/Pacific Islanders Heritage month, Conrad Romo’s Tongue and Groove Series will make an appearance at Giant Robot 2 featuring Frannie Choi, Chiwan Choi, Ed Lin, Traci Kato Kiriyama and others bios Chiwan Choi is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher Abductions is his second book of poetry. Ed Lin is the author of Waylaid,This Is a Bust and Snakes Can’t Run. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. The native New Yorker’s latest book is One Red Bastard, by Minotaur. He’ll be available to sign copies. Traci Akemi Kato-Kiriyama is the creator/ producer of Tuesday Night Café in Japan Town. She is a writer, performing artist, educator and  grassroots organizer. Franny Choi was a finalist at two of the three most prestigious poetry slams in the country: the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She was awarded Best Female Poet and Most Innovative at the 2011 Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational, and her team was specially recognized for Pushing the Art Forward at the 2011 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. She was also the top-ranking female poet at the 2011 Southern Fried Poetry Slam and the champion of 2010 Seoul Poetry Slam Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles as well as an online equivalent. Eric Nakamura Giant Robot Owner/Publisher eric@giantrobot.com  
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Cellphone novels? Some of you will cringe and those of you who slave over syntax of your words via computer are probably about to get mad. In Japan, authors actually create “literature” via text messages. This is an amazing feat and it’s working out. This story tells of a 21 year old, Rin who’s debut novel sold 400,000 copies and became number 5 in 2007. Our world definitely has changed, and how a novel can be written originally from texts is baffling, and they sell too? It continues to grow, even the list from last year, yields 5 of the top 10 best selling books. Imagine, seeing a person texting is no longer just sending a message, but it’s actually creative writing. (NY Times – Cellphone Authors)
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