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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/hamilton-time-trump/"></div>On July third, as Donald Trump declared at Mount Rushmore that “a new far-left fascism” is waging a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” millions of those far-left fascists were watching the filmed version of Hamilton, a complex honoring of our founding that, whatever its flaws as history, opens the story up to include all the folks who are usually cut out. (For a full-throated examination of Alexander Hamilton’s actual relationship to slave holding, <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/', 'read Ishmael Reed');">read Ishmael Reed</a> on the subject).
Hamilton is the ultimate Obama-era musical. In that faraway time, it was almost as if Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the show for and about the 44th president. And in a way he did. He began work on it in 2008, the year so many of us stood wherever we were and wept with pride when America elected its first Black president. The following year Miranda performed a number from what then was called the Hamilton Mixtape at one of the first cultural events hosted at the Obama White House.
When the show reached Broadway in 2015 it contained a song in which Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton both sing tenderly to their newborn infants:
<blockquote>[You] will come of age with our young nation.
We’ll bleed and fight for you,
We’ll make it right for you.
If we lay a strong enough foundation
We’ll pass it on to you,
We’ll give the world to you,
And you’ll blow us all away …
Someday, someday.</blockquote>
Five years ago, it seemed that someday had arrived. Watching the same scene in 2020 produces a much different effect. Did we in fact lay a strong enough foundation? At this moment we do not know, and we are certain to be flooded with a lot of new information on this point come November 3.
Other parts of the show adjusted themselves beautifully to the new American revolution taking place at this moment, with people dying in the streets just as they did then (and throughout our history). As a young Hamilton and his friends sing:
<blockquote>Rise up!
When you’re living on your knees
You rise up.
Tell your brother that he’s gotta rise up.
Tell your sister that she’s gotta rise up.
When are these colonies gonna
Rise up?</blockquote>
They could very well be the words of some of the leading speakers in the Black Lives Matter movement.
¤
Hamilton is packed with more substantive ideas and actual debate than any other musical I am aware of. Next to it, the other best known musical about our founding — 1776 by composer/lyricist Sherman Edwards and book writer Peter Stone, which premiered in another dramatic chapter of the civil-rights revolution, 1969 — is threadbare. 1776 is a show about feeling, while Hamilton is a show about thinking. Miranda achieves this in part by making reading and debate the subject of Hamilton, and both are referenced constantly in a show that itself is dense with references to Broadway musicals and hip hop culture. He turns arguments about the national debt and America’s place in the struggles of its allies into exciting rap battles between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton is that rare contemporary musical whose score could only have been composed in the time in which it was written.
And, always, the musical picks up the thread between the people who fought for America’s creation and the people who fight now to keep its soul alive. There’s of course the famous line shared by Lafayette and Hamilton that always gets applause — “Immigrants. We get the job done.” But the one that reverberates even more today than when the musical was new is a toast Hamilton and his friends drink to themselves, turning to look at the audience on the second line: “Here’s to the four of us. Tomorrow they’ll be more of us.”
¤
I have many times discussed the theory that the arc of history bends toward justice with my son in law, who is of Mexican descent. When I say that things have gotten better in my lifetime, he argues that I am not in a position to actually know. And indeed I concede that, even if I can imagine his experiences with racism, I cannot  comprehend the full truth of what he has been through. The anti-Semitism I faced in my own career was for the most part minimal and usually so ridiculous that I could tell funny stories about it and laugh… although I do not remember laughing when I asked for a raise at my first full-time job and my boss said, “Why don’t you ask your rich Jew father in Pikesville for a raise?”
But I am in a position to know some things just because of the number of years I have lived. I was born in 1958 and I can remember what we called the riots in Baltimore in the spring of 1968 and the public dialogue at the time about racial issues. And in this we certainly have improved. Fox News notwithstanding, to turn on the TV or read the newspapers is to see a wide-ranging discussion with a new kind of depth and sophistication, one that was barely present in mass media in 1968. To put it in Hamilton terms: there are more of us.
When Obama addressed the graduates of 2020, he told them not to be afraid. He said something that might sound trite but is also true. He said, “America&#8217;s gone through tough times before — slavery and civil war, famine and disease, the Great Depression, and 9/11. And each time we came out stronger, usually because a new generation, young people like you, learned from past mistakes and figured out how to make things better.”
And so if we watch Hamilton in 2020 with renewed pleasure and hope, there is also a nagging fear as we wait for November.
Trying to get a screener so that I could write this piece a little earlier, I ran into a concrete example of something we are all seeing on every television commercial from every well- established company and corporation in the country, the financial giants who pay lip service to the changes at hand while at the same time they dig deeper trenches in the hope they will not have to change themselves.
Here’s a wee bit of background on Disney+, the only place right now through which to stream Hamilton. The service acquired the filmed musical in February for $75 million. The parent company, Disney, is of course among the most successful entertainment conglomerates in the world at present. But it is in financial trouble. According to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/04/disney-july4-future-hamilton/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/04/disney-july4-future-hamilton/', 'a recent piece');">a recent piece</a> in the Washington Post by Steven Zeitchik, “the results for Disney’s fiscal third quarter are expected to be dismal, with revenue massively down compared to 2019′s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html', '$20.3 billion');">$20.3 billion</a><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/disney-fiscal-q3-2019-earnings.html', '.');">.</a>” Its theme parks have been shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. And further, as Zeitchik writes, the “Black Lives Matter protests that sprang up in the wake of the killing of George Floyd … have infused many Americans with a sense of anger and social justice incompatible with Disney’s make-no-waves message of harmony.” Purchasing Hamilton was not only smart financially, it also sent a message that the mouse is more woke than people might think.
Wanting to write about the show, I went searching online for a Disney publicist; I planned to run this piece on July 3, the first day that Hamilton streamed, and so I wanted to view it a few days earlier, no big deal. I encountered a stumbling block unlike any I had met in my 40 years in journalism. Searching with all the tricks of my trade, I could find no sign of any publicist who worked at Disney Plus. It was as if no intermediary between the company and the press existed. So, instead I found the names of all the top executives at the company, figured out their emails, and sent a query about my problem to each one. A couple of days later I received an email from a publicist. I asked if there was a screener available and was told no, but to check back. I did and was told there was no screener available. So I waited and watched Hamilton when it streamed.
It’s a tiny thing, perhaps, but this corporate rejection of the norms of cultural debate — not allowing the press to review shows the way they have always been reviewed, through previews — is in its small way a mirror of Trump’s attacks on the press and his belief in the inherent rightness of the economically powerful. Ishmael Reed is right to castigate Miranda for not facing the totality of Hamilton’s relation to slavery, but one can’t help, in these dark days, cheer on Hamilton’s call to further revolution.
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Hamilton in the Time of Trump

Hamilton in the Time of Trump

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/three-questions-talking-jonathan-shapiro/"></div>Now playing at The Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills: Sisters in Law, a smart new play about the relationship of the Supreme Court’s first two female justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Tovah Feldshuh) and Sandra Day O’Connor (Stephanie Faracy). Playwright Jonathan Shapiro is a LARB contributor, but he doesn’t let that stop him from teaching at UCLA Law School, co-creating the Amazon Prime show Goliath with David E. Kelley, or writing for NBC’s The Blacklist and on the upcoming HBO series The Undoing. A former federal prosecutor, Shapiro kindly answered three questions about his play.
¤
LAURIE WINER: Your play pits two ways of addressing injustice — slow, steady and politely versus urgent and direct — as embodied by Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, respectively. I thought I detected your own preference, which I would say is the latter. Could you tell us something about where you stand and why?
JONATHAN SHAPIRO: I&#8217;m a big talker, but the truth is, I&#8217;m more of an incrementalist. From 2000 to 2006, I served as a State Senate appointee to the bipartisan Commission on California Government Organization and Economy (&#8220;The Little Hoover Commission&#8221;), including a year as its Chairman. It&#8217;s a good government state board created by Pat Brown to address intractable policy issues. With neither the responsibility nor the authority to actually change things, our entire influence depended on the quality and logic of our reports, and the power of people on both sides of the political aisle to come up with reasonable solutions — which meant compromise. None of our recommendations changed the world. But while I was there, our suggestions on how to address prison overcrowding, water shortages, infrastructure challenges relating to green energy, and the need for pension reform actually became statutes and policy. None of these were silver bullets, but they made the world better. Slowly. It isn&#8217;t as cathartic or dramatic as demanding direct change (which probably is my instinct). But it does move the ball down the field, which is something.
 Can you tell us what you made of the Brett Kavanaugh televised hearing? 
In terms of needlessly cruel and tawdry national spectacles, it ranks up there with the Army-McCarthy Senate Hearings and Thomas Confirmation. Having testified before the US Senate once myself in 2000 on an espionage case I prosecuted, and having worked as a special assistant for then Attorney General Janet Reno during the Waco Hearings, I&#8217;m never surprised by the ham-handed, bloviating absurdity of our legislative branch whenever it goes on TV pretending to be the judicial branch.
Audiences seem to noticeably enjoy the experience of hearing rational and responsible people debate the nature of justice in your play. Do you think Sisters in Law is addressing a specifically current need or hunger?
People really do seem to enjoy it! I hear it all the time. Which gives me hope. If you give people what they want but aren&#8217;t getting, you&#8217;ll be a hit. In a world of hysterical cablenistas and screaming meanies, a sincere disputation between smart people who actually listen to one another as they try to find the right answer feels radical, innovative, and exciting. The body politic is starving for more nutritious debate. Democracy dies without it. These two women were champions of it. We&#8217;re all sick of screaming, violent spewing. We want honest, hard-fought, fact-based, fair discussion. You can feel it.
&nbsp;
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; September 18 through October 13, 8 p.m.; standby only, call for ticket prices. (310) 746-4000, <a href="http://thewallis.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://thewallis.org/', 'thewallis.org');">thewallis.org</a>.
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Three Questions: Talking with Jonathan Shapiro about &#8220;Sisters in Law&#8221; (Sep. 18 – Oct. 13, Wallis Annenberg Center)

j-gold_portrait_city_of_gold-0

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/in-memoriam/pleasant-know-things-memory-jonathan-gold/"></div>During the two terms of President George W. Bush, I lunched every other week with food critic Jonathan Gold and novelist Michelle Huneven. These were long, agenda-less, winey meals in which conversation followed the contours of our current obsessions, meandering from books to politics to our projects, our families, adventures from our younger days, the stranger or more embarrassing the better. Sometimes you do not recognize a golden era when you are living it.
The three of us formed a comfortable and I would say sibling-like triangle. He was almost a foot taller than both of us, ground huggers at 5’2” and 3”. Wispy ginger hair surrounded his large head like a halo and just touched the suspenders on his shoulders. He carried his girth with dignity that some years later morphed into majesty. Sometimes we hugged or kissed when we met and said goodbye but usually we didn’t, because those types of formalities seemed formal.
Michelle and I both felt perpetually guilty about devoting a chunk of the work day to a meal, but we gave ourselves passes for mental health. For Jonathan of course it was his job, though you wouldn’t know by observation. We hardly discussed food. I never saw Jonathan take a note, and I never received a follow-up email asking me if I recalled some ingredient for his clarification. We ordered what we liked, though Michelle and I always asked if he had already had the Poc Chuk or Dan Dan Noodles, because we knew he needed to try as many menu items as possible. We ordered what we liked and then he added about 12 more dishes for the now note-taking server who usually betrayed no surprise but seemed to respect the scope of our commitment.
We rode the peaks and valleys of these bountiful meals, from the agitating interlude before the arrival of the first dishes, to the greedy plunder, which always gave way to the slow sipping of the last of the wine and then coffee or tea when conversation tailored off into a drowsy state of well being, the way you might spend an afternoon vacationing in a European food city. The listless sampling of desserts was often the setting for one of Jonathan’s surprising one-liners, delivered after the long pauses in which his genius brewed.
One discussion began with newly reported details of Prescott Bush&#8217;s protection of Nazi gold, sailed into the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and ended in a fascinating disquisition from Jonathan about the properties of the ink sac of the squid. There followed a wine-saturated silence.
Jonathan broke it. He said, offhandedly: &#8220;It is pleasant to know things.&#8221;
I frequently repeat that sentence in my mind and savor it.
One day I reported on my dinner at the home of a food editor of whom Jonathan was not overly fond. “What did she serve?” he and Michelle wanted to know. “We started with some grilled scallops and wilted spinach,” said I. Jonathan asked, “Beurre blanc?” “I think it was balsamic vinegar,” I said, remembering the condiment on the kitchen counter.
After yet another deep drink from his wine glass and a bit of silence, Jonathan softly declared, &#8220;Balsamic vinegar is the last refuge of a scoundrel.&#8221;
Difficult to describe why these lines gave us so much pleasure; at the time we simply nodded, satisfied that the day ended with a solid Jonathan-ism.
Afterwards we often accompanied him to some grocer or butcher that he had discovered; I remember several trips to Howie’s market in San Gabriel, to the butcher in the back, where I would buy whatever cut of meat Jonathan and Michelle ordered. I loved being a lazy acolyte. Though I was two years older than Jonathan, I slipped into my role as youngest sibling, content to follow along and trust I would learn invaluable lessons. Our lunches continued into Obama’s first term but petered off in the second. Michelle was teaching at UCLA and was always working on her next novel, I got involved in the founding of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a book of my own, Jonathan of course won the Pulitzer and went back to working at the Los Angeles Times, and his commitments grew and grew. Though my husband and I still dined with Jonathan and his wife Laurie Ochoa several times a year, the era of those sublime irregular days was over. I always thought we’d return to them when we got a bit older. Now I know that’s all I’ll get. It will be enough, though no amount of time would have been enough. Just one more thing I learned from Jonathan.
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It is Pleasant to Know Things: In Memory of Jonathan Gold

Laurie Winer is a longtime journalist who has been on staff at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Laurie Winer

20th-Century Classics for 21st-Century Audiences: An Interview with Bartlett Sher

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

The Michael Jackson Songbook

Letter from New York: The Dope on How We Cope, or, The Theater Cure

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” — Aristotle

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

<h4>A prosecutor with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office for 32 years, eight of which he was the elected District Attorney (1992-2000), Gil Garcetti oversaw 1100 prosecutors, placed a special focus on combatting domestic violence, and initiated specific programs designed to prevent crime. He also oversaw high profile prosecutions, such as the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson cases, and LAPD’s Ramparts Division police abuse cases. After leaving office, he taught a seminar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government entitled “The Interaction of the Criminal Justice System, Race, Politics, and the Media”. He has also been a frequent speaker on his various photo projects, career change, the death penalty, and especially on empowering women and girls in West Africa by building bore hole wells in rural villages. He continues in his role of Consulting Producer for TNT’s two series, The Closer and Major Crimes. In 2002, he published his first photo essay book, Iron: Erecting The Walt Disney Concert Hall. His subsequent six books have all been photo essays, including Dance in Cuba, Water is Key, Paris: Women &amp; Bicycles, and Japan: A Reverence For Beauty. His books have led him to tell his stories in numerous photo exhibitions and presentations throughout the world, such as at The United Nations in New York; UNESCO in Paris; the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Fowler Museum at UCLA; and the Millennium Museum in Beijing. All of his books are discussed on his website, www.garcetti.com.</h4>

Gil Garcetti

Stephen Rohde is a writer, lecturer&nbsp;and political activist.&nbsp;For almost 50 years, he practiced civil rights, civil liberties, and intellectual property law. He is a past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and past National Chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He is a founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; member of the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus, and a member of the Black Jewish Justice Alliance. Mr. Rohde is the author of&nbsp;American Words of Freedom&nbsp;and&nbsp;Freedom of Assembly&nbsp;(part of the American Rights series); and numerous articles and book reviews on civil liberties and constitutional history for&nbsp;Los&nbsp;Angeles&nbsp;Review&nbsp;of&nbsp;Books,&nbsp;American Prospect,&nbsp;Los&nbsp;Angeles&nbsp;Times, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Lawyer, Truth Out, L A Progressive, Variety,&nbsp;and&nbsp;other&nbsp;publications. &nbsp;He&nbsp;is also&nbsp;co-author of&nbsp;Foundations of Freedom&nbsp;published by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. &nbsp;Mr. Rohde received Bend the Arc’s “Pursuit of Justice” Award and his work has been recognized by the ACLU and American Bar Association. Mr. Rohde received his BA degree in Political Science from Northwestern University and his JD degree from Columbia Law School.&nbsp;

Stephen Rohde

<h4>Don Franzen is a lawyer in Beverly Hills specializing in entertainment and business law. He has lectured on entertainment law at the Eastman School of Music, Santa Monica College’s Academy of Entertainment and Technology, the Berklee School of Music in Valencia, Spain, and lectures at UCLA’s Herb Albert School of Music, where he teaches two courses on the law and the music industry. He has published articles on legal issues in newspapers, magazines, and law journals. He serves on the board of the Los Angeles Opera and counts among his clients leading performers in opera, orchestral music, film, and the recording industries. He is the legal affairs editor for&nbsp;Los Angeles Review of Books.</h4>

Don Franzen

Radio Hour: Will California End the Death Penalty with Proposition 62?

A historian and writer interested in the intersections of architecture and power, Despina Stratigakos's latest book, <a title="This link opens a page in a new window or tab." href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300183818" target="_blank">Hitler at Home</a> (Yale University Press, 2015), investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. She has also published widely on issues of diversity in architecture, including the award-winning <a title="This link opens a page in a new window or tab." href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-womenas-berlin" target="_blank">A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City</a> (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Her forthcoming book, <a title="This link opens a page in a new window or tab." href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10665.html" target="_blank">Where Are the Women Architects?</a>, will be released in spring 2016 by Princeton University Press.

Despina Stratigakos

Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold (Vintage, 2002), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes (Simon &amp; Schuster, 2011), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His other novels include: The Mezzanine (Weidenfeld &amp; Nicolson, 1988), Room Temperature (Grove Press, 1990), U and I: A True Story (Random House, 1991), Vox (Vintage, 1993), The Fermata (Vintage, 1995), The Everlasting Story of Nory (Vintage, 1998), A Box of Matches (Vintage, 2003), Checkpoint (Vintage, 2004), Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon &amp; Schuster, 2008), The Anthologist ((Simon &amp; Schuster, 2009), and Traveling Sprinkler (2013). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He received the International Hermann Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. Nicholson Baker lives in Maine with his family.

(Photo: © Margaret Brentano)

Nicholson Baker

Boris Dralyuk is the Editor-in-Chief of the&nbsp;Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a literary translator and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He has also taught at&nbsp;the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work has&nbsp;appeared in the&nbsp;Times Literary Supplement,&nbsp;The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,&nbsp;London Review of Books, The Paris Review,&nbsp;The Guardian,&nbsp;Granta,&nbsp;World Literature Today,&nbsp;The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review,&nbsp;New England Review,&nbsp;Harvard Review,&nbsp;Jewish Quarterly,&nbsp;and other journals. He is the author of&nbsp;Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934&nbsp;(Brill, 2012) and translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018), Isaac Babel’s&nbsp;Red Cavalry&nbsp;(Pushkin Press, 2015) and&nbsp;Odessa Stories&nbsp;(Pushkin Press, 2016), Maxim Osipov’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, and&nbsp;Other Stories (NYRB Classics, 2019, with Alex Fleming and Anne Marie Jackson), and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (MacLehose Press, 2020). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution&nbsp;(Pushkin Press, 2016), and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of&nbsp;The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry&nbsp;(Penguin Classics, 2015). His website is&nbsp;<a href="http://bdralyuk.wordpress.com/">bdralyuk.wordpress.com</a>. (Photograph by Jennifer Croft.)

Boris Dralyuk

Radio Hour: Despina Stratigakos's "Hitler at Home" & Nicholson Baker on Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

Tracy Tynan, London born, studied social anthropology at Sussex University and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with BA in Liberal Arts, later pursuing film at UCLA. In 1982 she began designing costumes for films and TV. Her many credits include Choose Me, The Big Easy, Mi Familia, and Tuesdays with Morrie. In 2010 she was awarded the WIFTS foundation International Visionary award for her contribution to Costume Design. She is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts &amp; Sciences, Costume Designer’s Branch. As an artist, she has collaborated with Erika Rothenberg on several projects, including Suicide Notes, Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, and Shower Curtain of Death. She created a fractal sculpture for High Desert Test Sites 2013, a large Mengers Sponge, constructed of 3,000 business cards, collected from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, NM. Her memoir, Wear &amp; Tear: The Threads of My Life, will be published by Scribner on July 12th 2016. Tynan lives in Los Angeles with her husband, filmmaker Jim McBride. Photo credits: Ken Locker.

Tracy Tynan

Evan Kindley is senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Evan Kindley

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Radio Hour: Tracy Tynan's "Wear and Tear", plus D.W. Winnicott

Radio Hour: Nicholson Baker's "Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids"

<h4>Ron Arias is the author of The Road to Tamazunchale, The Wetback and Other Stories, and several non-fiction books, including Five Against the Sea , Healing from the Heart with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Moving Target: A Memoir of Pursuit, and White s Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time with Paul D. White. He lives with his wife in Hermosa Beach, California.</h4>

Ron Arias

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohnis a journalist, author and producer exploring issues involving women, culture and media.Janice has a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University. Her first script, Those People: A Love Story&nbsp;(formerly Lovers in Their Right Mind) was selected by DreamAgo 2016 Plume &amp; Pellicule international screenwriting atelier. Her work-in-progress documentary, “…but can she play?”has been twice recognized by Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Awards. In publishing, Janice is a contributor to the James Gayles anthology, Reflections&nbsp;(Pochino Press, 2014), and co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed&nbsp;(Atria, 2012). Her work has appeared in the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Essence, among other publications. She is a former Senior Editor for Los Angeles Review of Booksand served as Director of the Los Angeles Review of Books/ USC Publishing Workshop. She is currently Associate Director for the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Radio Hour: Ron Arias "The Wetback and Other Stories" plus Monica Coleman's "Bipolar Faith"

<h4>Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author. The daughter of a classical pianist and a journalist, she followed her father’s footsteps into the newsroom, beginning her career at The Jordan Times in Amman and Cronkite Productions in New York City. She later became an off-air reporter and researcher for ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel in Washington, DC, where she helped cover the historic presidential election in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a myriad of other events and topics. Blume now specializes in stories on historical cultural achievements and has documented seminal moments in the careers of Jackson Pollock, Truman Capote, and Ernest Hemingway, among other greats. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, and <a href="http://lesleymmblume.com/writings/">her work has appeared in many additional publications</a>, including Town &amp; Country, Vogue, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Departures, and The Paris Review Daily. Photo by Claiborne Swanson Frank.</h4>

Lesley M. M. Blume

<h4>Laura Albert won international acclaim with her fiction. Writing as JT LeRoy, she is the author of the best-selling novels <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158234146X/ref=as_li_tf_il?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=158234146X&amp;link_code=as3&amp;tag=lauraalcom-20" target="_blank">Sarah</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582342113?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creativeASIN=1582342113&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;tag=lauraalcom-20" target="_blank">The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things</a>, and the novella <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0867196149/ref=as_li_tf_il?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0867196149&amp;link_code=as3&amp;tag=lauraalcom-20" target="_blank">Harold’s End</a>, published by Last Gasp with illustrations by Cherry Hood.</h4>

Laura Albert

<h4>Janet Fitch is a Los Angeles native and the author of&nbsp;White Oleander&nbsp;and&nbsp;Paint It Black. Her latest novel is a two-part epic, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.</h4>

Janet Fitch

Radio Hour: Lesley M.M. Blume on Ernest Hemingway, Laura Albert recommends, and Janet Fitch reads

Radio Hour: Laura Albert on the Documentary "Author: The JT Leroy Story"

Radio Hour: Evan Kindley and Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.