RIDING THE UNIT: Selected Nonfiction 1994-2004 by Mark Spitzer FINALLY & OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED BY SIX GALLERY PRESS PITTSBURGH, PA!!!

Here's the link to order!

Via Annabelle Udo of AsianWeek comes that piece on the nurturing of the Filipino diaspora —

The intersection of Sixth and Mission streets straddles San Francisco’s battle with time and architecture. To the east, a mayhem of bars and grills, the Sony Metreon and the Westfield Mall.

To the west, a mish-mash of parking lots, old brick buildings and empty metered-parking spaces.
Amidst this transitioning neighborhood is Arkipelago Books, a literary diamond in the dust, at home in an area where the city’s first Filipino immigrants resided in the early 1900s.

Via Liz Miller of Bookslut:

The reason I didn't keep a diary in high school was because I didn't have much interest in writing what other people weren't going to read. My portentous teen angst still found purchase, though, mostly in long letters to friends, melodramatic personal essays for class, and the occasional spurt of Really Bad Poetry. Along the way, writing became my way of attempting to understand the world and what I was supposed to do in it. Writing was necessary, then, because I was a teenager, and I had no fucking clue.

Steve Erickson's genre-defying fiction can be as enthralling and difficult as his city—via Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.

It was only a day or two into the worst of the Southern California fires, and novelist Steve Erickson had just packed the car up so his family could flee their Topanga Canyon house.

They ended up staying put, watching from home the flames that could have been raging from a page of one of his novels. In Erickson's L.A., an unexplained sandstorm, the sudden emergence of an enormous lake in the center of the city and other unannounced breaches of time and space occur almost casually.

via Booklist online
Three Versions of the Truth.
Brown, Amy Knox (author).
Sept. 2007. 226p. Press 53, paperback, $16 (9780979304934).
REVIEW. First published August, 2007 (Booklist).

As its title suggests, the duplicitous nature of relationships-with lovers, family, friends, but most importantly, with one's own inner demons-is explored in all its tangled perplexity in Brown's vibrant debut collection of short stories set in her native Nebraska. As level on the page as the quintessential Great Plains landscape, Brown nonetheless reveals the dramatic peaks and valleys hidden within the interior terrain of her striking cast of everyday characters. From the college professor whose career takes a nosedive only to be saved by the publication of an ersatz self-help book in "Dr. Faustus in Lincoln" to the young woman contemplating the loss of a girlhood friendship in "Why We Are the Way We Are," Brown's protagonists are a preternaturally introspective lot, but their philosophical meditations make for revelatory reading. With fictional interludes of historical significance sprinkled throughout the collection like palate-cleansing dollops of sorbet, Brown serves up a savory homage to the place she calls home and to its myriad inhabitants. 
            — Carol Haggas