Pull up a chair; you’re in for a lovely literary evening this Thursday. We are pleased to introduce prolific Angeleno intellectual Lawrence Weschler as the special guest who will join author D. J. Waldie and California Book Club host John Freeman in a robust discussion of Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, the January CBC selection, and its elucidation of suburbia more broadly and Lakewood, California, in particular.
Weschler is the highly esteemed author of more than 20 unique, graceful books that approach questions from intriguing angles and with unusual associations, sometimes focusing on phenomenological accounts of experience and perception itself. These books include A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, which features two narratives about torture victims banding together to face their past abusers in Brazil and Uruguay; a biography of the innovative American installation artist Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees; and a magic realist nonfiction book, A Trove of Zohars, that contends with the history of photography. Waves Passing in the Night is a profile of polymath film legend Walter Murch, whose talent propelled the acclaimed editing of The Godfather and who also, as an outsider scientist, developed a theory of gravitational astro-acoustics. The book also considers a larger question of institutional scientists’ search for truth.
His lapidary nonfiction book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, explores marvels at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in downtown Culver City. You can learn in its pages, for instance, about spores, including fungus spores in the rainforests of west-central Africa that, when inhaled by stink ants, cause strange behavioral changes. Weschler won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism with a collection of essays and criticism, Everything Rises: A Book of Convergences. While this book gathers pieces written over the years about the unusual connections between disparate things, Weschler regularly examines the places where disparate things become associated.
One of his recent books is And How Are You, Doctor Sacks?, a memoir of his 35-year friendship with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who was also well-known for acclaimed books, like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It’s not a conventional memoir of side-by-side portraits, however; rather, Weschler’s close relationship with Sacks affords intimate, occasionally startling sides of Sacks that we aren’t privy to with such tenderness and raw disclosure in Sacks’s own memoir (well worth reading for different reasons), Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Conversation, for Weschler, is a portal to unexpected insights.
You can also find Weschler’s work in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, the Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and the Believer. And you can get a sense of his far-flung interests in his work for the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1981 to 2001. For a quarter of a century, he has taught a course on “the fiction of nonfiction” at different universities, including UC Santa Cruz, Brown, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and New York University.
It’s thrilling to welcome Weschler to the California Book Club to talk with Waldie and Freeman about Waldie’s unusual work of nonfiction Holy Land. After the event is over, you should pick up one of Weschler’s fascinating nonfiction books.•
Join us on January 18 at 5 p.m., when Waldie will appear in conversation with Weschler and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
We previously incorrectly stated that Holy Land had fallen out of print. Please purchase the book directly from the publisher if it is not available on Bookshop.
OUTSIDERS ONLY
Anna E. Clark writes a perceptive essay on the California imaginary in Waldie’s and Joan Didion’s work. —Alta
MEMORY AS TIME TRAVEL
Critic and novelist Ilana Masad reviews Isa Arsén’s “thoughtful, playful” debut novel, Shoot the Moon, in which a NASA programmer discovers a wormhole in a floor tile. —Alta
WEB OF DYSFUNCTION
Alta Journal associate editor Jessica Blough reviews Kate Brody’s Rabbit Hole, which, Blough says, “goes dark” and “closes the gap between the gawker and the watched.” —Alta
MACGUFFINS
Alta books editor David L. Ulin reviews Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s graphic novel Where the Body Was, saying, “The book unfolds in a universe, like this one, where things happen for no reason and all our attempts to explain them are little more than shots in the dark.” —Alta
LAST YEAR’S BESTSELLERS
Here are 2023’s bestselling titles at independent bookstores in California. —Alta
LITERARY ACQUISITION
The Los Angeles Public Library has acquired Angel City Press and will continue the press’s mission of publishing books about the city’s “rich cultural history.” —Los Angeles Times
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