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-Engaging characters who live on the non-glamorous side of L.A.
-Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Pat Barker's Union Street, Shaky Town tells the stories of people linked by place
-Compelling cover art from street artist Steve Powers (aka ESPO)
-Mathews is a much-respected, much-loved writing teacher and writer who has impacted a generation or two of successful writers
About the author
Lou Mathews is the author of L.A. Breakdown and a longstanding instructor at UCLA Extension’s acclaimed Creative Writing program. His stories have been published in ZZZYVYA, New England Review, Tin House, Black Clock, Paperback L.A., and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, former restaurant critic, and passionate cook. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and an NEA Fiction Fellowship, and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS
“L.A. is where you reside. Shaky Town is where you live.”
Welcome to Shaky Town, a place invisible on maps and found only in the secret heart of its citizens.
In this masterwork of panoramic style, Lou Mathews—a former mechanic and street racer—weaves together the tragedies and glories of one eastside neighborhood in the 1980s. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war, to an Irish priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous fault line but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.
A luminous achievement of peerless authenticity, Shaky Town captures the grit and gold of working-class Los Angeles and lays down Matthews's marker as one of the city’s great chroniclers.
