Despite living for years with Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy never once peeked at his diaries.
"We agreed that we mustn't give each other access to our diaries because we become self-consc...
Christopher Isherwood Goes to the Circus, and Clifton's
For decades writer Christopher Isherwood made Los Angeles his home. From his sunlit spot in the Santa Monica Canyon, Isherwood observed and recorded the 1960s in hundreds of typed pages. His The S...
From the tender age of 20, when he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Julian Bond has been at the forefront of civil rights activism in America. Now, more than 50 years into h...
British writer Christopher Isherwood arrived in Los Angeles after a long, slow bus ride from New York, where he had emigrated with his friend W.H. Auden. After unforgettably chronicling the underworld...
Rob Spillman, editor of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, compiled for the collection a diverse group of African authors from across the continent, including well-known writers like Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee and rising stars like Chimamanda Adichie and Laila Lalami. Spillman, editor and co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House and a writer himself, dropped by Zócalo’s offices to discuss why African writers are having a moment in the sun.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.
