Picture Business

Los Angeles past and present is the focus of this accomplished, entertaining collection of short stories, poems and essays. Among the unforgettable characters are a faded actress planning a media hoax, a would-be entertainment mogul, a young Midwest widow in love with Dean Martin, an ambitious newscaster, a cranky film director and a pigeon who doubles as a talent agent. The comically bizarre settings include a Las Vegas coffee shop, a university department devoted to Marilyn Monroe studies, a junior high science fair and a swimming raft off the coast of Malibu.

Varied in tone and theme, the pieces are linked by an unfailing eye for detail and a fondness for the absurd. This is a Los Angeles, according to the introduction, of "dreamers, hustlers, artists, visionaries, eccentrics and a considerable number of ordinary working people who have come west to reinvent themselves."

The stark physical beauty of southern California emerges in a series of poems about early settlers and seasonal extremes, and its erratic history is reflected in another group dealing with movie set excavations, film pioneers and L.A. baseball. In the portraits, author James Stratton takes a nostalgic yet carefully observed look at a professional Titanic survivor, the boxers and wrestlers of the old Olympic Auditorium, Rose Parade designers and some real-life Angelenos every bit as colorful as their fictional counterparts.

Picture Business: L.A. Stories, Poems and Portraits brings together work that has appeared in various journals and magazines with a wide selection of brand new writing published here for the very first time. Fresh and inventive, it captures a longtime resident's insights into a place that has figured so importantly and so consistently in America's collective imagination. With language as carefully sculpted as the landscape, this book, like the studios themselves, unspools one vivid, surprising "picture" after another.