Overview

The debut title of a new city-based anthology series featuring stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned some stories and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, fourteen of the city's most prophetic voices reimagine the city in very different ways. In this audiobook, you'll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you'll find here. Featuring brand-new stories by: Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A. G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu 

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9781094179919

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Reviews

A thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings...A collection that wows the imagination like no other. -- Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author An excellent collection of what-ifs that will pique readers' imaginations. -- Booklist Award-winning narrator Gabrielle de Cuir's use of a robot voice in 'Walk of Fame' by Duane Swierczynski. She sounds like a machine--but so very human at the same time. Hard to do...Fresh and gritty. -- AudioFile Many [stories] have a distinctly gritty and postapocalyptic flavor that takes advantage of a uniquely LA vibe. -- Library Journal Outstanding...Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of LA past, present, and future...Readers should snap this up. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Shows the breadth of worlds that can be created inside Los Angeles. -- Los Angeles Daily News Speculative stories set in neighborhoods around Los Angeles...a particularly appropriate and broadly appealing place to begin the series, given its outsized role in the American imagination. -- Shelf Awareness Tales that are both wildly imaginative and emotionally grounded. -- Los Angeles Times The stories here move among all of Los Angeles' gritty and bright corners. -- Kirkus Reviews

"""A thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings...A collection that wows the imagination like no other."" -- ""Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author"" ""An excellent collection of what-ifs that will pique readers' imaginations."" -- ""Booklist"" ""Award-winning narrator Gabrielle de Cuir's use of a robot voice in 'Walk of Fame' by Duane Swierczynski. She sounds like a machine--but so very human at the same time. Hard to do...Fresh and gritty."" -- ""AudioFile"" ""Many [stories] have a distinctly gritty and postapocalyptic flavor that takes advantage of a uniquely LA vibe."" -- ""Library Journal"" ""Outstanding...Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of LA past, present, and future...Readers should snap this up."" -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred review)"" ""Shows the breadth of worlds that can be created inside Los Angeles."" -- ""Los Angeles Daily News"" ""Speculative stories set in neighborhoods around Los Angeles...a particularly appropriate and broadly appealing place to begin the series, given its outsized role in the American imagination."" -- ""Shelf Awareness"" ""Tales that are both wildly imaginative and emotionally grounded."" -- ""Los Angeles Times"" ""The stories here move among all of Los Angeles' gritty and bright corners."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews"""

Author Information

"Ben H. Winters is the Edgar Award-winning author of The Last Policeman and its sequel, Countdown City. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana. Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, Bram Stoker Award-winning prose writer, editor, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association's Readers' Advisory Guide to Horror as ""consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening."" As a Halloween expert, she has appeared on the History Channel and BBC Radio and in the pages of Real Simple magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and she served as consultant on the first official US Postal Halloween stamps. Her most recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and Cemetery Dance Select: Lisa Morton. She lives in the San Fernando Valley, and can be found online at www.LisaMorton.com. Others, as in, not you Others, as in, not you Denise Hamilton is a writer-journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times and is the author of five acclaimed Eve Diamond crime novels, Prisoner of Memory, Savage Garden, Last Lullaby, Sugar Skull, and The Jasmine Trade, all of which have been Los Angeles Times bestsellers. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the short story anthology Los Angeles Noir, winner of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Mystery of 2007. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. Denise Hamilton is a writer-journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times and is the author of five acclaimed Eve Diamond crime novels, Prisoner of Memory, Savage Garden, Last Lullaby, Sugar Skull, and The Jasmine Trade, all of which have been Los Angeles Times bestsellers. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the short story anthology Los Angeles Noir, winner of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Mystery of 2007. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. Aimee Bender is the author of several novels and story collections. The Butterfly Lampshade was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award in 2020. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico, the youngest of eleven children, and later migrated to Southern California with his family and grew up in La Puente, a suburb of Los Angeles. He earned a BA with honors from the University of California at Riverside and an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, where he was editor of the university's literary magazine. Paul Boehmer attended his first Shakespearean play while in high school; he knew then that he was destined to become the classically trained actor he is today. Graduating with a master's degree, Paul was cast as Hamlet by the very stage actor who inspired his career path. A nod from the Universe he'd chosen aright! Paul has worked on Broadway and extensively in regional theater. Coinciding with another of his passions, sci-fi, Paul has been cast in various roles in many episodes of Star Trek. Paul's love of literature and learning led him by nature to his work as a narrator for audiobooks, his latest endeavour. Paul is married to the love of his life, Offir, and they live in Los Angeles with their two midnight-rambling tomcats, Dread and David. Judy Young is a voice talent and audiobook narrator. Justine Eyre is a classically trained actress who has narrated many audiobooks, earning the prestigious Audie Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She is multilingual and known for her great facility with accents. She has appeared on stage, with leading roles in King Lear and The Crucible, and has had starring roles in four films on the indie circuit. Her television credits include Two and a Half Men and Mad Men. Janina Edwards, an Earphone Award-winning narrator, is a graduate of the acting program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Gabrielle de Cuir, award-winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. She was a cowinner of the Audie Award for best narration in 2011 and a three-time finalist for the Audie and has garnered six AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her ""velvet touch"" as an actor's director has earned her a special place in the audiobook world as the foremost producer for bestselling authors and celebrities. Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than three thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices in 2012. Roxanne Hernandez is an audio narrator and a top narrator choice for young adult, adult drama, and Latin American/Chicano literature. She was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2011. Kate Orsini is a native of Talladega, Alabama. She earned a double major in Theatre and French Literature from Vassar College. She's performed on stage, in film, and on TV. She currently recurs on NCIS: LA, and stars in the Zoom episodic, ""The Corona Dialogues,"" produced by Bonnie Hunt, for which she won Best Actress at the London Independent Film Festival. John Rubinstein made his debut as the title role in Bob Fosse's Pippin. He is a skillful, AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator who has read works by Jonathan Kellerman, Orson Scott Card, Tom Clancy, and Gabriel Brownstein. Rubinstein is also a successful actor and has acted in the films Jekyll, Choose Conner, The Truth About Layla, and 21 Grams. His television credits include The Young and the Restless, Greek, Desperate Housewives, Day Break, Criminal Minds, Cold Case, CSI and Law & Order. Coming soon..."

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