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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9781094179926

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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

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. Ben H. Winters is coauthor of the New York Times Best Seller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which was hailed by The Onion A.V. Club as a ""sheer delight"" and by Library Journal as ""strangely entertaining, like a Weird Al version of an opera aria."" Mr. Winters lives in Brooklyn. 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. Coming soon... Judy Young is a voice talent and audiobook narrator. Paul Boehmer is an American actor best known for his numerous appearances in the Star Trek universe. Paul is a 1992 Masters of Fine Arts graduate of the Professional Theater Training Program at the University of Delaware. Justine Eyre has turned her passion for reading and remarkable facility with accents into her dream career. This classically trained, multilingual actress has narrated well over 400 audiobooks and has been honored to receive a coveted Audie Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. Appearing in leading roles onstage in King Lear and The Crucible, she has also graced the screen in Two and Half Men and Mad Men amongst her many television credits. Gabrielle de Cuir, an Audie and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She was born in Chicago, soaked in New York City's African and West Indian accents for 11 years, and for the past twenty years has swum in the swagger of the south (Atlanta, Georgia). As a result, she excels in portraying authentic characters and voices the African Diaspora. Her 2018 audiobook, The Wedding Date, is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, and Voice of Freedom (2016, Dreamscape) was an Audie Award finalist. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin. Stefan Rudnicki is an award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer. He was born in Poland and now resides in Studio City, California. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks and has participated in over a thousand as a writer, producer, or director. He is a recipient of multiple Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as a Grammy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Ray Bradbury Award. He received AudioFile's award for 2008 Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Along with a cast of other narrators, Rudnicki has read a number of Orson Scott Card's best-selling science fiction novels. He worked extensively with many other science fiction authors, including David Weber and Ben Bova. In reviewing the twentieth anniversary edition audiobook of Card's Ender's Game, Publishers Weekly stated, ""Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take."" Rudnicki is also a stage actor and director. 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. John Rubinstein appeared on Broadway in Pippin, Children of a Lesser God (Tony Award), M. Butterfly, and Ragtime, and starred in the television series Family and Crazy Like a Fox. His films include 21 Grams and Red Dragon. He is also a composer of film music and a director. 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.

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