L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
We Dropped a Bomb on You: The Best of Slake I-IVOne Last Ride in the Old World
Originally published in the The Surfer’s Journal. By JOE DONNELLY The winter was dry, too dry, until it wasn’t. When the rains finally came, they kept coming. Slow, steady, torrential, a brief time out, a sliver of sun, and then the cycle repeated. In the springtime of the plague, it seemed that even the sun […]
Propelled on a Zephyr of Compressed Wind
CR Stecyk, the Smithsonian, and the first airbrushed surfboard. Originally published in the The Surfer’s Journal. By JOE DONNELLY Stored somewhere deep in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, along with other markers of pre-collapse American life gleaned from hundreds of years of material history, is a singular surfboard […]
Fetched Up in Amber
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. M ike Purpus is waiting on the second step of the staircase that leads to his second-story apartment in South Redondo Beach. Purpus is used to waiting. He hasn’t had a driver’s license since he was a kid, so […]
The Confirmation of Danny Kwock
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. Danny Kwock’s hair is long. Like, hippie long. This might surprise those who’ve leafed through the tome The Eighties at Echo Beach, or are old enough to have been there and remember when Kwock, Preston Murray, Jeff Parker, Peter […]
Why Luke Perry’s death is so personal for many forgotten Gen Xers
This story originally appeared in the LA Times. My phone buzzed at 5:07 a.m. Monday morning with a text from a friend who was in India with his wife and son. The text read: “As Luke Perry goes, so does the world.” I was too groggy from the sleeping pill I’d taken to respond, but […]
Jill Leovy and The Safety Crisis
This story originally appeared in the LA Weekly. Jill Leovy picks at the ruins of a piece of carrot cake and describes the scene she just witnessed in Los Feliz, a riot of skinny, long-haired boys in skinny jeans and skinny, pointy shoes, strutting down Vermont Avenue like a flock of peacocks. “It struck me […]
Werner Herzog Loves L.A.
Originally published by the Los Angeles Times. Photos by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times. WERNER HERZOG is at a booth in a Sunset Boulevard restaurant, just down the hill from where he once rescued Joaquin Phoenix. The rescue happened 11 years ago when the freshly Oscar-nominated Phoenix flipped his car on a winding road […]
