L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

This contest may seem like an unfair one for Hollywood Regional Final of our Best L.A. Novel Tournament. What Makes Sammy Run?, written by Budd Schulberg, who would later win an Oscar for writing On the Waterfront, is synonymous with Hollywood, while Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One spends only a couple chapters there. Still, both books poke fun at a brand of phoniness that's become synonymous with the place.

The titular Sammy is Sammy Glick, who lies and scams his way from the Lower East Side tenements up the ranks of New York journalism and then Hollywood, his story told through the eyes of the older, wiser, morally principled Al Manheim, who can't help but tag along as he attempts his own transition from one coast to another.

The Loved One, published just seven years after Sammy, in 1948, goes the opposite direction, starting in Hollywood and moving elsewhere. It follows Dennis, a poet who came to L.A. from England to write for Hollywood but now works works at a pet cemetery called the Happier Hunting Ground. When his roommate Sir Francis gets fired from his studio job and then commits suicide, the funeral arrangements bring Dennis to the fancy human cemetery Whispering Glades, where he falls for a mortician named Aimee.

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Sales' book, which shares a title with Sofia Coppola's upcoming film (pictured above), is an expansion of her 2010 Vanity Fair article "The Suspects Wore Louboutins."

"It seemed like something somebody would make up," author Nancy Jo Sales says on the phone from her New York home. "If you had pitched this as a movie, nobody would've bought it. It would've been too unbelievable." But the story of a bunch of young suburbanites who burglarized a string of celebrity homes in 2008 and '09 did happen. And somebody did buy it — director Sofia Coppola, whose upcoming film The Bling Ring (out June 14) is inspired by the Hollywood crime spree. It's also the subject of Sales' new book, likewise titled The Bling Ring.

Coppola hired Sales as a consultant on the film after optioning her 2010 Vanity Fair article, "The Suspects Wore Louboutins." Realizing she had enough material on the case for a book, Sales started writing The Bling Ring last summer. It hits bookstores next week.

The Bling Ring, a nickname coined by the L.A. Times, was made up of six kids mostly in their late teens, who stole more than $3 million in merchandise from the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, Megan Fox, Ashley Tisdale and The Hills' Audrina Patridge, as well as a few non-celebs. They were arrested in 2009, and all pled no contest.

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Growing up gay and rebellious in a devoutly evangelical home in Kansas City is a promising premise for a memoir. There must be lots of conflict, domestic drama and self-discovery, right? Throw in the usual teenage hormone tsunami and you have a potential best-seller in the hottest of all literary categories: young adult.

Aaron Hartzler delivers the goods on two-thirds of that great premise in his debut book, which comes with the intriguing title Rapture Practice. He describes rising conflict, hormone overdrive and plenty of (mostly secret) rebellion — non–parent approved movies, non-Christian music, alcohol and even some backseat groping with girls.

But somehow, as this book has it, the highly intelligent, emotionally perceptive Hartzler doesn't grasp why just being near his best friend, Bradley, makes him feel so good. Or why feeling up a more-than-willing sophomore girl doesn't do anything other than confuse him. Or why he's fascinated by a photo of a guy at a gay pride parade leaning in to kiss a boy in a ball cap — an image that he can't get out of his mind.

Forget about the unrealized dramatic potential of coming out to your Jesus-freak parents — two well-meaning but dogmatic souls. Hartzler doesn't even let us in on the drama of coming out to himself.

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Kevin Scanlon

Natashia Deon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

At 24, Natashia Deon thought she had her whole life figured out. Despite hanging around L.A. nightclubs while working as a teenage promoter for radio station 92.3 The Beat, she graduated high school in the Santa Clarita Valley at 16, finished her undergrad degree at Cal State Long Beach at 19 and immediately joined the corporate world as an insurance underwriter in San Francisco, while still managing to graduate from law school and become an insurance defense attorney in her early 20s.

"I felt like I was so old at the time. I bought a house, I had a dog, I was just living," she recalls, then pauses to remember another detail from her past life: "I was golfing. Oh my God, I was golfing! I had a whole golf uniform."

Over fish and chips at a downtown L.A. beer bar, Deon remembers the turning point in her life a decade ago. She was working on a court case in which her client was being sued by a 70-year-old woman who had slipped and fallen in his building. Though she needed a hip replacement, the woman's attorney carelessly settled the case for $1,000, not nearly enough to cover her medical expenses. "I was just, like, 'This is wrong. This isn't what justice is about, this isn't why I became an attorney.' "

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Courtesy of Peter Mehlman

Peter Mehlman certainly has a flair for the English language. As a writer for beloved 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, he mainstreamed terms like shrinkage, sponge-worthy and "yada yada yada," the last of which has such a footing in pop culture vernacular that it's part of the Oxford English Dictionary. Heck. Even Jon Stewart used it on The Daily Show as recently as last month.

In his new book of essays, Mandela Was Late, Mehlman, a journalist by training (the book's title stems from an essay he wrote for Esquire magazine), shares observations of working on Seinfeld, living in Los Angeles, and other cultural observations and musings. But he mused for us for free when we called to chat about his book. Here, Mehlman shares his thoughts on television today, catchphrases, character narcissism and why he won't compete with the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account.

You've got a ton of one-liners in your book, such as suggesting the Museum of Tolerance have a lactose exhibit, or responding to a traffic cop who asks where you're heading by saying "Would you believe ... Daytona?" It's almost like you're working standup. But you were trained as a journalist.

I know in the preface I was trying to talk about how my life is gotten so full of these random thoughts and kind of threw them in there. I never even thought of it. The other pieces I'm hoping are more organic.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

If you're looking for sparse depictions of lost men wandering through their own spiritual crises with Los Angeles as the backdrop, then I've got a couple of books for you. Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man are starkly set apart by their eras and styles, but the basic premise, and the use of L.A. as setting and symbol for psychological desperation and emptiness, makes them far more similar than would appear at first glance.

A Single Man gives us one day in the life of George, a middle-aged British university professor living in Santa Monica who has recently lost his partner, Jim. The book, published in 1964, provides an incredibly well-rendered inner life, one tortured by grief and the burden of a gay protagonist who longs for acceptance, but also retribution. Told in a clipped, incredibly intimate present-tense third person, George's vanity and ego are laid bare, and the inner dialogue rings absolutely true. It's a book about aging and mourning, loneliness and the tragic futility of human connection. What I'm not sure it's about is Los Angeles.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

If you can get off the freeways, and learn to navigate Los Angeles via surface streets, then you'll start to understand this city. Veteran Angelinos tell newcomers this, the assumption being that understanding Los Angeles leads to liking it.

Both Bob Jones from Chester Himes' 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go and Antonia Bernal from Hector Tobar's 1998 novel The Tattooed Soldier navigate the city via surface streets and do so deftly. Bob does because most freeways didn't yet exist when Himes wrote If He Hollers. Antonio does because he's homeless and carless in and around downtown and Westlake. But neither protagonist from these two novels, facing off in Round Three of our Best L.A. Novel tournament, likes Los Angeles anymore for it.

Both men come to the city hoping for a new start. Instead they find themselves in a confusing place full of frustrating injustice that they can't escape, even as they veer from one neighborhood to another.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

The noir finals! There are few things L.A. does better than stylishly dark crime stories full of desperate characters in bleak settings. We invented film noir, even if it took a French critic to provide its name. And before that were the books that inspired the movies -- the tautly written paperbacks featuring bad dames and the violent men who lusted for them. True, L.A. can't lay claim to the man who first perfected the hardboiled detective, Dashiell Hammett, but the writers he inspired, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, surpassed the master. And they were both L.A. writers through and through.

Which is why, to this reader, the final matchup in our Noir category is a bit of a disappointment. How can we be seeking the best noir L.A. novel ever without Raymond Chandler in the running?

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See also:
*Top 12 LGBT Movies You Need To See, as Picked by Film Fest Organizers
*Our Queertown column

In her highly illustrated, keenly observed book Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America, Chicago-based editor Tracy Baim looks at how gay magazines and newspapers helped to win over hearts and minds in mainstream America while also informing LGBT folks about their own community and countering mainstream media coverage of gay issues.

Los Angeles played a key role in the rise of the gay press: The national gay newsmagazine The Advocate started up in L.A. in 1967 and the first pro-gay magazine in the United States, ONE magazine, first published in 1953. Baim talked with L.A. Weekly about the importance of her book and the gay press in the United States.

How did the project start and why did you want to do it?

I originally wanted to do profiles of the longest-running gay newspapers remaining in the U.S., but quickly expanded it to include the reason gay media was formed, how it thrived and survived, who were some of its key journalists and publications, and where it is going now.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading check out:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

The battle between Carolyn See's Golden Days and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man pits Topanga Canyon against Santa Monica, science fiction against realism and feminism against gay rights.

In crisp, gripping prose, Isherwood chronicles a day in the life of George, a gay professor trying to move on after the death of his long-time partner, Jim. Published seven years before Stonewall, the book's repudiation of gay stereotypes was nothing short of revolutionary.

See's novel, set in a dystopian version of the 1980's, stars Edith Langley, or Edie, who escaped two bad marriages, pulled herself up the socioeconomic ladder and sneers at "helpless" wives who are unable "to be anything more than ornaments ever." Yet Edie only manages to achieve her dream job -- president of the Third Women's Bank of Santa Monica -- because the man she's sleeping with offers it to her. And once she's got the position? "I learned to say nothing in meetings, letting my earrings speak for me."

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