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Los Angeles Stories
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A Los Angeles Times's and Southern California Indie Bookseller Association's Bestseller!
Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America's most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs ...more
Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America's most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs ...more
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Paperback, 232 pages
Published
October 4th 2011
by City Lights Publishers
(first published January 1st 2011)
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Start your review of Los Angeles Stories

The stars are lined up perfectly for musicians who write books. Some of my favorite books are by rock n' roll people i.e. Patti Smith's "Just kids," and Nick Cave's novels. And now we have a superb collection of short stories by guitarist/songwriter Ry Cooder that deals with Los Angeles from 1940 to the mid-50's and its brilliant. What you get is a series of snapshots of life in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and some of these places don't exist anymore - but yet they live via Cooder's
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So you think I’m kidding, do you? You think I don’t know that Ry Cooder is a musician? Aha, but in 2011 that same Ry Cooder wrote a book of short stories published by City Lights, entitled Los Angeles Stories. These stories, set between 1940 and the 1950s, are not only great L. A. Noir, but they sing with their own unique brand of chicken skin music. John Lee Hooker puts in an appearance, as does Charlie Parker. And the stories are rife with musical references:
Four Chinese girls were sitting at...more

Jul 27, 2011
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
rated it
it was amazing
Shelves:
cl-fiction,
cl-california-writers
"On his records, Ry Cooder specializes in the talking blues, modernizing the struggle and humanity in his source materials – folk and public-domain covers, the rhythms of Tex-Mex and Chicano culture – with narrative grit and immediacy. His prose, in turn, is rich in sound – echoes of blues, jazz, boleros – in this superb debut of tales set in L.A.'s Hispanic neighborhoods and on its R&B-nightclub boulevards in the Forties and Fifties. Cooder writes with Chandler-esque pepper and an eye for chara
...more

Quickly grew bored with these attempts at noir stories which all seemed the same, a murder, crime, "dame" in trouble etc. Was very little to distinguish the narrator of each story set in Los Angeles of more than half a century ago. The writing was muddled at times and confusing, especially with all that Spanish thrown in. I didn't have a clue until after I'd read them that they were written by a jazz musician. Lots of jazz stuff in there plus corny old-fashioned noir style dialogue and hard-nose
...more

I finished Los Angeles Stories on the St Malo ferry so was transported from a fortunately calm crossing of the English Channel to the down-at-heel city of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. Ry Cooder is not only a wonderful musician but also a pretty good writer as these stories prove. There is a fantastic sense of the atmosphere and seediness of the city, the desperation and hope of the people. Each of this collection of short stories has a link to the others, whether it be a place or a charac
...more

Lively writing and curious plots make for a solid collection of stories by my guitar hero of years ago. Cameos by folks like John Lee Hooker spice up the enchilada along the way.
Read it, don't leave it behind! ...more
Read it, don't leave it behind! ...more

I've been a big fan of Ry Cooder's music for many years, and I'm happy to be able to say that his literary debut is excellent! For short stories, these are on the long side, and if there's a flaw, it's is a tendency towards too much plot and too many characters. However, that's a minor quibble, and there's an enormous amount to enjoy. Cooder clearly knows a lot about the history of LA, and he draws on this effectively to set his stories in the 1940s and '50s. His characters are all people who ar
...more

“Los Angeles Stories”, musician/composer Ry Cooder’s first published collection, looks at struggling but always carrying on people (unsurprisingly, many having something to do with music) in 1950’s LA. The stories are variable (collections of stories almost always are) but all are full of well-described life and characters. The best of the lot (and they are really outstanding) are “End of the Line” and “My Telephone Keeps Ringin’”. These two read like miniature noir novels, with passive protagon
...more

Jul 15, 2018
Ted
rated it
it was amazing
Shelves:
amer-west,
redneck-noir,
lit,
short-stories,
fiction,
automobileculture,
ufos,
ellay,
ca-l-i-fornia
An excellent collection of short stories... Influenced by Nathanael West, steel guitars, Raymond Chandler, and old cars... Los Angeles in the 1940s & 50s.. sans glitz.
I hope he publishes more of these...
I hope he publishes more of these...

"I had made up my mind to quit worrying. Los Angeles was the Land of the Brighter Day, something good was bound to turn up."
These last two lines sum up the motivation that lies with the numerous characters that musician Ry Cooder offers up in his new collection of short stories. While the stories are nominally linked, the variety is enormous: mariachi players, park prophets, backalley dentists, tailors, and disc jockeys are all introduced in their native milieu. Set in the first half of the twen ...more
These last two lines sum up the motivation that lies with the numerous characters that musician Ry Cooder offers up in his new collection of short stories. While the stories are nominally linked, the variety is enormous: mariachi players, park prophets, backalley dentists, tailors, and disc jockeys are all introduced in their native milieu. Set in the first half of the twen ...more

Cool stories, well-told... Some readers have been disappointed not to see the same virtuosity in his writing (words) as his writing (music); I disagree. He's a great storyteller either way and, if the genre -- the street vernacular of the southwest in the fifties -- isn't your cup of tea, that's not his shortcoming. It might not be great literature, but they are good stories well told!
...more

Not much of a review here...just tryin' to help a little. If you like Ry's music, you'll almost certainly enjoy the book; these stories are so like his songs. If not, then not.
...more

Los Angeles Stories is a collection of working class slices of life set in LA during the 1940s-50s. The book runs 232 pages short and in that time Ry Cooder carefully weaves us through eight stories. All sprinkled with elements of noir and a fondness for the musician lifestyle and music of yesteryear.
All in a Day's Work is a strong start to the collection and introduces us to Cooder's style. Mundane existence who's characters aren't complex but the circumstances they find themselves in. Here a ...more
All in a Day's Work is a strong start to the collection and introduces us to Cooder's style. Mundane existence who's characters aren't complex but the circumstances they find themselves in. Here a ...more

From Old Bunker Hill to shabby Santa Monica, characters down on their luck or just plain foolish fall into noir's twisted web in the changing Los Angeles of the 1940s and 50s. This collection of short stories is written in the lingo of the era, and musician-author Ry Cooder populates the stories with musicians and night clubs. If you're hungry for interesting stories that break out from the same-ol'-same-ol', that harken back to the noir of times past, "Los Angeles Stories" is your ticket.
...more

These stories ... the characters, the settings, the mood, and of course, the stories themselves, are so elegantly crafted and memorable, I didn’t want to leave them.
I’m tempted to start reading it again, right now, because I want to visit with Herb, Ray, Lydia, Al, Billy, Dolly, Mike Brown, and all their friends, neighbors, and enemies again. I want to settle back in to my beloved Los Angeles at the time just before I was born.
It’s simply a remarkable book.
I’m tempted to start reading it again, right now, because I want to visit with Herb, Ray, Lydia, Al, Billy, Dolly, Mike Brown, and all their friends, neighbors, and enemies again. I want to settle back in to my beloved Los Angeles at the time just before I was born.
It’s simply a remarkable book.

These tales are dryly funny, meandering, full of old-time hipster slang, and crammed with period detail. I really enjoyed them. If some of these stories come to less than definite conclusions, it might be more useful for the reader to look on them less as plot-driven than as loose, spicy jams that fade out before they wear out their welcome.
Don't sweat it, the band'll kick in again soon. ...more
Don't sweat it, the band'll kick in again soon. ...more

I read this book as part of my book club, definitely not my thing. Nour is hard I felt like we were flying with an inexperienced pilot, stories sometimes just didn’t end, and the characters were sketchy at best. But it was a fascinating glimpse into what my neighborhood looked like 70 years ago, and for that I thank it.

Some of these stories are more successful than others, maybe one should have been left out. But some of these hum along like a Cadillac on an open road, and where music comes into it, in particular, you can feel the magic stirring and twitching. Nobody knows how to work a groove better than Ry Cooder. Good job!

This book sounded good based on the blurb on the back, but for some reason the author (the outstanding musician, Ry Cooder) chose to have all of the stories in the 40's and 50's, and I didn't find any of them that good.
...more

I enjoyed this book. Ry Cooder is a fine musician and music is at the heart of this book. It's a series of short stories set in Los Angeles in the late forties and fifties when his musical style was being born. The characters are a mix of Mexican Americans, African Americans, Okies and Cubans, again, the sources of his musical style. They're stories about itinerant musicians, tailors and high school drop outs trying to get by in a hostile environment. The stories are by turns funny, gothic, "noi
...more

Ry Cooder, best known as a session guitarist, songwriter and vocalist has written a book with tales of his home, Los Angeles. Cooder is successful at painting a picture of the city in it's varying stages of growth and decay over the years and he does so using everyday inhabitants as his set pieces but he with the broadest of strokes. Cooder's success at musically living in any choosen era or geographic location spills onto the pages of this book as he looks closely at forgotten eras and colorful
...more

Couldn't get through it. The short stories themselves have no payoff, loose ends that were once focal points trail off into nothing like wisps of smoke over a fire that fails to light for being overstuffed and unable to breathe.
The Spanglish is forced, the dialect is too heavily leaned on as is the period slang--often at the cost of clarity within stories already struggling to have purpose. There are huge chunks, pages even, of italics.
The effort is lazy and amateurish. It reads like a man stand ...more
The Spanglish is forced, the dialect is too heavily leaned on as is the period slang--often at the cost of clarity within stories already struggling to have purpose. There are huge chunks, pages even, of italics.
The effort is lazy and amateurish. It reads like a man stand ...more

Jun 08, 2019
Gregory
added it
Went to see Ry Cooder at a local theater here in town and about 2 weeks later I did a search on my search engine and I found out he wrote a book! And it's a work of fiction, no less! I was so surprised I had to check the name twice to see if it was indeed the musician (and a fine musician, at that) Mr Ry Cooder.
I dove into the book as I am great fan of Mr Cooder's music.
I read the first story and the voice was so convincing: written in the first person by a City Of Los Angeles employee collecti ...more
I dove into the book as I am great fan of Mr Cooder's music.
I read the first story and the voice was so convincing: written in the first person by a City Of Los Angeles employee collecti ...more

Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden.
• How did the fact that some of the stories didn’t seem “finished” effect your interpretation of what was happening?
• Could you envision the landscape? What stayed in your mind?
• How did you handle all the ambiguities? Give an example?
• Are there plot points you don’t understand? What are some different interpretations?
• How did his work as a musician affect his ...more
• How did the fact that some of the stories didn’t seem “finished” effect your interpretation of what was happening?
• Could you envision the landscape? What stayed in your mind?
• How did you handle all the ambiguities? Give an example?
• Are there plot points you don’t understand? What are some different interpretations?
• How did his work as a musician affect his ...more
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Ry Cooder is a world-famous guitarist, singer and composer, known for his slide guitar work, interest in roots music, and more recently for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including The Buena Vista Social Club. He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas. Two recent albums were accompanied by stories Cooder wrote to accompany th
...more
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