Critical Praise for Southland by Nina Revoyr
• A Los Angeles Times Best Seller
• Winner: Lambda Literary Award
• Winner: Ferro-Grumley Literary Award
• Winner: American Library Association’s Stonewall Honor Award
• Finalist: Edgar Award
• A Book Sense 76 Pick
• Selected for the Los Angeles Times’ Best Books of 2003 list
• Selected for the InsightOut Book Club
“The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel … But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Compelling … never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr’s reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in LA.”
—Publishers Weekly
“If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list … With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious …”
—Booklist (starred review)
“… an ambitious and absorbing book that works on many levels: as a social and political history of Los Angeles, as the story of a young woman discovering and coming to terms with her cultural heritage, as a multigenerational and multiracial family saga, and as a solid detective story.”
—Denver Post
“Nina Revoyr gives us her Los Angeles, a loved version of that often fabled landscape. Her people are as reticent and careful as any under siege, but she sifts their stories out of the dust of neighborhoods, police reports, and family legend. The stories—black, white, Asian, and multiracial—intertwine in unexpected and deeply satisfying ways. Read this book and tell me you don’t want to read more. I know I do.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
“Subtle, effective … [with] a satisfyingly unpredictable climax.”
—Washington Post
“Fascinating and heartbreaking … an essential part of L.A. history.”
—LA Weekly
“An engaging, thoughtful book that even East Coasters can enjoy.”
—New York Press
“A remarkable feat … Revoyr’s novel is honest in detailing Southern California’s brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity.”
—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“Dead-on descriptions of California both gritty and golden.”
—East Bay Express
“Southland gripped my attention and would not let go until I turned the last page.”
—International Examiner
“Southland is a simmering stew of individual dreams, family struggles, cultural relations, social changes, and race relations. It is a compelling, challenging, and rewarding novel.”
—Chicago Free Press
Critical Praise for The Necessary Hunger
“The Necessary Hunger is the kind of irresistible read you start on the subway at 6 p.m. on the way home from work and keep plowing through until you’ve turned the last page … It beats with the pulse of life …”
—Time Magazine
“Quietly intimate, vigorously honest, and uniquely American … Tough and tender without a single false note.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Revoyr triumphs in blending many complex issues, including urban poverty and violence, adolescent sexuality, and the vitality of basketball, without losing sight of her characters. She creates a family, in all senses of the word, of characters who are complex, admirable, and aggravating; readers will root for them on and off the court.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Revoyr focuses on a number of issues, including competition, interracialrelationships, and same-sex relationships … A thoughtful work …”
—Library Journal
“A wholesome coming-of-age novel about two high-school basketball stars, Revoyr’s debut is a meditation on consuming passion and a reflection on lost opportunities … The basketball action, which builds climactically, honors the split-second timing and excitement of the game. Revoyr also evokes the feel of contemporary L.A., capturing crackheads, gang-bangers, and car-jackings in sharp, street-smart dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Revoyr has unerringly caught the angst of teenagers, as well as the rarified, self-involved world in which they live … A sympathetic, tender rendering of the frustration of unrequited love.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This book may in fact contain the most loving prose we’ll see on basketball until John Edgar Wideman writes about his daughter Jamila, the gifted point guard for Stanford.”
—Chicago Tribune
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2008 Nina Revoyr
ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07017-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-46-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007939593
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
www.akashicbooks.com
For Patsy
That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
E-Book Extra: Excerpt from Lost Canyon
CHAPTER ONE
September 24, 1964
Then I heard about the opening of the Silent Movie Theater, I should have known that someone would look for me—but the young man’s phone call yesterday morning was still a surprise. He found me the easy way—by calling the operator—and the fact that my number is listed, under my own real name, is some measure of how rarely I’ve received such calls in the course of the last forty years. Yesterday morning, for example, when the telephone rang, I expected the caller to be Mrs. Bradford, from the town houses down the street— we often take breakfast together on weekend mornings, a practice that has become more frequent since her husband passed away—and I wasn’t prepared for the young, unfamiliar voice which asked, “Excuse me, sir, but are you the Jun Nakayama, from the classic silent movie Sleight of Hand?” I was caught off-guard, and asked curtly how he had come to possess my number.
“My name is Nick Bellinger,” the young man said, undaunted. “I’m an advisor to the people who are opening the new Silent Movie Theater. They’ve been trying to figure out what
