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State of California Beat Poet Laureate and novelist Rich Ferguson shares a playlist of his unique and prophetic LA works, each set to music and largely recorded during the Covid lockdown months of 2020-21. A winner in Opium Magazine’s Literary Death Match L.A., Ferguson has shared the stage with such poets and musicians as Patti Smith, Wanda Coleman, and Moby; was a featured performer in the film, What About Me?  featuring Michael Stipe, Michael Franti, and k.d. lang; and is the author of 8th& Agony , the novel New Jersey Me , and his latest poetry collection, Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, released by Moon Tide Press. 

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Flash fiction author and editor Meg Pokrass presents a Los Angeles trilogy titled "Her Own Music" and a standalone story, "Cash Register Tape," set in the San Fernando Valley, then chats with host Alan Rifkin about low points that promise everything.  Pokrass's work is featured in three Norton Anthologies of the flash fiction form, and her work was recently selected for The Best Small Fictions 2022. 

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Novelist (THE ENTHUSIAST), screenwriter (OVER THE EDGE, TEX, GREMLINS 2, MATINEE), and feature writer (ESQUIRE, NEW YORKER, NEW WEST) Charlie Haas presents  a sneak preview of his new novel, SUNLAND--about the brief desert flowering of a group of German artists, musicians, and free-love bohemians who voyage to Southern California, “the America of America,” in 1914 to start the world over--then chats with host Alan Rifkin about dreams that succeed by failing. 

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Episode 12 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 11 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 10 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 9 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 8 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 7 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel-in-stories that threads together a reporter's cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his mentally ill millennial son’s determination to claim his own season in the sun.  Part father-son drama, part roman a clef of a changing LA, the twelve linked episodes—bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy—stumble toward redemption through themes both So Cal and global: the ache of cultural drift, the alienation of the awkward and the uncelebrated in the 21st Century, and the timelessness of young dreams.

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Episode 6 of  “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel in stories that threads together a magazine writer’s cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his millennial son’s anguished determination to have his own season in the sun.

Jeffrey Leviton is a fading romantic, twice divorced, redeemed by a real, if slightly grandiose, gift for his craft. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazine publishing and unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the onset of Covid, Leviton grows through a harrowing crucible of circumstances—romantic chaos, alcoholic recovery, home loss, professional transition—all while attempting to anchor his son Philip’s precarious security. Meanwhile Philip, coming of age, intermittently homeless, and yearning to retrofit his existence into a generation he believes had it all, begs to experience his father’s LA, the essence of which he’s convinced lives embodied in Leviton’s eternally youthful long-time editor Bailey Kavanagh—perhaps the only woman ever to love Jeffrey Leviton.

Part family drama, part roman a clef of a lost world, the eight linked stories journey through themes of generational drift, the accelerating displacements of the 21st century, and the timelessness of young dreams.