Stories from The Last Basin

Stories from The Last Basin has been described as a "love story written for Los Angeles," but as in all good love stories, the love is continually confronted by foolishness, pain, loss, and irony. Where, then is love celebrated? In the care the author has taken in the creation of the characters that inhabit the stories. These are real people, young and old, trying and sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, to make a real life in a city founded on dreams.

Nine stories, all of them connected in little or large ways, take you from the 1950s to the near future. Similarly, each of the stories talk of the influence of Hollywood on the protagonists in enlightening, corrupting, and unexpected ways. The stories are challenging, difficult, nostalgic, impressionistic, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes funny, and at times profoundly sad, but even at their saddest, there is optimism.

The author draws inspiration from modernist writers, such as Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as from the post-modernist/meta realist writers he grew up with, such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe, and Ken Kesey. The careful reader will be rewarded with subtle and not-so-subtle homages to each of these authors and many others.

In this compilation, the stories are best read in the order that they are presented, although each stands on its own. When read from beginning to end, the reader will perceive a tenth story that arises from the sum of the whole.