Tag: James Crumley

Brodsky/Crumley (Books acquired, 17 Mar. 2026)

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We — that is, my family of four — split a nice spring break between heatwaved Los Angeles and more temperate Santa Barbara last week. I managed to squeeze in a visit to The Last Bookstore, which I hadn’t visited since 2017.

I keep a little list of books and authors to search for; one of these is the long-out-of-print 1987 cult novel Xman by Michael Brodsky. I found it about two minutes in, under “B” (duh) in gen fic for the steep steep price of five U.S. dollars. I also picked up another James Crumely novel, part of the Vintage Contemporaries series.

We — that is my son and I — also visited Skylight Books (after an unexpected pilgrimage to the Figure 8 wall on Sunset — the mural from the cover of that Elliott Smith record — we were just walking by it and my son who is a Fan lost his shit). Skylight Books is very very cool, with a great selection of comix, art books, zines, &c., but I failed to pick anything up, mostly because I was hungry and cranky.

We also visited LACMA, where I was disappointed that the many of the paintings I had seen on my previous visit were not currently on display (including Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen with Smoking Flame which knocked my socks off when I saw it up close all those years ago).

There was a cool exhibit by the contemporary artist Tavares Strachan. One of the segment of the exhibit is a series of painted plates, several of which depict extinct species. I couldn’t help think of Thomas Pynchon’s riff on the poor dodo in Gravity’s Rainbow when I saw this plate:

Books acquired, 26 May 2023

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I brought a box of old books to my spot; I did not intend to pick up any books but then I picked up six:

I’d been looking for a handsome and/or cheap copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon for a few years ago; success.

I posted something on Twitter a few days ago about how much I’ve been enjoying Steve Erickson’s Days Between Stations; one of the replies put James Crumley in his company (along with McCarthy and Joy Williams), so I picked up Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss:

I’ve long loved Peter Mendelsund’s cover designs, so I didn’t pass up on a used copy of What We See When We Read. It has a lot of pictures and diagrams and such.

I saw a very interesting looking person reading an actor’s edition of Philip Ridley’s play Mercury Fur on the train a few weeks ago. I had never heard of the play, but looked it up, thought it sounded pretty cool, and then looked for it in the drama section of this same book store the last time I was there. I didn’t find it. I found it yesterday mixed in with the novels. (I wasn’t actually looking for it.)

I don’t own physical copies of The Last Novel and Vanishing Point, two of the three novels collected in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and Other Novels, so I couldn’t pass on this omnibus. I do own a copy of Reader’s Block, which is not collected in This Is Not a Novel and Other Novels.