THE STORY SPOT

Here’s a shameless plug for a friend’s book. I just finished it (though it’s been out for a little while) and I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

Tara Ison’s The List is firmly set in LA, offering tidbits of life in a city obsessed by stories told on celluloid. Tara’s writing is witty, fun, and capable of effortlessly transporting her readers (well, me anyway) into the very heart of her characters’ lives making me turn those pages to see how it ends. What’s better than that?

Okay, for fear of this sounding like some sort of review or blurb or something, I’ll leave you with a recommendation to read The List, especially if you live in LA and have struggled, at some point, with reconciling your love of art with what your momma always told you.

Check out The List via my aStore or at your local library and visit Tara’s site here.

Support local writers!

Today’s LA Times featured a great cover piece by staff writer, Pauline O’Connor, about Antioch’s very own Wendy Ortiz and David Ulin. It’s true, dammit. People do read in LA…books, I mean…novels, I mean.

They do. Just not in their cars where we can see them.

And, in case you missed my thousand-and-one plugs attempting to draw you out, people also read aloud in LA. Our little 826LA inauguration got a mention too. Yep, it’s a small literary town but a good one.

Nice one ladies (and David, of course). Happy anniversary.

Looks like money talks and deep-thinking education walks.

• one of the first to eliminate race as an admission requirement

Some well-known alumni of Antioch College

• Lawrence Block: novelist
• Olympia Brown: women’s suffragist
• Leland C. Clark Jr.: chemist, built the first practical heart-lung machine
• John C. Flansburgh: guitarist and songwriter for the musical group They Might Be Giants
• Stephen Jay Gould: paleontologist and author
• Robert M. Greenwald: director and producer of more than 49 television movies, miniseries and feature films
• John P. Hammond: blues guitarist
• Coretta Scott King: activist and wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
• Horace Mann: abolitionist and the first president of Antioch
• Sylvia Nasar: journalist, economist and author of “A Beautiful Mind”
• Victor Nunez: independent filmmaker whose credits include “Ulee’s Gold” and “Ruby in Paradise”
• Leonard Nimoy: actor
• Eleanor Holmes Norton: congresswoman
• Cliff Robertson: actor
• Louis Sachar: author of Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel “Holes”
• Mark Strand: former U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry
• Rod Serling: “Twilight Zone” creator