Vanessa Fabiano’s debut collection of stories, Chinese on the Beach, is a remarkably vivid series of portraits of Chinese as well as expatriate life in Shanghai and Beijing during the boom decade of the ’90s, when the government loosened its economic controls and set a huge number of cultural changes in motion — toward high fashion, international glamor, and beach life in a coastal town.
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On Episode 40 I had a terrific wide-ranging conversation with Isaac Fitzgerald about AMERICAN RAMBLER, his road-trip book about Johnny Appleseed. Turns out I know more about Appleseed — whose real name was John Chapman — than I ought to.
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Delighted to talk again to Saumya Roy, author of CASTAWAY MOUNTAIN, this time about homelessness in San Francisco. She’s worked with homeless people in Mumbai — how are things different in America?
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Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.
He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.
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My review of a book about the drone war, Hellfire from Paradise Ranch, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
While I was in Somalia a man called Geoff Carter wrote about a picture of Indian men surfing on stand-up boards around 1800 off Chennai, which altered the known history of surfing a bit, even though the picture was hiding in plain sight at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
My review of Ingrid Betancourt's first novel, The Blue Line, is up at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012.
