Signal Hill - Softcover

Rifkin, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872864243 ISBN 13: 9780872864245

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin’s male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing—for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right.

A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of possibly lunatic belief; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father’s wealth can’t quite bring himself to claim his portion.

The ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion.

Alan Rifkin is a writer for Los Angeles Magazine. He lives in Long Beach, CA.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Rifkin is a writer for Los Angeles Magazine and a former contributing editor to Details. His short stories have appeared in L.A. Style and The Quarterly, and he has also written for the L.A. Times Magazine, Premiere, L.A. Weekly, Salon and Buzz Magazine. He was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Center USA Award in Journalism for his essay "Pool Man," which appeared in the L.A. Weekly. He lives with his wife and four children in Long Beach, CA.

Reviews

Rifkin combs L.A and environs for characters usually omitted from the national consciousness: neither drug dealers nor movie moguls, though lit by reflections from the glossy industry surrounding them. In "The Honor System," the ambivalent heir of a custom pool business has a series of encounters at Death Valley with an appealing woman "fleeing Studio City in a divorcee trance," who, confounded by a 50-cent charge and the lone $10 bill in her hand, backs into the narrator in the first tentative step to friendship. In "After the Divorce," an Encino teenager walks out one afternoon, intending to appear unannounced at his father's elegant home; en route he considers possible responses, but the pivotal moments occur when his father drives him home and talks with his mother. In "Signal Hill," trim sentences beautifully set the scene, but the divorced protagonist with an eye for the 25-year-olds at the gym is much less engaging. Well, the book still contains some gems, among them a clear, polished voice for L.A. County. Roberta Johnson
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Edition details

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872864243
• ISBN 13: 9780872864245
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152