Signal Hill

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.

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.