by D.J. Waldie

Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D.J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, “The suburb is America’s lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard.”

Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does. A breathtaking progression from his much-celebrated book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Where We Are Now is a compilation of Waldie’s most intriguing recent works and an exploration of the meaning of place in Los Angeles, long regarded as the most “placeless” of American cities.

Essays include:

• Preface: Where I Am
• All in the Family
• Closing the Suburban Frontier
• Gone Hollywood
• My Place in California
• The City and the River
• The Golden Dream Goes Dark
• First from Troy, Driven by Fate
• Et in Arcadia, Ego
• Fallout
• Hic Domus Dei Est et Porta Coeli
• New Urbanism 101
• Knowing Your Place
• Real City
• Tragic Opera
• L.A. Literature
• Catching the Urban Wave
• Metal and Flesh
• On the Bus
• Our Town
• Pornography of Despair
• A Necessary City
• For All Its Faults
• Ungovernable California
• The End of the West in Summerlin
• A Very Public Killing
• Paradise for One
• Alone

D.J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz Magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and dwell. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles Magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.