Description
Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS
“L.A. is where you reside. Shaky Town is where you live.”
Welcome to Shaky Town, a place invisible on maps and found only in the secret heart of its citizens.
In this masterwork of panoramic style, Lou Mathews—a former mechanic and street racer—weaves together the tragedies and glories of one eastside neighborhood in the 1980s. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war, to an Irish priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous fault line but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.
A luminous achievement of peerless authenticity, Shaky Town captures the grit and gold of working-class Los Angeles and lays down Matthews's marker as one of the city’s great chroniclers.
Trade Review“One of the best books of fiction to have come out in recent memory . . . [Shaky Town] is one of those rare works that carries an assuring integrity, showing evidence of a writer who understands the bafflement that is the human condition and has the capacity to articulate inchoate sadness and hurt and anger.” —ZYZZYVA
“This novel is a particular triumph of storytelling, each installment more acute, more poignant, more revealing than the last, each story crackling with its own distinct energy and intelligence. The characters are jumpy at the margins—volatile, mournful, funny as hell—with the little-known warrens and alleyways of Los Angeles teeming all around them. Mathews is a master, and perhaps contemporary fiction’s best-kept secret.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness
“In telling this story of the Los Angeles he’s known, served, and loved, Lou Mathews does more than add to the conversation writers have created about this city, he’s created a peerlessly detailed and empathetic work of art.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota
“No one writes, or maybe ever has written, as well as Mathews about the local streets and their navigations, liberations, and traps, as brilliantly demonstrated in these stories.” —Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn
“Shaky Town is ultimately an embrace of all the people—the respectable and the outcast, the casualties and the survivors, the sinners and the sinned against—that make up a Los Angeles at once pitiless and tender, horrible and wonderful, located in actuality and personal mythology.” —Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA
“In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a peerless chronicle of working-class Los Angeles, capturing his beloved hometown in all its tragedy and knuckleheaded glory. A former mechanic and eastside street racer, he illuminates daily life with the same kind of grace and authority that Leonard Gardner brought to Fat City. Mathews is the real deal, matching style with soul and reminding us what matters in this life.” —Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49
“With Shaky Town, Lou Mathews brings a fascinating and unforgettable corner of the real Los Angeles to vivid life, creating an authentic portrait of a time, a place, and a people. This community is no stranger to tragedy and loss, but there is much beauty, hope, and even humor in Mathew’s stories as well. His characters know what it means to endure, to survive. They have their triumphs and their struggles—yet so often in these pages, if we pay close enough attention, they are also showing us how to live.” —Skip Horack, author of The Other Joseph
“Mathews turns the prism of East L.A. this way and that, examining it from various perspectives. As an L.A. native, Mathews writes as an insider, giving voice to a diverse group of Angelenos spanning multiple generations and cultures. The result is greater than the sum of its parts: a panoramic vision of an alluring, deranged, rattletrap of a city . . . Remarkably alive.” —Larissa Dooley, Los Angeles Review of Books
