Beginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman’s short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin. What distinguishes Braverman is her emphatically feminist sensibility: She gives voice to a predominantly female cast of characters—divorcées and their drug-addled daughters, Mexican émigrés and whores—who brazenly defy convention.
Now, in her memoir Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, Braverman returns to the landscape of her native city after having abandoned it more than a decade ago.
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