'House of Leaves changed my life': the cult novel at 20 Books

Table Of Content

• Birkin bag thieves prowl L.A.’s rich neighborhoods, fueling a bizarre black market
• Amy Duggar King hopes cousin Josh Duggar is feeling ‘torture’ while behind bars
• BookOff Del Amo Fashion Center
• Books
• Featured Collections
• Jessica Ferri, owner of Womb House Books, shares the panels she’s most excited about at the 2024 Festival of Books

Poe's statement on the connection between the two works is that they are parallax views of the same story. House of Leaves refers to Poe and her songs several times, not only limited to her album Haunted, but Hello as well. One example occurs when the character Karen Green is interviewing various academics on their interpretations of the short film "Exploration #4"; she consults a "Poet," but there is a space between the "Poe" and the "t," suggesting that Poe at one point commented on the book.

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Tree of Codes": Gimmick or Great Read? - LitReactor

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Tree of Codes": Gimmick or Great Read?.

Posted: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Birkin bag thieves prowl L.A.’s rich neighborhoods, fueling a bizarre black market

A handyman by trade, Tom is said to be a contented underachiever with no fixed residence or attachments, as well as a recovering alcoholic. He is also described as comical and well-liked by all his acquaintances, in contrast to Navidson's cold professionalism. Much of this information is attributed to a supposed 900-page scholarly treatise analyzing the Navidson brothers as parallels to the Biblical brothers Esau and Jacob.

Amy Duggar King hopes cousin Josh Duggar is feeling ‘torture’ while behind bars

In an introduction dated 1998, Truant claims to have found the book as an unfinished manuscript left by the recently deceased Zampanò, having never met the author in life. Truant, an apprentice at a Los Angeles tattoo parlor, decided to complete and submit the work for posthumous publication. The rest of the book is punctuated by footnotes by Truant, whether fact-checking, editorializing, translating, or interjecting seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes. Truant's work is further supplemented by uncredited professional editors, who profess to have, in turn, never met Truant. Library visitors can enjoy free WiFi and a pleasant respite from the streets of Hollywood in this 685 sq. Ft. oasis, and often combine their library visits with attending Salon events and viewing exhibitions in the Gallery.

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Entirely written by Truant, this chapter recounts the conclusion of his downward spiral after Lude's death. Truant invents two different accounts of positive turnarounds, only to disavow both. He then describes setting fire to the completed manuscript, and, after a struck-out passage in purple – the only such passage in the entire book – Truant tells an ambiguous story about a woman who loses her baby in childbirth. My favorite book of all-time is probably “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, and I’m currently finishing up Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, “Klara and the Sun,” a speculative fiction novel told from the point of view of an android companion. Some reviewers mentioned issues like shabby property conditions on closer inspection, mediocre food, and dissatisfaction with the level of knowledge among the staff. Specific complaints about the dining area being dark and cold, and comments about the high rental increases, were also noted.

The Whalestoe Letters

The film concludes with Navidson and Karen marrying, and reuniting their family in Vermont. One of Jenny’s favorite books is “Breast and Eggs” by Meiko Kawakami, a novel translated from Japanese that sheds light on femininity through female relationships and a woman’s relationship to her own body. She just finished reading Han Kang’s novel “Greek Lessons ,” her follow-up to “The Vegetarian,” a thought-provoking thriller about how one woman’s choice to stop eating meat changes the course of her life and the lives around her. It’s a great book for transplants and native Angelenos to better understand Los Angeles through its history, its artists and its authors. An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews.

Zampanò's text includes an entire chapter extending this analysis, but most of the text is destroyed without explanation. Pelafina, more commonly referred to as simply "P.", is Johnny's institutionalized mother who appears in the appendix to the text. Johnny Truant serves a dual role, as primary editor of Zampanò's academic study of The Navidson Record and protagonist as revealed through footnotes and appendices.

Recent guests have been stunned by the tent encampments, sidewalks piled with debris and shuttered storefronts I see daily. I feel embarrassed and heartbroken for the unhoused, their neighbors, my city. In the title story of Johnson’s latest short story collection, Dean lives in the Pacific Electric Building downtown; sensitive to the new wave of change that’s brought a Starbucks and restaurants that serve wood-fired pizzas. “He knows now that there is always someone who has come before you, someone who is going to come after.” LA’s final illusion is that it’s somehow new, still filled with possibility.

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The Whalestoe Letters, a compilation of letters written by Truant's mother Pelafina during her committal at The Three Attic Whalestoe Institution, are published both as an appendix to House of Leaves and as a standalone book with additional content. Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript. He recounts tales of sexual encounters, his lust for a tattooed dancer he calls Thumper, and his bar-hopping with his friend Lude.

Take those Santa Ana winds, they kick up and we think of Joan Didion’s Los Angeles Notebook, or Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind—those meek little wives and their carving knives. Or when the sun is baking downtown, we think of John Fante’s LA—that sad little flower in the sand. The literature of Los Angeles paints a city that is rich but also a brutal playground, its inhabitants balancing on that tightrope of contradiction. Here I’ve listed ten books that have shaped Los Angeles’s character, but also show how Los Angeles shapes its people. Some are classics, others lesser known, but all have captured part of that elusive LA soul. Through reading the manuscript, we learn about the events of the film, The Navidson Record.

“But mostly, the landscape reminded him of space, the final frontier,” J.J, a college student who already wants to start over, tells us in Rogues. Braverman needs her own resurgence, it’s far too difficult to find a copy of this book. Not only does she capture a pre-gentrified Venice of the 1970s, but also that symbiotic relationship between living beside the Santa Monica Bay, beneath the depthless sky, a vanishing horizon—and addiction, that sweet slide into languidness. There’s a certain pull, an inexplicable force, some as yet uncharted form of gravity. The toes change, growing invisible sharp claws designed to dig in and fight against the slide into pale blue listless waves.” Rose, Braverman’s protagonist, is caught between her many lives, all of them threatening to converge with the impending death of her father. Add in a cocaine addiction that has her contemplating the life cycle of the Venice canals, and you get a poetic bildungsroman that is entirely LA.

When a mysterious doorway appears, leading to a maze of smooth, ash-grey walls, Will Navidson – the house’s owner, a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist – goes in to investigate. The Navidson Record, his film of these explorations, becomes the intense focus of a blind man called Zampanò, who writes about the footage with lengthy, academic precision. When Zampanò is found dead in his apartment, troubled tattoo artist Johnny Truant discovers his notes and inherits the fixation. As Truant becomes increasingly obsessed with the story, so too does the reader. In keeping with the mission of JAPAN HOUSE, the diverse collection of books explores Japanese culture, art and history, as well as Los Angeles as a home for the Japanese diaspora and site of economic and cultural exchange. We hope that these interconnected libraries will provide opportunities for visitors to feel connected to and inspired by Japanese culture here in the U.S.

With everything from dark bars to picturesque vistas as well as historic buildings and parks, the city has a locale for every literary mood, and we have the book suggestions to match each one. Displaying our problems to visitors has made me think how Los Angeles — even with its history of civil unrest and corruption, poverty and racism, earthquakes and fires — often gets measured against a tradition of cheery propaganda promoting a West Coast paradise. To the Holy Land, and the cliché of the California dream persists, despite those who say the promise of abundance and fresh starts is dead, and the dream, a nightmare. Even if plenty’s lost in the transposition, the Vivian Beaumont revival of “The House of Blue Leaves” (“American Playhouse,” 9 p.m., PBS, Channel 28) cannot deny the volcanic force of this 1971 play by John Guare.

Navidson, still investigating the house, sought explanations from laboratory analysis, only to learn that samples taken from the maze are older than the Earth itself. An appendix provided by the editors includes a miscellany of writings from both Zampanò and Truant excluded from the body of the book, an obituary for Truant's birth father, and a series of letters later compiled in the Whalestoe Letters. The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. Printed books allow a different experience with space to pause, contemplate, and immerse in an author’s words.

The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games. The digital library allows all curious minds to access our archive from anywhere in the world for free. The JAPAN HOUSE Library exists in both physical and digital forms, presenting a specially curated collection of books from novels to photography monographs, travel guides, gastronomy, to manga comics.

Today’s readers will be startled by how much in the WPA guidebook has disappeared and how much did not yet exist. The book was followed by a companion piece called The Whalestoe Letters, a series of letters written to the character Johnny Truant by his mother while she was confined in a mental institution. Arriving at the house to help Navidson measure its dimensions, Tom is said to have improved the family's relationships and mood during his presence. Karen separated from Navidson, departing to New York City with their children.