The American Voice

Another City: Writing From Los Angeles

City Lights Books, 273 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Sprawling, impossible to pin down, by turns annoying and epiphany-inducing, animated and dull, inspired and empty-headed, Another City: Writing From Los Angeles is a collection of short prose and poetry much like the city from which it originated. The anthology, which was edited by David L. Ulin, a Manhattan transplant who has lived in L.A. since 1991, includes the work of 37 writers of appropriately diverse ethnic backgrounds and a sometimes jarringly mixed caliber.

Ulin began his search for prospective writers to include at open mike nights, indie bookstores, and obscure zines. While the quality of the best of the pack here is certainly good enough to justify the cover price, as a whole, the book never quite rises above that open mike night aroma of lukewarm chai and Gitanes. For a quick pick-me-up, Jerry Stahl's quirky "Inside Miss Los Angeles," is worth a look, if not a long contemplation. Even though it's not worth looting a bookstore over, Richard Rayner's "Los Angeles" does a fine job of covering the Rodney King riots. "Naked Chinese People," by Diane Lefer, is one of the saddest, most painful short stories I've ever read (and I think I'll read it again tomorrow), and Erika Schickel's "Magic Hour" almost perfectly captures that peculiar feeling you get when you realize that although you were a unique child of God where you used to live, in L.A., you're just another cliché .