A Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek Best Book of the Year
It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie -family- led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.A. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head.
At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but -cineautistic, - sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. He has...

At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory.

One November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc--a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ--sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president, Barack Obama.

In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little...