Filled with biting humor and insight, Nathanael West’s savage satire of Hollywood wannabes builds to an angry and apocalyptic climax. It’s the ultimate L.A. novel.

It’s always raining in Chandler’s L.A., a moody counterpoint to the cheap glamour and surface glitz of the city. This is the first Philip Marlowe mystery - a masterpiece of hardboiled fiction.

Kate Braverman’s boho grunge classic is set in Venice, CA, in the latter days of the counterculture. The novel paints a dystopian portrait of Los Angeles as a place of dysfunction, addiction and loss.

Héctor Tobar’s story of worlds in collision follows a Latina maid in a quixotic journey from the O.C. to Eastside L.A.; it offers an unflinching portrait of the racial fault lines within our city.

Set in locations across the city from Crenshaw to Little Tokyo, Nina Revoyr’s brilliant novel tells a multi-generational story that weaves together African-American and Japanese-American L.A.

Chester Himes’ WW2 classic is set in Southside L.A. and in the shipyards of Long Beach. It’s a coruscating exposé of the Black experience, as relevant today as ever.

Two couples in Topanga Canyon - one White, one Mexican - move from misunderstanding to overt conflict. T.C. Boyle’s brilliant mid-90s novel illustrates L.A.’s racial and environmental fragility.