Richard Rayner is the author of nine books, both fiction and non-fiction, most recently A Bright and Guilty Place, a history of certain true crimes in L.A. in the late 1920s and 1930s. He has published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He writes a regular column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches in the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Fabulous Monsters: Matthew Specktor’s “American Dream Machine”
HOLLYWOOD FICTION is almost as old as the industry itself. It tends, like the broader genre of Los Angeles fiction, toward ...
Paperback Writers: Georges Simenon
Simenon was a relentless self-mythologizer, but a pitiless self-analyzer too....
Paperback Writers: Joan Didion
Didion is so afraid of her own depths of feeling she can’t avoid revealing them. That’s her contradiction, her fascination....
Paperback Writers: Arthur Machen
H.P. Lovecraft has been regarded as a classic for at least twenty years now; Machen, too, deserves his place in the corrupting sun....
Paperback Writers: Rudyard Kipling
Kipling is a fundamentally dark writer....
