Los Angeles Review of Books
An exclusive book club moderated by LARB's Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz
Tom Lutz handpicks four books a year and conducts an exclusive book club with LARB members. Books are shipped to your door in advance. The book club meeting is held on Facebook, and all members are sent an exclusive interview between Tom and the author, either by video or audio stream.
For questions about Tom’s Book Club, email us at membership@lareviewofbooks.org.
Our Next Book Club
MOUNT TERMINUS by David Grand
We are excited to announce our next book club selection: Mount Terminus by David Grand. Eleven years in the making, Mount Terminus is a dark, majestic bildungsroman about art, family, and overwhelming love, all at the intersection of the birth of cinema and the birth of modern Los Angeles.
LARB contributor Sam Worley said of the novel, “Origin stories and mythmaking are at the heart of this book, and they are all the more resonant because their material consequences — the California water crisis, for one — are still with us today.”
The Facebook discussion group will begin on Sunday October 12. Sign up to join Tom's Book Club by October 10 to receive your copy of the book.
Become a LARB member for access to book club events and more.
About the Book
FROM THE AUTHOR OF LOUSE AND THE DISAPPEARING BODY, 11 YEARS IN THE MAKING.
After his mother’s death, young Bloom boards a train with his bereaved father, Jacob, to travel west across mountains and deserts to California: Mount Terminus, their new home at the desolate end of the world. There, in a villa built atop a rare desert spring, they live apart from society, supported by the income from Jacob’s invention, the Rosenbloom Loop, a piece of technology that has revolutionized the nascent art of filmmaking. There, Bloom grows up in the shadow of his father’s grief, with only a pair of servants, the house’s ghosts, and his own artistic muse for company.
But Jacob can’t forever protect his family from his past—the dramatic series of events that has taken him from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on New York City's Lower East Side and into the graces of beautiful twin girls, and finally to this fragile refuge in pre-Hollywood Los Angeles. And Bloom, now an eccentric dark genius, can’t live alone at the top of the mountain forever. Prodded by his newly discovered half brother, in every way his opposite, Bloom will have to come down to meet the world. Otherwise the orange farmers and the vaqueros, the speculators and the developers, the artists and the barons of the silver screen, will surely come up the mountain to meet him.
Mount Terminus is a triumphant piece of literature from a Los Angeles native writer whose mythic prose tells a story at the intersection of two births: the birth of cinema, and the birth of modern Los Angeles.
Previous Book Club Events
Jonthan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem in Discussion with Tom Lutz
October 5, 2013
Aimee Bender
Aimee Bender in Discussion with Tom Lutz
February 9, 2014
Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi Book Club / Discussion with Tom Lutz
June 16, 2014