But then, Los Angeles has never been defined by physical geography-it’s a grab bag of ethnic clusters, neighborhoods, communities, subcultures. A state of mind. Lienna Silver’s world of Russian immigrants who carry memories of their homeland like a snail’s shell and Christopher Rice’s tale of two young gay men nearing the end of a relationship might take place on different planets instead of four miles apart. And Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, San Marino, Commerce, and Belmont Shores aren’t even in L.A. proper, but they’re part of the recombinant DNA that is helping Los Angeles evolve into something so new we can’t even imagine what it will look like five years from now.

What we can be sure of is that it will remain a funhouse mirror reflecting back into infinity, and that we’ll glimpse bits that look frighteningly familiar. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes wouldn’t recognize the Chinatown of Jim Pascoe’s story-whose tiny crooked alleys now house hipster bars and art galleries-but he’d sense the same edgy despair. Diana Wagman captures the eerie dislocation of Westchester, a 1950s model suburb under the shadow of LAX airport where body parts might rain from the sky. The detective in Héctor Tobar’s story is obsessed with the damage done by kids with guns. Soon after Tobar turned in his story, a fourteen-year-old boy in L.A. shot and killed an eleven-year-old over a bike.

Tobar’s story is set in working-class East Hollywood and his Armenianand Mexican-American detective duo reminisce about the moldering movie star photos of famous alums at their alma mater, Hollywood High. When the authors in this collection write about The Industry, they refract it through an oblique angle-Janet Fitch’s ’70s actress hiding away in a decaying Los Feliz mansion; Scott Phillips’s sexy Valley cocktail waitress whose claim to fame lies in the title, “The Girl Who Kissed Barnaby Jones”; Morrison’s security chief for the studios who quashed the story about the producer bludgeoned by his own jewel-encrusted dildo.