Lou Matthew's Shaky Town Paperback

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a timeless novel of working-class Los Angeles. A former mechanic and street racer, he tells his story in cool and panoramic style, weaving together the tragedies and glories of one of L.A.’s eastside neighborhoods. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war to a priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous faultline but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lou Mathews lives in Los Angeles and is a fourth generation Angeleno. Married at 19, he worked his way through U.C. Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic and continued to work as a mechanic until he was 39. His first novel, L.A. Breakdown, about illegal street racing, was picked by the Los Angeles Times as a Best Book of 1999. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, a California Arts Council Fiction Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize. His short stories have been published in Short Story, ZYZZYVA, New England Review Witness, Tin House, Black Clock, nine fiction anthologies and two textbook series. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s renowned Writer’s Program since 1989 and is a recipient of Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor Awards. His new novel, Shaky Town, was published in September 2021 and was long-listed for the 2022 Tournament of Books. More details on Mathews and Shaky Town can be found at https://www.tigervanbooks.com/shaky-town

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for the year's top novel. The Lager Queen of Minnesota, his second novel, won the WILLA Literary Award and was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award. His shorter writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. His third and newest novel, out April 18th, is Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, which Roxane Gay calls "a perfect book."