Nathanael West killed near El Centro

Almost Beautiful: the death in El Centro of Nathanael West, one of America’s most mordant authors

Fifteen minutes ago, a bit after 2:30, they started driving north from the grand, desert-white De Anza Hotel in Calexico, California, four and a half blocks from the Mexican border. Sky of blue. Air still moist from last night’s rain. Their Ford wagon is loaded with game from a weekend hunting quail and duck.

June 27, 2002, Read full story

Grrrrrrrrrrrr”

If the histories of other abandoned pit bulls (which the North County shelter sees all the time) are a guide, then Riley was probably trained by Reggie for a year to become a fighter. Such training commonly consists of both discipline and torture.

July 29, 2004 Read full story

We Wish There Were Fewer

The indefatigable ex-real estate agent Elissa Davey co-founded the Garden with Rebecca Melendez. In 1998, she read about a dead baby boy, discarded in a dumpster, in Chula Vista. Outraged, bewildered, she wondered, “Who could do something like that?”

Jan. 23, 2019 Read full story

“Jenna’s Dad”: Ken Druck and the grief of losing a child.

We sat in floral-patterned wrought-iron chairs, painted creamy white, in a corner of the Casa de Bandini, San Diego’s colonial Mexican restaurant. For two hours, the four of us devoured chicken quesadillas, chiles rellenos, chips, salsa, flan, drinks. Nothing prepares you for interviewing three fathers who’ve lost their kids.

January 11, 2001 Read full story

“To Fuse Wind and Its Motion”

In the parking lot, I can identify one species, the Western gull, which nests on Mexico’s Islas Coronados, some 15 miles off Rosarito. It is our only resident gull, which, as one local birder told me, has solved the migration urge: “Why would anyone ever want to leave San Diego?”

December 4, 2004 Read full story

How Larson came to write for the Reader:

I have written before about how the brilliant literary editor, Judith Moore, who died in 2006, encouraged my submissions to the Reader and brought me into the fold as a staff writer, 21 years ago. Here I want to say that in the 1990s, as a long-time reader of long-form features and literary journalism in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, I said to myself, I can write pieces like that—given the time and the money. And I did—buoyed by a prompt check from the Reader, by Judith’s unwavering guidance, and by Heather Goodwillie’s uncannily skillful copy editing.

Since then, the weekly magazine has evolved under the print/online/advertising steamroller of the Internet, which has meant I and others have had to shorten our novella-length stories. Still, every day I am grateful to Jim Holman and Ernie Grimm for giving me a place to publish my critical and creative turns on the peculiarity of San Diego’s rarefied culture, unheralded history, and second-city (to L.A.) identity. We live in a community ever unsure of itself, which is both its charm and its enigma, especially for a nonfiction writer such as I.