Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books. Outsiders often think of Los Angeles as an anti-intellectual place, all Hollywood glitz and no substance, but writers have always been drawn to my hometown. In David L. Ulin’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” I read about Simone de Beauvoir’s 1947 journey to L.A.’s Eastside, where she learned about the city’s anti-Mexican prejudice and admired Dia de los Muertos skulls. It’s no accident that two very different, canonical works of L.A. literature climax with riots, even though they were written more than a half century apart: Nathanael West’s 1939 novel “The Day of the Locust,” and Anna Deavere Smith’s play “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”Is there a book, or a writer, who captures the essence of Los Angeles? With her iconic 1960s and ‘70s essays about Los Angeles and the West, in collections such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion helped invent New Journalism.

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