Lilac Mines
(Manic D Press, 2009)
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Lilac Mines is the story of Felix Ketay, a 25-year-old fashion magazine writer who thinks that being queer means wearing leather wrist cuffs before anyone else does. But her foundations are shaken when, in the course of a few weeks, her self-proclaimed pomosexual girlfriend leaves her for an even punker girl, and two frat boys gay-bash her on the streets of West Hollywood.
It is also the story of Anna Lisa Hill, Felix’s aunt, who comes of age in the 1960s in the butch-femme bar scene of Lilac Mines, a sometime ghost-town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Forty years later, Felix joins her aunt in Lilac Mines, hoping Anna Lisa will help her craft a more genuine identity for herself. But when Anna Lisa proves bitter and standoffish, Felix devotes her energies to investigating the town’s 100-year-old mystery: the disappearance of 16-year-old Lilac Ambrose in one of the mine shafts that runs beneath the mountain.
Between combating postmodern pastiche and old-fashioned homophobia, finding an authentic history is never easy. But Lilac Mines—with its abandoned mines, unknowable secrets and the occasional quirky-cute thrift store employee—might not be such a bad place to try.
read an excerpt from Lilac Mines
“Lilac Mines is a novel of great tenderness, humor, and wisdom. Cheryl Klein takes us deftly from the hipster neighborhoods of Los Angeles to a hardscrabble town in the Sierra foothills to the night spots and rigid social mores of an earlier time. Through the interlocking stories of unique women who come of age in different eras, she shows us the ways that people—and places—lose themselves, and then find themselves again.”
—Nina Revoyr, author of Southland and The Age of Dreaming
The Commuters
(City Works Press, 2006)
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“What was the city but lyrical? What was traffic but rhythm?” wonders an albino folksinger, one of many strange and sincere Angelenos in The Commuters. In Cheryl Klein’s debut collection of connected stories, Los Angeles is many things: a place where the garment industry sidelines as many dreamers as the movie business does, where a lonely foster child’s prank spawns an urban legend, where all anyone really wants is a roommate who will stick around. Eclectic in form and woven with gritty and gorgeous detail, The Commuters tells the city’s stories from an insider’s perspective—which is, as the students and workers and angel-winged DJs in these pages know, one of always being an outsider.
read an excerpt from The Commuters
“What a vision of Los Angeles—flames and sorrow, passion and Palms, such hard work and searching in these streets that no one has populated quite as richly or imaginatively or perceptively in quite some time as Cheryl Klein. I am awed by her unequivocal tenderness for her characters, all of them crossing and looking and loving in L.A.”
—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“Authentic and deft, witty and moving, assured and audacious on the sly, Cheryl Klein’s The Commuters captures, as well as any fiction in recent memory, how L.A. is as lyrical as it is lonely, and how in each of its missed connections is a moment of beauty.”
—Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville
“The Commuters pieces together a crazy-quilt map of the (Dis)United States of Los Angeles. Like the motorists of the title, readers of this novel-in-short-stories are given glimpses of the lives of people we may never meet—the foster child who wants to be a ‘parrot dancer’; the garment worker who pens plaintive letters to her sister in Mexico; the Korean sweatshop owner whose daughter is learning Japanese. With insight and heart, Cheryl Klein reveals the streets and highways that intersect and link these lives to one another, and to our own.”
—Terry Wolverton, author of Insurgent Muse