L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
We Dropped a Bomb on You: The Best of Slake I-IVFetched Up in Amber
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. M ike Purpus is waiting on the second step of the staircase that leads to his second-story apartment in South Redondo Beach. Purpus is used to waiting. He hasn’t had a driver’s license since he was a kid, so […]
The Confirmation of Danny Kwock
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. Danny Kwock’s hair is long. Like, hippie long. This might surprise those who’ve leafed through the tome The Eighties at Echo Beach, or are old enough to have been there and remember when Kwock, Preston Murray, Jeff Parker, Peter […]
Hymns of the Apocalypse
By JOE DONNELLY APRIL 17, 2020 This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. It’s like they knew. Of course Pearl Jam didn’t intend for its new album, “Gigaton,” to be a coronavirus hymnal. After all, it has been gestating for seven years, taking shape via a sort of long-distance, idea-sharing dynamic necessitated by the band […]
LA Times Reviews Slouching Towards Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Times did a nice review of this sterling collection of LA writers writing about Joan Didion’s estimable impact. It was nice to be among those contributors mentioned in the review. “Flexing his many years as a music writer, Joe Donnelly offers a lovely and convincing piece about growing up with the Beatles, learning to […]
Why Luke Perry’s death is so personal for many forgotten Gen Xers
This story originally appeared in the LA Times. My phone buzzed at 5:07 a.m. Monday morning with a text from a friend who was in India with his wife and son. The text read: “As Luke Perry goes, so does the world.” I was too groggy from the sleeping pill I’d taken to respond, but […]
Skylight Books’ L.A. Man Podcast
Listen here: skylightbooks.podbean.com The next best thing to having been there.
L.A. Man is here!
L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World (Rare Bird Books | April 17, 2018) collects the best and boldest of Donnelly’s profiles—illuminating a time and place in Los Angeles worth preserving. Donnelly emerges as a sort of West Coast George Plimpton, taking his subjects by the horns—at the pool table, in […]
Bush’s War of Art
This essay originally appeared in riotmaterial.com I was on the phone with my father and I can’t remember exactly how we got to the part of the conversation we were destined to get to—the part of the conversation everyone was destined to get to—as we watched the unfathomable unfold on that morning of September 11, […]
Werner Herzog Loves L.A.
Originally published by the Los Angeles Times. Photos by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times. WERNER HERZOG is at a booth in a Sunset Boulevard restaurant, just down the hill from where he once rescued Joaquin Phoenix. The rescue happened 11 years ago when the freshly Oscar-nominated Phoenix flipped his car on a winding road […]
