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-IVHymns 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.
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 […]
Coastal Elite Elegy
Originally for Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2016 Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. -Alfred North Whitehead OF THE MANY forensic narratives that have been stitched together to try and shape the potentially-nightmarish November 8 election results into some kind of cloth of understanding, one in particular […]
O. Henry Prize Stories Collection Is Here!
Joe Donnelly’s “Bonus Baby” brings us to the ball game but from inside the very center, from the pitcher’s point of view. The story takes place during a game—not just any game but a possible perfect game. We see how the pitcher’s life has led him to this moment. The pitcher’s tics, familiar to any […]
