THIS SORT OF DYING

AHMAD SHAMLOU

Translated by Sholeh Wolpé

I want to die the sleep of acacias.

Dreamily in the short-lived breeze that passes, hesitantly to die the sleep of the acacias.

I want to fly in the heavy breaths of petunias.

In summer gardens, damp and warm at the evening’s first hours take flight in the breaths of petunias.

Even if the blue iris of a knife blooms on my chest — I’d like to die the sleep of acacias in their last breath, and in the halls decorated with sash windows become the weighted passage of petunias at seven in the evening.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT L.A.

L.A. is already buried under a mountain of cliches and I don't wish to add another.

— Mike Davis, Set the Night on Fire:

L.A. in the Sixties

When I moved to L.A. I felt like a runaway. Ten years later, I feel like a tool…. — Ottessa Moshfegh, author of My

Year of Rest and Relaxation

I’ll start out Fanny Factoid then say it straight: L.A. is the most populous county in the nation; adjusted for the cost of housing we have the highest poverty rate; we’re the manufacturing capital of the US (used to be steel, now it’s tshirts and underpants and wut, u got a problem with that?); almost half the goods that arrive in this blighted and trinket-rich nation come through our two ports. If you want to know what the future looks like, and I mean its near-brutality, this is the place to live. Snow-capped mountains, citrus blossoms scenting the breeze, and scavenged train tracks with a bomb-blast of packaging materials for miles. Text me when you get to Union Station I’ll pick you up in front. — XOXO, Rachel Kushner, author of

The Mars Room Getting off the 118 at Topanga one day just before I left California for college, I looked at the boulders turning purple in the sunset and thought, with the idiot gravity of a recent high school graduate, “No matter where I go in my life, I will die in LA.” I haven’t spent more than a few weeks in the city at a time since then, and honestly I still think I was probably right. — Ari Brostoff, author of Missing Time

Los Angeles is the best city in the world for writers. A night out with friends leads into earnest discussions of astral travel and ancestral dreams, diasporic iterations of the moon rabbit myth, the best Taiwanese breakfast spot for youtiou, the cultural significance of Pornhub commenters. Everyone you meet here is operating on multiple dimensions of time-space. LA reminds me to always be curious, to observe everything and everyone with care. — Jean Chen Ho, author of Fiona and Jane

Emily Ratajkowski is a model, actress, activist, entrepreneur, and writer. Her first book is My Body.

Lisa Teasley is a writer, artist, and Los Angeles native. She is the author of the award-winning story collection Glow in the Dark and the critically acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, published by Bloomsbury. She is also the writer and presenter of the BBC television documentary High School Prom and an editor at large for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her website is www.lisateasley.com.

Anthony Christian Ocampo is a writer and sociologist from Los Angeles. He is the author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Say hi to him on Twitter at @ anthonyocampo.

Kenji C Liu is the author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019), finalist for the California and Maine book awards, and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His writing is in numerous journals, anthologies, magazines, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). An alumnus of Kundiman, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Ángeles.

Rachel Rabbit White is a practicing hedonist.

Rosie Stockton is an actual luddite.

Katie Kadue was born and raised in Los Angeles.

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Porochista Khakpour is the author of four critically acclaimed books. Her next book, Tehrangeles: A Novel, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her other writing has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast Traveler, Bookforum, Elle, Slate, BOMB, and many others. She is a contributing editor at Evergreen Review and lives in NYC.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins teaches at Pomona College. She has written about food, race and culture as a journalist and scholar for over 20 years.

Chloe Watlington was born but definitely not raised in Los Angeles.

Geoff Nicholson Geoff Nicholson’s latest book, The Suburbanist: A Personal Account and Ambivalent Celebration of Life in the Suburbs with Field Notes, was published in November 2021 by Harbour Books.

Lindsay Gellman is a journalist in New York. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, where she was a staff reporter, as well as in The New York Times, The New Yorker, WIRED, Businessweek, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Germany. She is a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University, where she teaches nonfiction writing.

Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor based in Los Angeles. Her most recent books are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could and the novel Art Is Everything.

Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at CSULong Beach and writes regularly on arts and culture for local and national publications. He’s lived in the SGV for an accumulated 20+ years and once kept a log of all the beef noodle soup restaurants he had been to in the area.

Ana Quiring Ana Quiring is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Avidly, Feminist Modernist Studies, Full Stop, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She tweets @AnaQuiring.

Vickie Vértiz is a writer and educator from Bell Gardens, CA. Her writing can be found in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and with KCET. Her book Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut won the 2018 PEN America literary prize in poetry. A graduate of Williams College, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of California Riverside, she teaches in the Writing Program at UC-Santa Barbara.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, McSweeney’s, and Poetry magazine. She has received awards from MacDowell, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Djerassi, and she serves as Executive Director at Kundiman.

Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) is an Iranian poet and journalist. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1984, Shamlou is one of Iran’s most revered modern poets and one of the prominent leaders of Iran’s modern literature literary movement. Today, he is one of the most revered literary figures in modern Iranian history.

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian American poet, translator, and playwright. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, several plays, and an oratorio. Her most recent book, Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse (University of Arkansas Press, March 2022) is hailed by Ilya Kaminsky as a book “that created its own genre — a thrill of lyric combined with the narrative spell.” Sholeh is currently a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles and Barcelona.

Perwana Nazif is a writer and the Art Director for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She occasionally curates film and art programs.

Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942 in Mexico City, Mexico) studied cinematography at university and then worked as an assistant to Mexican modernist master, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. He became a lifelong mentor and encouraged her in developing her own artistic vision. Now considered one of Mexico’s most prolific and celebrated photographers, her work has graced more than sixty exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. In 2007, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles held a retrospective exhibition, The Goat’s Dance. Graciela Iturbide is the 2008 winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, and, in 2015, the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center for Photography.

Julian Wasser started his career in photography in the Washington DC bureau of the Associated Press where he met and accompanied the famous news photographer Weegee—who would become a lasting influence on him. In the mid-60s Wasser moved to Los Angeles as a contract photographer for Time, Life, and Fortune magazines and becoming internationally known as the go to guy for getting candid but memorably composed photographs. (His iconic images of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston; Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz; and a young Jodie Foster are already classics.)