• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

You are here: Home / Archives for fantasy

David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks”

October 5, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="KUST1tJRtgkRnoQOLlZRPbrZOASSJtA8"] I'M not sure there's a novelist alive whose work I look forward to more than David Mitchell's. I say this even while sharing some mixed feelings about his new novel. The parts of this that work -- four and a half of its six parts -- are simply spectacular. In fact, I can't think of two many writers of any kind whose storytelling is … [Read more...]

USC Historian Discovers Witches (and Vampires)

April 7, 2011 by Scott Timberg

WHEN I heard that a USC professor had written a bestselling vampire novel I thought, This sounds like what the English call a train-jumper -- someone who latches onto a trend, half-heartedly and after the fact. Boy was I wrong. Deborah Harkness is the real thing, and her novel, A Discovery of Witches, comes out of her scholarship on the shift from the supernatural medieval period to the … [Read more...]

Pro and Con on Ray Bradbury

May 13, 2010 by Scott Timberg

THE first Los Angeles writer many people read -- I think this was true for me -- is Ray Bradbury. The fantasy and science-fiction writer, nearing his 90th birthday, gets a very fine treatment from Nathaniel Rich in Slate this week. (Here for his piece.) I dedicated the book I co-edited, The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, to Bradbury; my partner in crime Dana Gioia and I regarded him as a … [Read more...]

Magical Prose and Rethinking Literary Realism

April 26, 2010 by Scott Timberg

On Saturday I led a panel at UCLA with three writers who work in what we might call slipstream, literary fantasy, conceptual fiction, surrealism, or some other school still to be named. While the specific label isn't particularly important, the emphasis on rethinking realism, on embracing the best of genres like fantasy and science fiction, and moving into what Michael Chabon has called "the … [Read more...]

Eight Decades of Ursula K. Le Guin

October 21, 2009 by Scott Timberg

TODAY one of the most innovative and intriguing writers in the english language marks her 80th birthday. there aren't many novelists who i enjoy as much today as i did when i was in elementary school; ursula le guin is one of them. here is the recent LA Times piece i wrote on her after visiting her in portland and re-immersing myself in her body of work and the debates around it. she was a very … [Read more...]

Ursula Le Guin Vs. Oliver Cromwell

May 26, 2009 by Scott Timberg

SOMEHOW, without quite knowing it, i wrote two brief pieces on ursula le guin, and both have recently gone up.the first is mostly an extended intro to my LATimes profile, which adds some excised lines from author/ essayist/ cosmopolitan pico iyer as well as sci-fi scholar/ critic annalee newitz.the second, here, is the seed of what i hope is a bigger project some day on the transition away from … [Read more...]

Michael Chabon, Genre and Literary Criticism

March 10, 2009 by Scott Timberg

READERS of this blog probably need no urging on what a fine novelist michael chabon is -- and i direct anyone who doubts over to "kavalier and clay" or a number of his other excellent works of fiction.but literary criticism, even by as esteemed a talent as mr. chabon, tends to fly under the radar, and that's why it gives me great pleasure to highlight his essay/criticism collection "maps and … [Read more...]

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
May 2025
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Dec    

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in