Welcome to Diane Lefer's page
with Kevin McCarthy, actor and brother of Mary McCarthy, at Dutton's Brentwood Books
(photo credit: Rachel Canon)
For years I tried to divide my time and juggle creative work and activism.
These days? Can't keep them apart.
Click for Upcoming EventsClick for more about my Plays, Books, and Personal Appearances
including California Transit, awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, published by Sarabande Books) .Click to read Los Angeles Times review
"From the world that could not be saved, the storyteller salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness.....we follow her anywhere...a rigorous and passionate inquiry of the highest order." - Carole Maso
"Lefer's characters...are Californians obsessed with social and economic injustice, the welfare of animals, the politics of the body and the Kafkaesque horrors of immigration law....Lefer's book certainly deserves attention."--San Francisco Chronicle
from the publisher: Southern California: land of dislocation and assimilation. It is a place Diane Lefer knows well. In California Transit, she uses conversational prose and macabre wit to zero-in on a Mexican woman detained indefinitely by immigration officials, isolating her from her American family; or a zoo employee considering what to do with a euthanized antelope's head; or, in the title novella, a lonely woman, riding buses all day, who cannot avert the violence building within her. This collection explores the difference between justice and law through a lens unfiltered by moralistic or didactic intention. Like a surveillance camera meant to record crime, not to stop it, Lefer presents a world gone wrong, not because of people's hatred for one another but because of their impossible, unfulfilled yearning to connect."Diane Lefer is one of the most gifted and witty writers around....California Transit contains such a wide range of quirky events and rich characterizations that it is as memorable and satisfying as any fiction. In other words, grab this book--you will not be disappointed, for each of her stories is a well-told and compelling gem." -- Oscar Hijuelos
Personal/Political Essays: search for my name at:
Interviews:
Contact: desilef@cs.com
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LA Progressive
In LA TACO by Frankie Colmane
In BiblioBuffet
by Daniel Jaffe
Sarabande Books Author Interview