The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories

by Daniel A. Olivas

Overview

Wanderers and writers, gangbangers and lawyers, dreamers and devils. The King of Lighting Fixtures paints an idiosyncratic but honest portrait of Los Angeles, depicting how the city both entrances and confounds. Each story serves as a reflection of Daniel A. Olivas’s grand City of Angels, a “magical metropolis where dreams come true.”

The characters here represent all walks of L.A. life—from Satan’s reluctant Craigslist roommate to a young girl coping with trauma at her brother’s wake—and their tales ebb and flow among various styles, including magical realism, social realism, and speculative fiction. Like a jazz album, they glide and bop, tease and illuminate, sadden and hearten as they navigate effortlessly from meta to fabulist, from flash fiction to longer, more complex narratives.

These are literary sketches of a Los Angeles that will surprise, connect, and disrupt readers wherever they may live.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816535620
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Series:	Camino del Sol
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of seven books, including The Book of Want: A Novel and Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1990, Olivas has practiced law with the California Department of Justice. A second-generation Angeleno, he makes his home in Los Angeles with his wife.
 

Table of Contents

Good Things Happen at Tina's Café 3

Juana 14

Bar 107 18

Mateo's Walk 20

The Subtenant 22

Needle 26

Orange Line 29

Carbon Beach 32

Imprints 34

Fat Man 44

Kind of Blue 45

La Diabla at the Farm 49

Things We Do Not Talk About 58

Better Than Divorce 61

Elizondo Returns Home 62

Mamá's Advice 67

Like Rivera and Kahlo 69

The Lost Soul of Humberto Reyes 71

@chicanowriter 73

The King of Lighting Fixtures 78

Pluck 114

Still Life with Woman and Stroller 115

A Very Bitter Man 117

Silver Case 119

The Last Dream of Pánfilo Velasco 121

Homecoming 124

Meeting with My Editor 139

Gig Economy 142

The Three Mornings of José Antonio Rincón 144

The Great Wall 150

Acknowledgments 153

Credits 155

Editorial Reviews

What unites the work is a sense of place.”—Los Angeles Times

“Olivas, the king of flash fiction, flexes both magical realist and realist muscles.”—NBC News

“The collection cements his place in the magical realism tradition of García Márquez and Urrea, and showcases his skills as a master stylist and self-aware observer of life's little vignettes.”—Shelf Awareness

“[A] bold insistence on leaving a few seams visible, a few threads frayed—even on pulling the rug away entirely—makes the book resound as a fascinating exploration of both the art of storytelling and the ways in which fiction echoes the messiness of life.”—Foreword Reviews

“Assured and perceptive, offering a view of another Southland from Chandler’s and Didion’s.”—Kirkus

“Because some pieces are of such brevity and wit, readers will take delight in reading twice.”—La Bloga

“An exceptional collection of original and entertaining stories by a master of the short story format.”—Midwest Book Review “A sharp, smart collection punctuated with inventiveness and wit: in the ongoing effort to depict Los Angeles as lit by something other than the glare of Hollywood, Daniel A. Olivas reminds us that the vast topography of the entire city and its neighborhoods are vibrant with their own unique electricities.”—Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark
 
“Comic, wry, very Angeleno, and essential Southern California.”—Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here
"By turns funny and frightening, deliciously suspenseful and comfortingly homey, The King of Lighting Fixtures is a credit to its author and to its readers, who have no choice but to give into imagination and to the joys of this delightful collection."—Erin Rubin, LibroMobile

“The short story is a delicate artifact and Olivas knows it: the right balance is achieved only if what is said is in harmony with what is left unmentioned. His Los Angeles is not only from bottom up but from east to west and from south to north.”—Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words

From the Publisher

2017-09-04
Vignettes of Latino life in Los Angeles, reminiscent of Michael Tolkin's The Player in its sardonic range.It's probably safe to guess that most teenage girls do not receive each evening, as if in a daily affirmation, the instruction, "Mija, when you kill a man, you must find the weak spot that all men have and make him suffer pain as he has never suffered before." Mama's advice, happily, isn't often followed literally in these sketches, but in most of them the men are revealed to be riddled with weak spots indeed, measuring out their lives—as do the women, for that matter—in coffee spoons, or at least in visits to Starbucks. Coffee, indeed, seems to have healing powers in the opening story, "Good Things Happen at Tina's Café." At least Yuban does, the stuff that the polydactylic protagonist Félix quaffs in the diner owned by the alluring Tina, who, by the end of the story, may or may not exist, just as Félix's ordinary reality may or may not be a decaffeinated illusion. Enigmatic and suggestive, the story is an exercise in a gritty form of magical realism, complete with funicular railway. The lead in Olivas' (The Book of Want, 2011, etc.) title story is less likable, deservedly proud of his accomplishments—"Those punks had no pinche empire, that's for goddamn sure"—and a complicated enough character to stand up to a little Rashomon-ish examination through the eyes of several people who know him, in interviews conducted on behalf of a writer who just happens to be named Olivas ("a real pendejo"). Though often playful, the collection ends on a grim note as a family is torn apart by the "great wall" that a certain president touts, in an endless audio loop over a detention center loudspeaker system, as one that Mexico will pay for, "and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me."Assured and perceptive, offering a view of another Southland from Chandler's and Didion's.

Kirkus Reviews