Collins, Jackie. Hollywood wives, New York : Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Jackie Collins broke into the big time with this unashamedly trashy novel.  To date it remains her biggest success...Hollywood Wives appeals to those readers who are interested in sex, fame and money, in other words just about everyone.

If the The Loved One is high literature then Collins's blockbuster is low literature.  Moreover, like Waugh, she knows her territory, makes her points and takes no prisoners.  This is a portrait of Reagan's America and a gallery of tacky charcters indulging in 1980s materialism, decadence and success-at-any price overkill in Tinseltown.

The prose style is uncomplicated which translates as anyone with a low reading ability can follow the story.  Expletives, drug references crime and lots of sex are the author's stock-in-trade.  It could be argued that Collins is the female Harold Robbins, who veered even more into the pornographic.

Hollywood Wives evolved into a mega mini series and was a ratings smash.  Collins has just published her 33rd novel.

Bukowski, Charles. Come on in! : new poems, New York : HarperCollins, 2006.



Charles Bukowski the poet was an important figure in the counter-culture days of the 1960s. 

This collection of new poems was published posthumously for Bukowski died in 1994.  An alcoholic, a social outcast, often poverty-stricken, Bukowski's subject matter was Los Angeles itself and the so-called losers or marginalised people 

Come on in! : new poems covers familiar territory...sex and alcohol and relationships.  An excerpt from his poem "down and out on the boardwalk' summarises his rather special gift:

she described

her boyfriend

in detail

to me

then took out her

                                                    guitar

                                                    and started

                                                    singing.

                                                    later that night

                                                    I sodomised her

                                                    and told her

                                                    not to

                                                    come

                                                    around any

                                                    more.

                                                    I got lucky:

                                                    she

                                                    didn't.                       

Rechy, John. City of night, New York : Grove Press, 1963.

City of Night belongs to the literary genre known as the "underground" novel.  The word underground usually denotes an activity that is forbidden, or an aspect of life which polite society chooses not to face in broad daylight.  And so it is here, as John Rechy depicts the world of male hustlers and their "tricks" in the big urban sprawl of America.

The novel has acquired a legendary status and it demands to be read, although no doubt the shock value has diminished over the decades.

City of Night is best described as one man's odyssey: an unnamed  male prostitute travels from the East Coast to the West Coast, picking up clients.  The Los Angeles portion of the novel emphasises the lives of transvestites.  The locales are seedy - the language equally so.  It has been suggested that the book inspired director Gus Van Sant to write and film My Own Private Idaho.