Description: "I have never read a book quite like this one. It exceeded every expectation I have developed in the 15-years since Sesshu Foster''s previous novel, the Believer Book Award-winning masterpiece Atomik Aztex, was released. ELADATL is a work that is both about the past of Eastern Los Angeles and a novel that is of its future, a metaphor for the lifting up of a people, and also for the crashing and burning of expectations. There are riots, pirate radio stations, militaristic chicken farms, and krakens, but at its heart, this is a novel about class, race, economic struggle and a yearning for transcendence. Along with Sesshu Foster''s words and Arturo Romo''s masterful artwork, the academia-mocking appendices lend ELADATL a vibe reminiscent of Walter Benjamin by way of Vladimir Nabokov. I cannot wait to turn our customers onto this novel."--Jason Jefferies, Quail Ridge Bookstore, Raleigh, NC "Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo''s ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a portfolio in prose and pictures that''s 100% made up but that I nonetheless believe to be 100% true. It reads like a cross between Yamashita''s I Hotel and Pynchon''s The Crying of Lot 49, although saying so does ELADATL a disservice--it stands proudly on its own, a smile on its face and middle finger raised. If I don''t see a young bookseller sporting an ELADATL tattoo within the next couple years, I''ll be shocked."--James Crossley, Madison Books, Seattle, WA "This novel not only explores the actual quest for physical elevation, but, more significantly, with the complication of inner elevation, attempting to rise above a circumstance studded with racism and looming financial debacle. Mr. Foster''s novel magically inscribes the trenchant character of an opaque and transitional zeitgeist."--Will Alexander, author of Kaleidoscope Omniscience "Plunge upward into ELADATL''s phantasmagoric skies, where Los Angeles outsiders fly pirate dirigibles to legendary cities built of trash. This hip, avant, alternate history wriggles into and out of all ordinariness, transforming oppression into adventure and you, oh fortunate reader, into a witness of the glorious exploits of Swirling Alhambra and his rebel cohort. Get ready to leave the status quo behind and soar beyond the probable to the possible, your brain buoyed by this book''s heady mix of fear and joy and outraged delight."--Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair: A Novel "A fierce, bittersweet, and hilarious antidote to our increasingly deracinated personhoods and neighborhoods, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines inspires us to hold our ground in a here and now that includes futures and pasts we both know and can barely imagine. Set against the absence of Hollywood--that perfect hierarchical structure that occludes most of the actual labor that goes into making the finished product--Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo take us through the hood and under the hood while celebrating and mourning the intimacy of social life in all its vicissitudes. Along the way, our fearless guides introduce us to the living politics of a particular place whose accumulated experience reverberates throughout the cosmos."--Ammiel Alcalay, Founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative "''The strange future of war over Los Angeles, zeppelins versus dirigibles . . . '' Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo capture the uncapturable. ''Experience levitation and death,'' ''attune your cellular vibrations to the frequency of Star Beings,'' ''the merciless winds of the human heart,'' ''the Atmospheric Trash Vortex.'' Who is the I here? ''The welcoming hosts at the front door, you want to look inside?'' The nightmare does not erase the comedy. ''The CIA behind the million faces, hair and fingernails still growing.'' ''Sign your sorrow over . . . they''re taking everything; let''s give it to them, the sober whisky of Love.'' Unforgetable read. ''Isn''t someone in charge?''"--Sharon Doubiago, author of My Beard: Memoir Stories "Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo co-pilot the ELADATL phantasmagoric journey across historic/imagined skies with magnificent views of a post-industrial East Los Angeles wasteland that is dotted with cinematic/cultural phantoms: Raquel Welch, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Anthony Quinn, and Brown Berets who invoke the mantra, ''Don''t believe the fake dreams of the secret police.'' Human skin, dirigible skin, chorizo skins, are simultaneously celebrated as art while being attacked by Zeppelin gunships. ELADATL lifts the reader into a free intellectual airspace where airships of new thinking reign."--Harry Gamboa Jr., author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr.

Please Wait