Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin’s male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing—for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right.
A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of possibly lunatic belief; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father’s wealth can’t quite bring himself to claim his portion.
The ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion.
Alan Rifkin is a writer for Los Angeles Magazine. He lives in Long Beach, CA.

Signal Hill

Literature & Fiction

Rifkin, Alan

Literary

City Lights Publishers

In a series of strangely resilient personal adventures–often beginning with breakups, and fueled by a sense of "invincible longing"–essayist Alan Rifkin flings himself at the last vestiges of the Southern California Dream. He chases summer with a pool man, lives with monks in a Santa Barbara monastery, joins a dysfunctional Los Angeles writing club, communes with wild dolphins, traces the steps of Otzi the Iceman, emulates a Bible-based marriage, and confronts his mother's last season in his beloved San Fernando Valley, in each case wrestling with mysteries of heaven and earth. By the time he looks up, he has waded deep into the complications of later life–compromised love, family tragedy, and what it might mean to be a grownup in the 21st century West.

Burdens by Water: An Unintended Memoir

Religion & Spirituality

Brown Paper Press

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