ARIS JANIGIAN reads from his new novel WAITING FOR LIPCHITZ AT CHATEAU MARMONT

Skylight Books Podcast Series

Waiting for Lipchitz at Chateau Marmont (Rare Bird)

Set in two iconic locales—Hollywood's legendary Chateau Marmont and luxurious Fresno's Forestiere's Underground Garden—Waiting for Lipchitz at Chateau Marmont is a bold and colorful critique of the California Dream through the perspective of a once-upon-a-time successful screenwriter and wealth that taunts him. Caught between John O'Brien's Better and, perhaps, a Christopher Guest adaptation of Waiting for Godot, Janigian's Lipchitz is a new take on the absent protagonist and what's inevitably illuminated by its void.

Praise for Waitng for Lipchitz at the Chateu Marmont

''Waiting for Lipchitz at the Chateu Marmont is a marvel, a novel full of tilts and torque, wild fulminations and mordant shrugs. Beneath the stunningly limber prose quivers a rare and compelling tenderness for our irrevocably damaged, irrevocably beautiful world" —Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up and Gladyss of the Hunt

"Waiting for Lipchitz the Chateau Marmont is a novel of ideas, or more precisely two 'thought novellas' braided through one another. One does involve waiting for Lipchitz, a producer of 'quality' pictures, at the Chateau. It is the rumination of a more-than-slightly desperate screenwriter, by turns hilarious and despairing, on the demise of Los Angeles and its narcissistic denizens, told in a decadent Industry noir to rival the guilty pleasures of Bret Easton Ellis or Bruce Wagner. Cutting across the grain of that pungent inner dialogue, however, is the same scribe’s recollection of a friendship and long-running conversation with John Hirschman, a larger-than-life raconteur in his own right, recently 'self-exiled' to Fresno. Here, in the flat heat, hidden gardens and agricultural bounty of the Central Valley, Janigian finds a voice closer to Saroyan and Steinbeck, and a California that can still sate more substantial human hungers. As the novel progresses, a sharply observed late-Hollywood parody, in which all 'art' has burned down to the hollow cinders of commodity, gives way to a beautifully turned meditation on the possibility of a more truly commodious life. WL@CM captures two Californias at a time when they have never been less coincident. Janagian serves up a brilliantly bipolar mix of memory and observation, fury and speculation, a story that may free his waiting screenwriter from false tethers to an overhyped city, even as it ties the author fast to a vast, prodigious, if lately unsung state."—Joe Day, author of Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime

Aris Janigian is author of three previous novels, Bloodvine, Riverbig, and This Angelic Land. He is also co-author along with April Greiman of Something from Nothing, a book on the philosophy of graphic design. A Ph.D. in psychology, from 1993 to 2005 he was senior professor of Humanities at Southern California Institute of Architecture. He has published in genres as diverse as poetry, social psychology, and design criticism. He was a contributing writer to West, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, a finalist for the William Saroyan Fiction Prize, and the recipient of the Anahid Literary Award from Columbia University.