Category: Short Stories

Journal of American Progress: Short Stories by Andy Hurvitz

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I have finished editing Journal of American Progress, a self-published book of eight short stories.
There is a $2.99 download available for the ipad.

My hope is to reach a wider audience, in an easy and economical way.
I am publishing for the new generation who reads on a tablet.

Here again is a summary of the book. I ask your forgiveness for the self-promotion
but hope that you will think it well-earned:

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN PROGRESS

Andy Hurvitz crafts a collection of short stories, of people caught in the illusory melting pot of Los Angeles.

In three stories, inspired by the late Billy Strayhorn’s mordantly elegant song titles: a taunting teen thug gets his comeuppance in “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing”; a retail sales clerk imagines he is friends with a laconic Western heir in “Something to Live For” ; a bitter decorator escapes to Chicago to plot revenge on his reality TV rival in “Lush Life”.

Colton Banning is the protagonist of three stories where the young multi-racial athlete, escaping desert poverty, tempts fate to conquer Hollywood through sports and social climbing, encountering wealth and power poisoned by sadism, revenge, sexual desire and envy in the beaches and bedrooms of Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu.

In “Somebodies and Nobodies” a sex tape could blackmail a powerful woman and Colton risks his life to get it; Colton rents a room in a messy Venice house of refugees from India and Vermont, pursuing poetry, power and sex in “Journal of American Progress”; and in “The Bright Shop”, he is back in time, in 1969, to meet a successful LA fashion retailer living in an architectural dream house, a place she escaped to from the Holocaust. Two other tales explore desperation under the sun: In “Dry Wind”, a depressed film editor, tempted by escape and money, submits to an ex-girlfriend’s manipulation, falling under her spell, into theft and sex, on a car trip to San Angelo, TX . And in “Day of the Deltoid” a bored, sexually addicted housewife navigates between decadence and respectability while remodeling her Cheviot Hills home.

No person who knows or dreams of Los Angeles can fail to be moved by this cunning and insightful writer whose caustic and poetic prose breathes the dirty air and fresh dreams of this region. It is an elegiac and entertaining collection.

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Dry Wind-a new short story by Andy Hurvitz

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Manipulated by Hollywood promises, an indebted editor, working on a pop star video, suffers blinding headaches, red eyes, and debilitating depression;and is sent on a fool’s errand to take stolen money to an old woman in San Angelo, Texas; confronting tragedy, memory and love’s delusions.

Dry Wind.

The Bright Shop by Andy Hurvitz

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Case Study House #9, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

An excerpt from my new short story “The Bright Shop”.

Log Line:

A European refugee designs a new life in 1960s Los Angeles only to see it crumble, near the Pacific, on the edge of a new decade.

Excerpt:

Tail Road runs like a jagged capillary along the top of a mountain ridge, rising up from the ocean near Santa Monica and high up into the canyon. Below it, cliffs, rocks and erosion.

It’s a narrow finger of a road, shaded and hidden, wooded and secluded, a private place, home to a very few, who live behind walls and gates, eucalyptus and ornamental grasses, sprayed in fog and breeze.

Rich are the residents, self-made or self-employed, made wealthy by defending the law- or defying it.

At the western end of Tail Road, just before its precarious termination over Pacific Coast Highway, the one-story, steel and glass, 1957 Seams House sits on a flat, two-acre promontory.

The Bright Shop by Andy Hurvitz

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Malibu Near Trancas, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Excerpt from “The Bright Shop“, a new short story by Andy Hurvitz

The Student Athlete

On another Sunday with Henry, Tanya sat with her newspaper, atop the wood deck of the Malibu West Beach Club as Henry played in the sand.

A roof rhyming repetition of half circles and hanging globe lights, the beach club’s young, casual, jaunty and informal architecture echoed its members, an athletic, friendly, successful group who worked hard at leisure.

Multi-ethnic, the people included a Chinese born Physics professor, Dr. Hy Loh, 35, who did chin-ups in his speedo; a Malaysian model, Jacinda Pu-See, who had just been cast in a James Bond movie; and Argentine immigrant Dr. Limon Jacobs whose psychological citrus treatment and adherence to a diet omitting yellow fruits was all the rage.

The flighty film colony buzzed the grounds, landing on the deck in their oversized sunglasses and deep tans, puffing and exhaling, taking off in sudden flight and eccentric gesticulation, marking beach territory in lush olfactory waves of Aramis and Chanel No. 5.

Late Sunday afternoon, up on the Coast Highway, Tanya and Henry were driving home, when she saw a tall, muscular mulatto man in a red swimsuit hitchhiking. She had seen him before, back at the beach, flipping, somersaulting, jumping and running in the surf.

Without a thought, she pulled over and told Henry to get in back so the hiker could get in.

He introduced himself as Colton Banning. He told her he was studying at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Up close she carefully studied the student’s broadly carved chest, flat stomach, and tawny skin. They made conversation about school, Malibu and Vietnam.

Without concern or caution, she invited him up to the house.

She hoped the architecture might seduce him.

Journal of American Progress.

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Colton Banning is back. He is living, near the Venice canals, in a messy house full of conflicted characters. Surrounded by dirt, disorder and self-absorption, he is lusted after by an older woman and taken into a poet’s suffering.

Journal of American Progress