About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
This writer and three others will have their short stories read aloud at the Annenberg Community Beach House on Tuesday, August 16, 2016 at 6:30pm.
My story, “The Bright Shop”, concerns a European refugee who designs a new life in 1960s Los Angeles only to see it crumble on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Actor Deborah Geffner will perform it.
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.
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.
Here in Van Nuys 
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