This new edition of Mike Davis’s visionary work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century.

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

“Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.” — San Francisco Examiner

“A history as fascinating as it is instructive.”— Peter Ackroyd, The Times

MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis lives in San Diego. He is the author of many books, including Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, Late Victorian Holocausts and Planet of Slums. His Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb is forthcoming from Verso.

462 pages
45 b/w illustrations

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 568 5
ISBN-10: 1 84467 568 8
US$16.95 / £10.99 / CAN$23