You'll Like it Here
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900’s through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes and other ephemera that speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialization and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton used digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account, masterfully tracing this larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of our current times.
Formally, You'll Like it Here works in conversation with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, and Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 Fog. The novel also embraces a multi-register, journalistic storytelling that questions the tenuous line between objectivity and subjectivity in documenting the unreliability of history—both personal and collective—brilliantly balancing voids of loss, absence, and disappearance with moments of natural transcendence and miraculous phenomena.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Politanoff debuts with an alternately stark and whimsical series of vignettes drawn from early 20th-century stories in the Redondo Reflex and other Southern California newspapers. "A Ducking" portrays a yachtsman slipping into the water, a puff of pipe smoke momentarily marking the site of his disappearance. It's followed by "How to Avoid Drowning," which optimistically suggests that "all you need is something to rest a finger on—a floating fifty-gallon barrel, orchestra drum, or copper kettle." Many accounts of drownings follow, as well as some shootings, including a questionable police shooting in "Mistaken Identity," evoking a hardscrabble region ruled by draconian lawmen. Most of the crimes reported are petty, such as women cited for smoking in public—"Message to the Authorities" serves as an objection to the gender-discriminating law—or a Portuguese restaurateur arrested for using illegal fishing traps. The strange and playful "Devil in the Whisky" follows a drunken man who steals a boat, then calls for rescue at sea only to swim to shore and face arrest. "Mask Shortage" highlights the mask mandate for the 1918 influenza pandemic, while "Dispatch" evokes a WWI soldier who'd rather face poison gas than wear a gas mask. The project succeeds at breathing life into an era encapsulated by faded newsprint, which, by the end, doesn't feel so long ago.
