Stephen Randall
 Stephen Randall is currently deputy editor of Playboy magazine. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. A third generation Angeleno (yes, there is such a thing), Stephen Randall has spent much of his journalistic career doing one of two things: explaining the City of Los Angeles and all it means to outsiders (as Deputy Editor of Playboy and a staff writer for Women’s Wear Daily) or explaining it to locals (as articles editor of Los Angeles magazine, among other L.A. publications). Now he has taken his unique view of L.A. and turned it into a hilarious novel of manners and mores called The Other Side of Mulholland that illuminates a Los Angeles all Angelenos will recognize as the real city they live in and non-Angelenos will be charmed by. It’s a refreshing portrayal for a city that suffers from all sorts of media exaggeration: from the glitzy roman a clefs that concentrate on an unreal city populated by conniving starlets and predatory producers to the dark, brooding and equally hyperbolic views of writers like Mike Davis and Joan Didion. Randall’s witty novel, which centers on a mildly dysfunctional family that finds itself divided—half in the San Fernando Valley and half on the Westside—takes the popular misconceptions of L.A. and replaces them an accurate, and pointed satire that pokes fun at life in the Valley, on the Westside, downtown, the secession movement, show business, delicatessen wars, local journalism, car washes, brush fires, auto worship, malls, the Chabad telethon and other unusual aspects of L.A.’s personality. In The Other Side of Mulholland, Randall explores the city’s duality through the lives of identical twin brothers, Perry and Tim Newman—who themselves represent L.A.’s myths and realities—and their parents, two Valley-dwelling empty nesters who have their own challenges to face. |
 "Fresh, witty and relentlessly funny -- a wise exploration of how, for many of us, family ties can not only bind, but gag." --Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry "A frothy, fast-paced exploration of the dichotomies between the two sections of Los Angeles: upper L.A. with all the glitz and the big houses and beautiful women and BMWs, and lower L.A., the suburbs 'too dull to be the subject of a TV show or a Joan Didion novel.'" --Washington Post Book World "Reverberates with echoes of Nathanael West, Horace McCoy and even Robert Altman." --Publisher's Weekly "Don't go poolside without [it]." --People Magazine "Fast paced like the city but with down-to-earth morals like the Valley." --L.A. Daily News "A witty novel of manners and mores in the two Los Angeleses...Satire that's more affectionate than barbed: a good-humored look at the L.A. that Randall grew up in, still lives in, and is titillated by." --Kirkus Reviews "Randall's writing is as sharp and bright as the region's fable Mediterranean sun. Randall has presented a Los Angeles full of bizarre, oftentimes inexplicable, hierarchies and dualities." --Los Angeles Times "If Bridget Jones had a sex change and teamed up with Nathanael West, the result would be this scathing, hysterical, drop-dead accurate portrayal of contempo L.A. With laser-sharp wit and sentences you want to read out loud to strangers, Randall lays bare the pretensions, rituals, and peculiar, air-conditioned dementia of life in the City of Angels." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and Perv--A Love Story |
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