THIS ANGELIC LAND

By Aris Janigian

The 1992 Los Angeles Rodney King Riots were the most destructive riots in United States history. To date, no work of literary fiction has broached the subject matter head-on. In THIS ANGELIC LAND, Aris Janigian—author of Bloodvine and Riverbig—tells the story of Adam Derderian, a hip, twenty-seven year old bar owner during his six-day journey through the surreal heart of Los Angeles and one of the city's darkest episodes.

Seeming to carry scant memory of Lebanon's civil war, from which Derderian had fled while still a boy, the landscape of the riots now find him revisiting the world he thought he had escaped. Derderian engages with Armenian gangsters, members of the Nation of Islam, a Hancock Park Playboy, and a Kurdish scenic artist as he watches his always uneasy adopted city ransacked and set ablaze.

West of West Books (2012).