Jervey tervalon biography of martin
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Hawthorne Books
Praise care Stories purchase Boys
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- Pam Houston
- Author relief Contents Can Have Shifted
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- Antonya Nelson
- Author of Bound
Gregory Martin’s Stories for Boys is a magnetic contemplation on what happens when a decades-long lie silt brutally crush. Moving, test, and persistent, this intensely personal accurate pushe
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Jervey Tervalon has a taste for observation in ‘Monster’s Chef’
The novelist Jervey Tervalon likes to share this interesting fun fact about his life: He was born in the same year as Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.
Tervalon, 55, is a professional teller and gatherer of stories and also a busy literary networker. He grew up in Los Angeles, where celebrity culture can feel like a huge planet whose gravity is constantly sucking him in. The collision between the stars of movie, television and music industries, and the lives of ordinary Angelenos is the subject of his new novel, “Monster’s Chef” (Amistad: 224 pp., $24.99).
“Living in Los Angeles, you always hear celebrity stories,” Tervalon says in a Pasadena cafe not far from his Altadena home. He then recounts a few of the many behind-the-scenes tales he’s heard about the late Michael Jackson. Like a lot of Angelenos, he’s both fascinated and repulsed by celebrity culture.
“When I was growing up in L.A., I lived four blocks from the place where Marvin Gaye was killed,” Tervalon says, remembering the 1984 shooting death of the soul singer. As a teenager, Tervalon encountered the football player and actor Jim Brown at a house party and cringed when his then girlfriend approached the mercurial Brown. “I was terrified he’d br
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Channing Mink / Daily Nexus
I came to UC Santa Barbara in 1976. My dorm room looked out onto the lagoon and I was just a five-minute walk away from the ocean. It was so beautiful that I felt unnerved and alone. It was so white that I thought of campus as being the Wonderbread World.
I came from the Jefferson Park/Crenshaw area of Los Angeles that at the time was still largely a community of African Americans who, like me, originated from Texas or New Orleans. It was a vibrant place to grow up. There were many skilled craftsmen in the neighborhood; my neighbor Charles owned a Jaguar repair shop and did very well with his business. My dad was the neighborhood mechanic and worked nights at the post office, so he was around in the daytime to take me and my neighborhood friends to the beach or Griffith Park. Mr. Bambino would barbecue peach brandy-soaked ribs and the neighborhood kids would line up for a couple to gnaw on.
As a kid, I would listen to my brothers’ friends sitting on the corner drinking beer, smoking weed and talking about the brutality and unfairness of the Vietnam War and the racism in H.P. Lovecraft back in 1973. It was a rich and complicated black world where I developed confidence in my intelligence and talent.
Later, I needed all that confidence because