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A piece in today's LAT Calendar asks why author Kate Braverman isn't more famous in Los Angeles, her hometown. She is more than happy to fill in Anne-Marie O'Connor on how she, Kate Braverman, should be more appreciated.
Her less well-received "Palm Latitudes," she believes "is unknown for the masterpiece that it is." Her short stories have won awards, run in numerous anthologies. So why is she better known in her new home of four years, San Francisco, she asks, than in her own city of fellow fallen angels?"I'm not just another writer. I don't think people understand my relationship with this city, and they don't understand what I've achieved," Braverman declares, as she sits in Guelaguetza, the Oaxacan mole mecca, near her childhood haunts in Mar Vista....
"There is not another woman writer in Southern California who sits between Bellow and Conrad next to Hemingway and Kafka. I have the most literary stature, certainly, of any woman in Southern California," Braverman says — a view that might not be held by fans of such writers as Joan Didion, Carolyn See or Alice Sebold.
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Many Los Angeles writers freely volunteer their debt to her.
"Of course they admire me," she responds. "They wouldn't exist without me."
"I am in the canon. Those other people will never be in the canon."
Oh please. Nice shout out for Guelaguetza West! For some reason the story doesn't show up when you search "Kate Braverman" at LATimes.com.
* Noted: (11:50 am) Maybe Angelenos don't appreciate Kate because she hates L.A. "A gulag with palm trees...a massive studio set, a clever assemblage of facades," she said in a recent San Francisco Chronicle profile.