MacArthur Park: an excerpt

by Andrew Durbin

In MacArthur Park: an excerpt, Andrew Durbin examines the outsider histories behind California’s sunny idealism—from the early cult movements of the twentieth century to the community that has formed around the work of Tom of Finland to contemporary art’s response to climactic precarity. A hybrid memoir and history of east LA, MacArthur Park: an excerpt considers the doomsday anxiety that prevails in earthquake country. Lost in the sprawl, Durbin moves from diners to hotels, the radio sermons of cult leaders to the disco lyrics of Donna Summer, mapping the differences and contradictions that define the city. “I’m trying to understand something about this place,” he tells the painter Richard Hawkins over dinner on Santa Monica Boulevard. “What about this place?” the painter asks. Neither respond.

36 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2015

About the author

Andrew Durbin is the author of MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), both from Nightboat Books. In 2018, MacArthur Park was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. His book about Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, The Wonderful World that Almost Was, is forthcoming from FSG and Granta in April 2026. He is the editor of Jacolby Satterwhite’s How lovely is me being as I am (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2021), Kevin Killian’s Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte, 2018), and the chapbook series Say bye to reason and hi to everything (Capricious, 2015). His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He lives in London and is the editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.