David Ulin is a writer, a book critic and an editor. He edited one of my favorite books about Los Angeles, Writing Los Angeles, which brings together writers as disparate as Chester Himes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Christopher Isherwood. (And of course, Raymond Chandler.) The book has an elegant cover too, clean and graphically simple and yet evocative. David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading ("Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time") is based on this essay he wrote for the L.A. Times. Ulin used to be the Times' book editor and then became a critic in order to focus on his own fiction.) I've never read any of Ulin's fiction, but I have several of the books he's edited on my shelves. This is a man who celebrates the act of reading. This is aman whose name writers should know.
