Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles

Kate Braverman grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1950s when glitz was just beginning to be manufactured. It wasn’t a destination city yet. It was the last outpost with an ocean view.

Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles chronicles the trajectory of Braverman’s Left Coast generation with a voice of singular power. She was an antiwar and feminist activist in Berkeley, a punk poet, a single mother in the East L.A. barrio, and a woman in and out of recovery at AA meetings. In her forties, Braverman left Los Angeles for a six year odyssey in a 150-year-old farmhouse in New York’s Allegheny Mountains. Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles is an eccentric and profoundly daring view of social and individual transformation, equal parts history, hallucination, stand up comedy monologue, travelogue, and philosophy.

Library Journal calls Braverman a “literary genius”; Rolling Stone describes her as having the “power and intensity you don’t see much outside of rock and roll.”

“A memoir? Essays? Kate Braverman is a legendary novelist, short-story writer, and poet, but this book reminds us that nonfiction must be at least as daring and innovative as our strongest poems and novels.”—Robert Polito, from the introduction