La Medusa

“La Medusa, Vanessa Place's monumental polyvalent, polyglot epic novel of Los Angeles, is like a shocking rock slide of polished stones of the first water, cut by a master jeweler, faceted into ten thousand-and-one sides--and the whole spill runs in relative slow motion with no drag, no yawns, all be-bop, hip-hop, Now. It is an epic silent, as long as Von Stroheim's Greed and every bit as powerful. But one thing is certain: no matter how good the picture may turn out to be, the book will definitely have been better.”
--James McCourt

“Dazzling and daze-inducing, La Medusa returns us to the ambitious, difficult, and serious work of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Beckett. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, La Medusa is an investigation into the nature of experience. Los Angeles takes the role of Dublin.  The brain and its double cortex generate the stylistic intricacies that the organs and senses do in Joyce.  And above all, it is a female epic, in which the swirling city-universe is explored and shaped by the petrifying eye and intellect of the wily Medusa, her coiling locks extending everywhere.”
--Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW Public Radio.