Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn't want me to make the same mistake in my life.

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him