Bender's L.A. - Michael Elias

In the coke-dusted canyons and deal-making rooms of 1970s Los Angeles, Bender's L.A. follows writer David Bender as he sets out to remake his life - romantically, professionally, and spiritually - after his wife walks out in Puerto Vallarta with a single sentence and a suitcase.

While the Vietnam War casts its shadow, Bender runs afoul of Nixon's FBI, plays tennis with fugitive Abbie Hoffman, arms himself against a homicidal producer, and goes back in time to fall in love with a young Marilyn Monroe. Bender weaves through a world of players, radicals, writers and artists including a woman suspiciously like Eve Babitz.

Haunted by his New York past and guided by his Sun Tzu-quoting agent Neil Navitz, Bender begins to wonder whether success has cost him the things that mattered - or whether he ever truly possessed them.

With a comic edge, Elias offers a bitter-sweet meditation on love, memory, and the moral compromise of the Hollywood illusion machine and the misfits it often mangles along the way. In this tragicomedy of nostalgia and recovery, Bender prevails.

"I loved this book." - Steve Martin