Everything Now

A Los Angeles Times bestseller. Winner of the California Book Award. Named one of the “Best California Books” by The New York Times. An exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis – not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state.

Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny – this is the city-state of Los Angeles.

"Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sharp, convincing work of acute observation. It is as clearheaded and nuanced as it is timely."
—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

“To write the definitive book about Los Angeles would be impossible. In Everything Now, the novelist Rosecrans Baldwin doesn’t try. And in not trying, he may have written the perfect book about Los Angeles.”
—Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

“Nailed it.“
—David Kipen, The Los Angeles Times

“[Baldwin] manages to define, and, perhaps, redefine, the most undefinable of cities with a fresh and sometimes startling inquisitiveness. Ambitious in a way that seems to mirror L.A.’s sprawl, the story is told through a series of vignettes, combining deft on-the-ground reporting, hazy personal memories, and snippets of overheard conversations that read, appropriately, like film scripts… Like [Mike] Davis, Baldwin peels back the faded myths of stereotypes and boosterism in his effort to source the origins of L.A.’s power.”
—Alissa Walker, Vulture

“Baldwin offers an amalgam of voices in the form of stories, conversations, and reflections that add up to a spectacular collage portrait of Los Angeles. The result is a daring and innovative excavation of the City of Angels as 'the Great American City-State.'”
―David Ulin, ALTA Magazine

“In this blend of memoir and reportage, a novelist and screenwriter surveys the eighty-eight independent and deeply unequal cities that make up the “nation-state” of Los Angeles… The place that emerges is one of extreme luck, extreme misfortune, and no middle class, and yet, perhaps, not just ‘a jumble of people any more than a song was a string of notes.’”
—The New Yorker Magazine

“It’s precisely Los Angeles’s fundamental ambiguity, its magnetic swirl of beauty and darkness, that makes books like Baldwin’s worth writing, and reading.”
—Casey Schwartz, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“So how does the author wrap his arms around this complex city-state? By delivering poignant miniatures of individuals who make it their business to subvert L.A.'s stasis and apathy… An elegant and unflinching observer, Mr. Baldwin digs up an invisible city under layers of pop-culture mythologizing and media cliches.”
—Marc Weingarten, The Wall Street Journal

“[Baldwin] burrowed in and paid careful attention to the specific frequencies and unique atmospheres that make the place so singular. The result of that enthusiastic and thoughtful study is a genre-bending work of reportage and memoir that’s been lauded as one of the best and most inventive books of the summer. It’s a book that delights in the mysteries of the place.”
—Geoff Gagnon, GQ Magazine

"Everything Now is the rare work that understands L.A. for its Sphinx-like inscrutability and complex history…. This is the meticulously reported and three-dimensional contemporary history that the city needs."
―Jeff Weiss, The LAnd Magazine

“Baldwin has written the best book on [Los Angeles] since City of Quartz… If you’re not already under the odd spell that L.A. so often casts on even people who’ve never visited it, you’ll feel the light brushing of that spell while reading these pages; if you find the whole idea of Los Angeles vaguely, indefinably revolting, Baldwin’s anecdotes will make you seethe delectably with vicarious disapproval; and if you are indeed already bewitched by LA, you now have a new piece of required reading.”
―Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

"Los Angeles invites extreme forms of correspondence, love letters and hate mail, and Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now is a lush amalgam of both. In beautiful and concise prose, he maps a sun-drenched geography that we love to hate and hate to love. With this book, Baldwin cements his status as one of California’s finest literary cartographers."
―Myriam Gurba, author of Mean

“Despite reckoning with a litany of contemporary apocalypses, it remains a book levied with humor, including an inventive appropriation of Charles Bukowski’s character Henry Chinaski, an exposé of the lampoonable greed of investment trusts that view human suffering as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ‘buy low,’ and a hilarious depiction of a screenwriting team’s meeting with Hollywood producers gone awry.“
—Sean Hooks, Full Stop Magazine

"With a novelist's eye and a searching curiosity, Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sprawling work that explores a place and its people, as well as culture, history, geography and ecology. A feat of imagination that fed my mind, heart and soul."
―Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"A witty and imaginative survey of contemporary L.A…. This multifaceted, openhearted account reveals L.A. as a 'shifting mosaic of human potential' unlike any other place in the world."
—Publishers Weekly

"All the research, all the thinking and wandering and interviewing that Baldwin did to get head and heart, arms and eyes around greater Los Angeles sits barely beyond the sightlines of the beautiful storytelling, the unpacking of myth and memory, the narrative wrestling match with a place that has crushed so many other would-be interpreters. Rosecrans Baldwin tackles a city-state’s sprawling past and present across great chunks of chronology and culture, and does it with grace and imagination. This book is a revelation.”
―William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

"Full of surprising facts and anecdotes, this is a compelling, thoroughly researched, and lovingly crafted chronicle of how Los Angeles came to be."
—Booklist

“With Everything Now, Rosecrans Baldwin maps the superstates of Los Angeles, capturing an immense urban world in all its shifts. Against backdrops of floods and wildfires, loneliness and delight, Baldwin has constructed his own brilliant scenography, a book as lively as the city it describes.”
―Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City

“Conceiving of Los Angeles as a city-state—a sort of world unto itself—Baldwin launches an investigation of its sometimes-surreal world of natural beauty (punctuated by natural disasters)… The result is a collagistic portrait of one of the most distinct cultural epicenters of the US.”
—Lit Hub

“I was born in Los Angeles and intend to die here―there’s no place in the world I love more. I'm also constantly furious about the many ways it falls short of its promise. Rosecrans Baldwin has taken on the unwieldy task of portraying this unique, enormous city in all its overlapping, contradictory layers, and incredibly, he succeeds.”
―Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay

“As an accomplished essayist and writer of fiction, Baldwin’s outsider status gives him a perfect vantage point to challenge, embrace or confront what it means to live in LA in the 21st century.”
—Jonathan Bell, Wallpaper* Magazine

“In brisk and graceful style Rosecrans Baldwin has produced a new and necessary guidebook for contemporary Los Angeles, one that captures the elusive and bewildering qualities of the beautiful sprawling nightmare so many of us call home. Everything Now should be handed out to everyone who gets off a plane at LAX.”
―Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49