Jessica Ferri presents BURIED HOLLYWOODLAND with Sarah Rose Etter

Sunny's Bookshop - Located inside our floral shop Shades of Petals (Tarzana, CA)

Join us to celebrate the release of Jessica Ferri's BURIED HOLLYWOODLAND: The Cemeteries of Los Angeles! Jessica will be in conversation with Sarah Rose Etter for this special night of reading, signing, and Q&A.

ABOUT BURIED HOLLYWOODLAND

Los Angeles is home to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood; it's an "industry" town through and through. But the movie business isn't its only industry. The City of Angels is also home to the most influential American cemetery: Forest Lawn, "the Disneyland of Death.” In a culture that stigmatizes grief and loss, Marilyn Monroe’s crypt is one of the most visited tourist sites in the country. The cemeteries of Los Angeles offer Americans a vector to access their morbid curiosities through the cult of celebrity death. Los Angeles is a fairyland, a liminal space, not completely real. Within its confines, the silver screen can be blinding.

In addition to the spectacle of celebrity tragedy, the history of LA’s cemeteries reveals a diverse community of immigrants and transplants desperate for the American dream, though you might not know it, depending on whose version of that dream you’re starring in. Both Forest Lawn and Hollywood Forever Cemetery were built on movie set backlots. There's no business like show business, and the cemeteries of Los Angeles have the Hollywood version of America's history down.

ABOUT JESSICA FERRI

Jessica Ferri is a writer and photographer based in Northern California. She is the author of Silent Cities New York, Silent Cities San Francisco, Buried Hollywoodland: The Cemeteries of Los Angeles, and Buried SF Bay Area: The Fallen Star. She is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post and the owner of the feminist bookshop Womb House Books.

ABOUT SARAH ROSE ETTER

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of RIPE (Scribner), and The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio), winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction collection, Tongue Party, was selected by Deb Olin Unferth to be published as the winner of the 2011 Caketrain Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, TIME, BOMB, The Cut, VICE, and more. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. In 2017, she was the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Bordeaux, France, where she presented on surrealist writing as a mode of feminism. She earned her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Host or Publisher Sunny's Bookshop