The Last We Fake
An LA novel-in-stories each season, along with selected short fiction from exceptional authors, both new and established, whose works take place at the shifting borders of the American Dream. Each season, the podcast debuts an original novel in serialized episodes. Separately, the episodes stand alone, but together they comprise a novel-length journey, with a cast of recurring characters.
The Last We Fake
Season 2 Trailer
Season 2's original novel, titled SUNLAND, by screenwriter, journalist and novelist Charlie Haas, unfolds the brief desert flowering of a group of German artists, musicians, and free spirits who come to Southern California, “the America of America,” in 1914 to start the world over. They’re fleeing cops, city life, sexual norms, the oncoming world war, and the Internet of their time--the telegraph, telephone, and movies--in favor of naked farming, altruism, and wild new music. The main characters, a family of four who abandon Berlin in hope of a saner life—middling violinist-dreamer Anna, factory worker Gerhard, prototypical flowerchild Lilli, and budding tech futurist Benji—branch out from the fields of San Bernardino to the real estate tracts of burgeoning L.A., at once wrestling with and setting in motion the longings and questions that have beguiled and bedeviled every American generation since.
CREDITS:
Music for the trailer is "Lullaby of Sunland," composed and performed by Ben Rifkin.
Charlie Haas’s screenwriting credits include Over the Edge, Tex, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, New West, The Threepenny Review, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, along with many other journals. Haas’s previous novel, The Enthusiast, was published by HarperPerennial in 2009. Follow his Twitter feed at: @Charlie_Haas.
Podcast art by Ryan Longnecker.
Sound production by Ben Rifkin.
