A Fragmentary History of California

In the wake of his mother’s death in 2014, Ashton Politanoff began consulting the digital archive at the public library of Redondo Beach, Calif., the coastal city in southern Los Angeles where she’d lived. (Politanoff, a professor, still resides there.) The resultant findings, gleaned from local newspapers—photographs, advertisements, instances of violence, recipes, industrial disasters, and other ephemera—comprise Politanoff’s debut, You’ll Like It Here, a sort of nonfiction collage that locates the seeds of contemporary catastrophe deep within a surreal regional history.