Weekly gives its Best

The LA Weekly that comes out today is all Best of L.A. features -- nothing else. There's the usual roundup of best burger, best shopping and best place to pay someone to teach you about giving blow jobs. Plus the Best L.A. Novel, A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood; Best Public Space, the L.A. Central Library; and Best Lost Literary Classic, Flutter of an Eyelid by Myron Brinig. David L. Ulin also recommends:

Best Literary Startup: First Cut Books

As a bookstore, especially an online bookstore, First Cut doesn’t offer many titles, but what it has ranges from the poetry of Pablo Neruda to Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar. Works are on the roster because they mean something to owner Lucia Silva. Yet if that makes for an idiosyncratic standard, it’s one we like. The same can be said of First Cut’s initial foray into publishing — a literary journal called Filthy, devoted entirely to the art of baseball pitching. If there’s a knock on First Cut, it’s that it exists too much in the shadow of McSweeney’s, a connection Silva encourages with homages and links. Still, in a publishing culture as homogeneous as this one, McSweeney’s isn’t a bad model to aspire to. And by flying in the face of conventional wisdom, First Cut already knows how to stand on its own. www.firstbooks.com