A Guadalajara reunion in Boyle Heights

Those of us who didn't take part in the celebration of Los Angeles literary goodness at last year's Guadalajara book fair have a new reason to be envious. A new book, edited by Veronique de Turenne and J. Michael Walker, celebrates the scene all over again. At a launch party Sunday in Boyle Heights, Guadalajaritos such as those two, Jonathan Gold, Laurie Ochoa, Jenny Price, Sam Hall Kaplan, Michael Jaime Becerra and Gary Phillips swapped Mexico stories and drank sangria. The location was Libros Schmibros, the community lending library and book store opened at 1st Street and Cummings by David Kipen, the former book critic and Director of Literature/National Reading Initiatives at the National Endowment for the Arts. The book is "Waiting for Foreign: L.A. Writers on (and in) Guadalajara" and includes original illustrations by Walker and submissions by many of those authors and others such as Ruben Martinez, Dagoberto Gilb, Luis J. Rodriguez, Susan Patron, David Ulin and Geoff Nicholson. (Order the book.)

Photo: Billy Vasquez