Sporting Guide

A brilliantly imaginative, illustrated recreation of an 1890s Los Angeles pocket guide, or "Sporting Guide," to the brothels of the day.

Before there was the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late nineteenth century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune.

This era of her native city has always fascinated author, fashion icon, and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn. In a series of beautiful, haunting interlinked stories she recreates the Los Angeles of the 1890s through stories of its pimps, politicians, prostitutes-male and females-businessmen, madams and johns. She takes readers inside the bordellos and velvet curtained rooms where sex entices but power and money rule. Based on her original research in the libraries and archives of LA, these fictional stories center around real historical characters-like the famous owner of LA's grandest brothel, Pearl Morton (whose tombstone Goldwyn discovered). Interspersed in those stories, Goldwyn writes about the historical realities of the time, from fashion to opium drug addiction to sexual practices and birth control.

Sporting Guide evokes a lost world of those on the margins of LA, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and she gives a poignant voice to people and stories lost to time.

About the Author

Liz Goldwyn is a writer, filmmaker, and artist living and working in Los Angeles. She is the writer and director of the documentary Pretty Things (HBO, 2005) based on her non-fiction book Pretty Things: the Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens, (HarperCollins 2006 Hardcover, 2010 Paperback). Goldwyn's short films include Underwater Ballet (2008), LA at Night (2009), The Painted Lady (2012) and Dear Diary (2013).

Goldwyn was New York Editor of French Vogue from 2001 to 2002 and has contributed to publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Financial Times, British Vogue and C Magazine. In September 2014 she became the first guest editor of Town & Country in its' 168-year history.

She has been commissioned as an artist and designer by M.A.C Cosmetics, Van Cleef & Arpels, Altamont Apparel, and Le Bon Marché and has created jewelry for feature films including Running With Scissors (2006).