ELADATL : a history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines

Author

Sesshu Foster

Call Number

• FICTION FOST (CEN)

Publication Information

San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, [2020]

Physical Description

317 pages : illustrations, map ; 22 cm

Summary

"In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles - some as large as one thousand feet long - was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel in the pre-apocalyptic Southwest, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing triumph and terrifying disaster. Written and presented as an 'actual history of a fictional company,' this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum"--