BOOKPACKING LOS ANGELES

USC student Bookpackers explore Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the inspiration for the Sternwood Mansion in ‘The Big Sleep’

This class offers students a unique opportunity to dive deep into USC’s vibrant and extraordinary home city. It’s an immersive class - meaning that we travel beyond the classroom. Every Saturday for 10 weeks, we meet for a seminar in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, we head out and ‘bookpack’ a different facet of the city.

Over the semester, we read a variety of classic and contemporary L.A. novels - from Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion - and we exploring these fictional worlds both conceptually, and on the ground. We walk the same streets as the characters in the stories, we dig into context and history - and we reflect on the intersection between literary landscapes, and the contemporary culture of L.A..

Download the 2026 Syllabus here. Apply through open enrollment, Fall 2025.

Andrew will be holding two informational sessions on Zoom, describing his various immersive classes at USC. Join us at 10am on Friday, October 3rd (link here), or at 10am on Friday, November 14th (link here).

Student testimonial

Diana Carpio, USC Class of 2025: “Bookpacking is the perfect opportunity to experience various Los Angeles neighborhoods and subcultures. This course is a fun and interactive way to learn more about the city, especially if you are not a local. The class format allows for schedule flexibility, which was especially helpful as a student active in various clubs, a job, and an internship. As an interdisciplinary learner, this class is one of the best I have taken! I also cannot recommend Professor Chater enough; he is very well-versed in different media types, and he challenges you to interact with Los Angeles in a unique way. Bookpacking has given me confidence and a fun format in which I now use to navigate other cities across the U.S. and around the world!”

what we read where…

Numbered Lozenges LA

The Day of the Locust

Filled with biting humor and insight, Nathanael West’s savage satire of Hollywood wannabes builds to an angry and apocalyptic climax. It’s the ultimate L.A. novel.

The Big Sleep

It’s always raining in Chandler’s L.A., a moody counterpoint to the cheap glamour and surface glitz of the city. This is the first Philip Marlowe mystery - a masterpiece of hardboiled fiction.

Lithium for Medea

Kate Braverman’s boho grunge classic is set in Venice, CA, in the latter days of the counterculture. The novel paints a dystopian portrait of Los Angeles as a place of dysfunction, addiction and loss.

The Barbarian Nurseries

Héctor Tobar’s story of worlds in collision follows a Latina maid in a quixotic journey from the O.C. to Eastside L.A.; it offers an unflinching portrait of the racial fault lines within our city.

Southland

Set in locations across the city from Crenshaw to Little Tokyo, Nina Revoyr’s brilliant novel tells a multi-generational story that weaves together African-American and Japanese-American L.A.

If He Hollers Let Him Go

Chester Himes’ WW2 classic is set in Southside L.A. and in the shipyards of Long Beach. It’s a coruscating exposé of the Black experience, as relevant today as ever.

The Tortilla Curtain

Two couples in Topanga Canyon - one White, one Mexican - move from misunderstanding to overt conflict. T.C. Boyle’s brilliant mid-90s novel illustrates L.A.’s racial and environmental fragility.

Featured STUDENT BLOGS

Featured

Tobar's Twofer

Daniela Magaña traces the trajectories of two characters in two countries across two time periods in Héctor Tobar’s ‘The Tattooed Soldier’.

Piercing the Dream

Tina Per-Akopyan tests the limits of the L.A. Dream as she follows in the footsteps of James M. Cain’s eponymous heroine.

West's Weird Hollywood

Tinna Flores searches for the art behind the artifice in Nathanael West’s classic LA novel, ‘The Day of the Locust’.

Sins of the City

Rachel Cope reexamines the mythos of L.A. through Nina Revoyr’s ‘Southland’.

Isherwood in Isolation

‘A Single Man’ is the perfect novel for Lockdown L.A. - by Annie Nguyen

Ellis on Ellis

Claudia Ellis (no relation) stalks the Los Angeles of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘Less Than Zero’…

The Dead Still Center

In isolation in a time of Coronovirus, Rachel Cope revisits Didion’s Los Angeles - the ‘dead still center of the world’.

Canal Vision

Venice, CA is the setting for Kate Braverman’s grunge classic ‘Lithium for Medea’

Going Postal

Bookpacking Bukowski in the city he called home