The King of Lighting Fixtures
Daniel Olivas

Los Angeles and its residents serve as the muse for Daniel Olivas’ 30 excellently crafted tales of love, lust, anxiety and everything in between. The very first story, Good Things Happen at Tina’s Cafe, sets the tone as fast-paced and not afraid of big jumps in plot. Felix is born with an extra finger and his uncle tries a home remedy. Felix then grows up, dates an owner of a coffee shop, and his hand is normal.

Olivas’ stories reflect the diversity of Los Angeles beautifully and he writes across gender convincingly. Many of these stories are hard-hitting, super fast pieces of flash fiction that, like a shooting star, catch the eye before zipping out of view. Mateo’s Walk is a nostalgic walk through downtown L.A.. Orange Line offers insight into the paranoia that often accompanies discrimination: a Jewish Mexican begins to hallucinate perpetrators.

Olivas also uses the author-as-protagonist to critique the American publishing establishment. In Imprints, an editor makes a not funny joke about “multicultural fiction” to an agent at a lunch meeting, and the agent can only stay silent. Bar 107 shows an aging fiction scribe struggling to cobble together a living despite illustrious bylines.

The King of Lighting Fixtures is a riotous, quick paced look at L.A. life.

Daniel Olivas is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning The Book of Want. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and countless others.

The King of Lighting Fixtures is published by University of Arizona Press. Click here to purchase.

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Reviewed by
Elliott Turner​
​1/27/2018

Elliott Turner is the author of The Night of the Virgin, one of "the top ten fiction books of 2017" according to TheLatinoAuthor.com. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Atticus Reviews, VICE, Fusion, SplitLip Mag, and Transect Magazine.

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