Writing in Megacities

By Mark Haskell SmithJune 5, 2015

Writing in Megacities


Recently Saad Z. Hossain arrived in LA to launch his debut novel, Escape from Baghdad!. A day before the release party he hopped into a van with LA writer Mark Haskell Smith and quickly explained that he wrote most of his book while sitting in the back of cars in the brutal traffic of his native Dhaka, Bangladesh. In this video, Hossain and Smith look to find out which city, LA or Dhaka, is the biggest hot mess, and therefore (at least to them, both writers) the better place to write.

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Mark Haskell Smith is an LA-based author, whose latest novel is Naked at Lunch.

LARB Contributor

Mark Haskell Smith is the author of Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup, BakedRaw: A Love Story, Blown, and other books. His latest is Rude Talk in Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer’s Journey through Greece (Unnamed, 2021). He is an associate professor in the MFA program for Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert Graduate Center.

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