Nikita Kruschev famously wanted to visit Disneyland — and was denied the chance by then LA Police Chief William H. Parker, who decided he could not ensure Khrushchev's personal safety. "If you persist in this, there will be no talk of disarmament," Khrushchev warned Mayor Norris Poulson. There was no visit to Disneyland. The power of the mouse was greater than the power of the bomb.

The city of Los Angeles looms large in our literary history, especially for the mystery genre. It should not come as a surprise, then, that actual history offers mysteries and intrigue to equal or excel those written by giants of American literature. What does come as a surprise is that it took so long to bring them effectively to the printed page, in John Buntin's 'L. A. Noir' (Three Rivers Press / Crown Publishing / Random House ; April 6, 2010 ; $16).

LA is not a real city, many contend, and they have a point. To those who live in New York, or London, LA can seem like a bunch of suburbs butting up against one another with no real heart of the city, no real soul of the city. That may indeed be the case now; but perhaps both were bought and sold sometime back in the 1950's. Readers who want to watch that happen, as told in a classic story of conflict, need look no father than John Buntin's 'L. A. Noir.'

The problem with Los Angeles as a city extends to the stories about that city. LA is diffuse. It's literally all over the map, and it's not easy to wrap it up, put a pin in it and say, "Here — this is LA," or "Here — this is the L. A. story."

But John Buntin has tackled and succeeded at that task in a non-fictional format that reads like a cracking good gritty noir novel while telling a truth that will sometimes seem more incredible than one could imagine in the realm of fiction. Khrushchev in Disneyland is only a small detour in Buntin's complex but compelling story.

Buntin shapes his tale of Dragnet-era LA around two men; Mickey Cohen, who started his career as an enforcer for Bugsy Siegel, but ended up running crime in LA, and William H. Parker, who discovered the underworld that ran LA in the 1920's and vowed to create an independent police force that would never be beholden to politicians and their patrons.

Buntin managed to get his hands on lots of raw material from which to shape a story we've not seen before; LAPD files of the 50's and 60's and unpublished work by Ben Hecht, for example. But it's not just the new material that makes this book fascinating, it's the verve and skill with which it is written and organized.

Buntin manages to find the connective tissue that is not just his story, but the city of Los Angeles itself. He sees through the diffuse, dispersed panorama to the brutal, beating heart and what grips it so firmly — what draws people to the city and the city itself together. Suffice it to say that chances are after reading this book, you'll mind your manners when driving in Los Angeles.

Buntin also knows how to find the plots in history, how to annotate and when to discard, so that reading 'L. A. Noir,' you'll feel like it's a novel, not a recitation of, as Joe Friday would say, "The facts, Ma'am, just the facts." These are the facts, but there is an art at work here as well. The art of telling a story, the art that holds LA in a grip so tight to this very day.

We turn on the light and open the book. It is time to read, to become who we are.

Jorge Luis Borges is known primarily for his ficciones. But the new series collecting his poetry, edited by Suzanne Jill Levine may just change that perception. It is after all, based on our own blindness. Borges first found himself in his poetry. These new collections and translations offer readers a similar opportunity. Earlier this week, I looked at 'The Sonnets.'

That sterling collection is not all that Penguin has up their sleeve. I can't imagine anyone who enjoys Borges' ficciones would not find the same sort of dark thrills in 'Poems of the Night' (Penguin Classics / Penguin ; March 30, 2010 ; $17), edited, introduced and with notes by Efrain Kristal. These are the poems he wrote that reflect (oh, the mirrors never go away) his interest and investment in the darkness that would eventually overtake him.

'Poems of the Night' spans Borges' career, and includes a number of poems not published in English. Some of my readers may know that I enjoy — not suffer! — insomnia as a genetic inheritance. For reasons unclear to me, I require about five hours of sleep per day and pretty much always have, though the effect has increased as I have aged. So the appeal of a poem titled "Insomnia," one of the first that Borges published is clear; but I think it will have a great appeal to any reader who trends towards dark fiction:

The universe of this night
Is as vast as oblivion, as precise as fever.

....

Flooded lots, slums huddled like dogs, puddles of fetid silver;
I am the hateful watchman of these unmoving placements.

...

Rough clouds the color of wine lees will stain the sky;
And dawn will come to my tightly closed eyes.

Kristal's introduction and notes set the scene well for this collection, evoking Borges' interest in Schopenhauer and Borges' recurring nightmares; not surprisingly, dreams of mirrors and labyrinths. This collection offers a glimpse into the Borges' own poetic vision of the darkness; Kristal quotes Borges: "I have two nightmares that often become confused with each other. I have a nightmare of the labyrinth. ... My other nightmare is that of a mirror. The two are not distinct, as it takes only two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth." And thusly are you launched into the night.

The book is divided into three sections; "The Poet Dreams," which features work from 1922 to 1957; "The Gift of Blindness," from 1958 to 1977; and "Waiting for the Night," which features work from 1978 to 1985. An Appendix features versions of older poems edited by Borges, who was not averse to disavowing his older work. As with 'The Sonnets,' 'Poems of the Night' prints each poem first in Spanish, on the left page, and then in English on the right page. There's an index and list of sources, the sort of thing that Borges might have rendered in one of his ficciones.

Borges was, first and foremost, a bookworm; and thus his work has a special appeal to readers, those who enjoy that peculiar pleasure of immersing one's self in language, the mental wheels that whir when you transform the words on the printed page into — "reading," as it were. This is surely why his metafictional work is so appealing. Borges, in his fiction turned the mirrors and labyrinths of his nightmares on the reading process itself. He had such a firm grasp on what happens when we stare at words and think about them that he was able to write words that played with that process.

In a sense, he did this first and best in his poetry. As wonderful as his ficciones are, his poetry offers readers a more personal and immediate sense of the reading experience. Here you will find the undermind upturned and brought from the night into the light. Here you will find Signos, Signs, translated by Stephen Kessler:

Signs

for Susana Bombal

Around 1915, in Geneva, I saw on the terrace
of a museum a tall bell with Chinese characters.
In 1976, I write these lines:
Undeciphered and alone, I know
in the vague night I can be a bronze
prayer or a saying in which is encoded
the flavor of a life or of an evening
or Chuang Tzu's dream, which you know already
or an insignificant date or a parable
or a great emperor, now a few syllables
or the universe or your secret name
or that enigma you investigated in vain
for so long a time though all your days.
I can be anything. Leave me in the dark.