Tom Dibblee is Trop’s editor. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and his nonfiction has appeared in Pacific Standard, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Point. He lives in Los Angeles.
The Weather
On October 20, 2012, a frantic downtown Los Angeles nightspot patron made a frantic 911 call, claiming that four verbose and still-relatively-young people who were way overdressed, dressed as if they were going a distant cousin’s…
The Weather
For this first installment of Team Writing, Emma Kemp sent Tom Dibblee a short story she was working on about a nameless couple wandering the hills. She said it was missing something. Tom suggested she add…
The Weather
To start Nightmares of Hell at the beginning, click here. … Author’s Note—What’s up, guys. First of all I just want to thank you all for all the love you gave me for the first chapter of my…
The Weather
Author’s Note—What’s up, guys. First of all I just want to say I thank you all for reading my novel, and I hope you all like it. And to all the haters out there, like Kevin…
The Weather
This is the second in a series of excerpts from Tom’s Bad Man Memoir. The first is available here. What percentage was I born? I don’t know. But I say I’m about seventy-five percent bad man.…
The Weather
An Excerpt from My Bad Man Memoir Bad behavior is one of those things that I know the best. It all started at a young age. I was growing up and I lived in a house…
Books
Not too long ago, here in Los Angeles, I was walking down the street to get a doner kebab at a place called Spitz. Their doner kebabs are criminally good, and I was almost there when…
The Weather
It’s Sunday morning and I just got back from Intelligentsia coffee in Silver Lake. I’d spent the night at a friend’s in Echo Park and I stopped on my way back to East Hollywood. I parked…
The Weather
Jonathan Franzen writes novels of the world. David Foster Wallace, novels of the self. And in this, the fourth and final installment of Roger Sollenberger’s interview with Club Monaco Man Tom Dibblee, Roger and Tom discover…
The Weather
Pants, store, friend, self: yes, all men experience self-discovery. But few are lucky enough to do so in pants, and fewer still are lucky enough to do so in exactly the right pair of pants—a pair…
The Weather
Last week, in the first installment of Trop Weather Editor Roger Sollenberger’s interview with Club Monaco Man Tom Dibblee, Roger and Tom discussed: pants, fit, weight fluctuation, belt indentation, bodily health, sexual function, shades of khaki,…
Interviews
Antoine Wilson has just released his second novel, Panorama City, about a small-town guy with village idiot levels of good faith who spends forty days and forty nights in the San Fernando Valley, just north of…
The Weather
Not too long ago, on a beach in Rhode Island, Tom Dibblee told a beautiful woman that he was a Club Monaco Man. They were talking about pants; the statement arose from a legitimate context; it…
Letters to Jake
Hey Jake Jake, it seems the barista and I fell into a ditch. We were having an impossible time getting to Nevada. I was having an easy time of writing to you on into infinity about…
Letters to Jake
Hey Jake The barista and I had faraway looks in our eyes. We stood on the top of the hill and lavished them on the landscape before us—the poppy preserve without poppies in Lancaster, CA, barely…
The Weather
The other day I was rowing a boat with my friend and fellow Tropner Jill Riddell. She had rowed us down a lake to meet her children and husband at a picnic spot. Some people swam…
The Weather
The earth’s shaken twice in the last twenty-four hours. The first time I was on my couch and it took me a second to know what was happening. The second time I was on my couch…