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Topic Archive: Books and authors
Another good bookstore is folding up its tent — and the news drew multiple, audible protests here in the house when I read it out loud. "After 20 years selling...
Posted March 18, 2009 07:19 PM
Author John Shannon says he smelled something burning while driving home today. Under the hood of his car he found this bird's nest smoldering atop the engine. His ride had...
Posted March 10, 2009 10:10 PM
Mark Arax, the former Los Angeles Times reporter based in Fresno, is joining the staff of the state's Senate Select Committee on Air Quality, a new committee headed by Sen....
Posted March 9, 2009 09:58 PM
Rick Wartzman, the former editor of the LAT's own West magazine, is a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book prize in the history category for "Obscene in the Extreme:...
Posted March 2, 2009 12:52 PM
The New Yorker that hits the streets today has an excerpt from "The Pale King," the unfinished novel that David Foster Wallace was working on when he hanged himself at...
Posted March 2, 2009 09:34 AM
The gay-oriented West Hollywood store announced this week that it's closing soon after nearly thirty years, citing in part the loss of foot traffic from all the construction work to...
Posted February 26, 2009 09:48 AM
John Updike released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, for ''Rabbit Is Rich'' and ''Rabbit at Rest,'' two National...
Posted January 27, 2009 11:04 AM
Former Los Angeles Times editor Jim O'Shea, who lost the top job after clashing with then-publisher David Hiller, will study conflicts between newspaper editors and owners as a spring fellow...
Posted January 26, 2009 12:32 PM
Ayres, the Los Angeles correspondent for The Times of London, previously wrote "War Reporting for Cowards." From the flap for "Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale," his newest: All Chris...
Posted January 23, 2009 12:54 AM
Jennifer Baszile, a professor of history at Yale, has written a memoir called "The Black Girl Next Door" that doesn't reflect kindly on her upbringing as an African American girl...
Posted January 11, 2009 11:48 PM
Echo Park author Charlie Huston, who blogs at Pulpnoir.com, gets a helpful Janet Maslin review in today's New York Times for his latest book, "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All...
Posted January 4, 2009 05:06 PM
Goldman died today of pancreatic cancer, a disease that was just recently diagnosed. He leaves two teenage sons. As I posted earlier today, Goldman and staffers at the Sunset Strip...
Posted January 3, 2009 09:27 PM
Staffers and friends of Sunset Strip fixture Book Soup are contacting potential buyers due to a serious illness afflicting founder Glenn Goldman. Judging by emails circulating in L.A. book circles,...
Posted January 3, 2009 01:10 PM
Forrest J Ackerman, archivist Tina Allen, artist Arthur C. Clarke, author Philip Conisbee, curator Michael Crichton, author Bo Diddley, rocker Elaine Dundy, author Patricia Faure, art dealer Robert Graham,...
Posted December 30, 2008 06:40 PM
Los Angeles author Howard Rosenberg (the former LAT critic) and his co-author Charles Feldman were booked on KRON TV in San Francisco on Jan. 3 to talk about their new...
Posted December 29, 2008 05:54 PM
I observed more WTF? head scratching over the L.A. Times' layoff of Calendar writer Scott Timberg this fall than over just about anybody. So no surprise he shows up today...
Posted December 14, 2008 02:13 PM
Village Books struggles to get by in the little shopping district of Pacific Palisades, but things seem especially grim on that street this year. The bookstore has loyal fans, though,...
Posted December 12, 2008 12:53 PM
Here's how AP announces the news: Forrest J Ackerman, the sometime actor, literary agent, magazine editor and full-time bon vivant who discovered author Ray Bradbury and was widely credited with...
Posted December 5, 2008 12:58 PM
Ken Gonzales-Day, a photographer and Scripps College professor, wrote the book "Lynching in the West: 1850-1935." He has traveled California trying to locate the actual trees used by lynch mobs....
Posted December 5, 2008 12:57 AM
Last night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, PEN Center USA gave a lifetime achievement award to multi-faceted writer Larry Gelbart and its First Amendment Award to the Writers Guild. Jesse...
Posted December 4, 2008 08:17 AM
David Willman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 investigation into the FDA's approval of some deadly drugs, is one of the solid reporters to recently leave the former...
Posted December 3, 2008 12:44 PM
Photographer Patrick Ecclesine's new book from Santa Monica Press, "Faces of Sunset Boulevard: a Portrait of Los Angeles," travels the length of the boulevard through portraits of people who live,...
Posted November 28, 2008 10:15 PM
Maps or guides to mentioned locales seem to be a more popular marketing wrinkle for books set in Los Angeles. At least those from Hachette: remember the dining guide to...
Posted November 28, 2008 08:37 PM
From around the local media: Sam Rubin talked to SAG president Alan Rosenberg on the KTLA Morning News. "We've made monumental moves in their direction...and they have not moved one...
Posted November 24, 2008 03:08 PM
Los Angeles' participation in the national Big Read program has been to encourage reading and discussion of "The Maltese Falcon," the classic Dashiell Hammett noir novel from 1930 that the...
Posted November 21, 2008 03:38 PM
For a couple of years I've been anticipating the biography of Isaias Hellman, who had a hand in so much early Los Angeles history as the power behind Farmers and...
Posted November 18, 2008 11:21 PM
Los Angeles-born Olympic wrestling champion Henry Cejudo will write his memoir, "The Americano Dream," for Celebra. It's about growing up Mexican American in South Los Angeles, being moved to New...
Posted November 12, 2008 10:38 AM
The author and creator of "ER" died yesterday in Los Angeles "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," his website announced. His books included "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost...
Posted November 5, 2008 11:29 AM
The Chicago Tribune summarizes Studs Terkel as "author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol." He died today at home there, with his book scheduled for release next month, "P.S. Further Thoughts From...
Posted October 31, 2008 03:22 PM
Deanne Stillman posts at Native Intelligence about Tony Hillerman, her former professor who died yesterday and who provided inspiration for her own writing about the West. I can't remember any...
Posted October 27, 2008 12:24 PM
Tony Hillerman introduced readers to the Navajo culture of the Southwest through his series of mystery novels centered on Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and officer Jim Chee. Hillerman...
Posted October 27, 2008 12:33 AM
Mark Hull, publisher of Red Hen Press, got the word to get out of his Granada Hills home office as the Sesnon Fire bore down. Which books did he choose...
Posted October 14, 2008 03:09 PM
It's not just the Pasadena Symphony. The almost-certainly-a-recession is affecting arts and culture organizations all around. On KCRW's Politics of Culture at 2:30 this afternoon, Ruth Seymour talks with key...
Posted October 14, 2008 12:13 PM
The New York Times' David Carr jets out to the coast and finds that in Hollywood, it's still morning in America. Hollywood comes by its indifference honestly. Certainly, the stock...
Posted October 13, 2008 12:13 AM
Just for kicks, before and after my "Noir of Politics" panel at Sunday's West Hollywood Book Fair I shot some video of other panels and did interviews with author...
Posted October 1, 2008 01:01 AM
"Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles" will be published Thursday by The Overlook Press/Penguin U.S.A. The book, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, looks like it...
Posted September 30, 2008 09:58 AM
Fox 11 crime reporter Chris Blatchford is out with "The Black Hand," which Dominick Dunne calls in a blurb, "A gripping, powerful, chilling inside look at a criminal organization that...
Posted September 27, 2008 01:46 AM
My KCRW spot this afternoon talks about the story possibilities of having the Dodgers and Angels in the playoffs, and about the star power of Manny Ramirez. LA Observed on...
Posted September 26, 2008 04:41 PM
The film in which Robert Downey Jr. portrays LAT columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx plays downtown street musician Nathaniel Ayers, must be getting close. The trailer runs 2:31 on...
Posted September 16, 2008 11:10 AM
KCRW (89.9 FM) will devote this week's "Politics of Culture" to the death and literary legacy of David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last week at home in Claremont. "Bookworm"...
Posted September 15, 2008 04:17 PM
Novelist David Foster Wallace, best known for "Infinite Jest" and other books, hanged himself at home in Claremont, police said in the city east of Los Angeles. He had been...
Posted September 13, 2008 05:48 PM
October 18 will be the final day for the venerable Long Beach book store. Everything is 50% off as of now, with further markdowns to come. Ray Bradbury did what...
Posted September 9, 2008 11:49 PM
I enjoyed reading the story of Tom Dreesen and Tim Reid, who met at a Jaycees meeting outside Chicago in 1968 and struggled to break through as a black-and-white comedy...
Posted September 9, 2008 10:41 PM
Attention ex-journalists looking for something new to do. A bookstore in Big Bear Lake is for sale. "In the heart of Big Bear Village, a four seasons resort community in...
Posted September 5, 2008 01:10 PM
Los Angeles magazine's September issue includes a round-up of the area's best high schools (not on line) and a book review-cum-profile of the city's most visible activist parent of the...
Posted August 27, 2008 05:48 PM
This was the weekend that Sandra Tsing Loh's latest book, "Mother on Fire," got reviewed in the New York Times and her hometown Los Angeles Times. Both reviewers enjoyed the...
Posted August 25, 2008 12:44 AM
Eating L.A.'s Pat Saperstein joined LA Observed author Denise Hamilton on a culinary tour based on locations mentioned in "The Last Embrace," Denise's latest Los Angeles-based mystery. This one, set...
Posted August 16, 2008 11:48 PM
LA Observed author David Rensin was on a book tour-vacation when Hollywood manager and producer Bernie Brillstein ">died, but I for one have been anticipating David's reaction. He helped Brillstein...
Posted August 14, 2008 04:24 PM
Allan Sloan of Fortune Magazine, a persistent skeptic of Tribune dealings, breaks down Sam Zell's latest creative financing scheme for Marketplace: "The company is in, as you know, big trouble....What...
Posted August 11, 2008 10:45 PM
Echo Park author Sarah Miller has an amusing piece in the Times opinion pages Sunday about John Edwards' former extra-marital squeeze, who rented the room Miller had vacated in a...
Posted August 10, 2008 11:35 PM
Bill Boyarsky, LA Observed's occasional politics columnist, is a finalist in nonfiction for the 2008 book award from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It's for "Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh...
Posted August 4, 2008 08:55 PM
Even as Acres of Books' coming demise in Long Beach becomes more certain, Skylight Books in Los Feliz is becoming the rare independent bookstore to grow these days. On Wednesday...
Posted July 29, 2008 07:21 AM
The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" drills down on the closure of newspaper book sections, pegged to the L.A. Times situation. Here's the email blast at Romenesko: This past Sunday, the...
Posted July 28, 2008 03:00 PM
Times book editor David Ulin tells Publishers Weekly that, in the post-Book Review era, the upside is that “editorially and aesthetically, we are going to be producing the same kind...
Posted July 28, 2008 07:58 AM
Yesterday it was the Book Review's former editors pleading to keep a distinct books presence in the Los Angeles Times. Today, Los Angeles author Daniel A. Olivas (Latinos in Lotusland,...
Posted July 22, 2008 10:55 AM
Four past book editors of the Los Angeles Times — Sonja Bolle, Digby Diehl, Jack Miles and Steve Wasserman — released a letter protesting the planned termination of the Sunday...
Posted July 21, 2008 09:20 AM
Jill Leovy is turning her year as the Los Angeles Times' homicide blogger into a book for Spiegel & Grau. "The Homicide Report: Black Men, Murder and America’s Unseen Catastrophe"...
Posted July 15, 2008 11:06 PM
Carolyn Kellogg blogs at Jacket Copy that there is a potential winner in all the handwringing and debate over the magazine cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Islamic militants....
Posted July 15, 2008 02:51 PM
That's how one staffer describes the mood around the Los Angeles Times offices, where editors were believed to be working last night on their final lists of staffers — 150...
Posted July 11, 2008 12:50 AM
Sam Zell's in-house innovator Lee Abrams has memoed again, long and rambling and ungrammatical as usual. Now that the cost-cutting Los Angeles Times is apparently moving towards folding the stand-alone...
Posted July 8, 2008 09:15 AM
Email from proprietor Michael Dawson announces that Los Angeles' oldest bookstore, now located on Larchmont Boulevard, will go to appointment only. Dawson's has sold books in L.A. since 1905 and...
Posted June 26, 2008 05:13 PM
Ray Bradbury spoke last night at the iconic Long Beach bookstore and railed about its threatened closure and the dearth of bookstores in certain areas around Los Angeles. LBReport.com was...
Posted June 26, 2008 07:37 AM
Frank Girardot, city editor at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, also posted his paper's original 1958 coverage of the murder of writer James Ellroy's mother. In the post Girardot describes...
Posted June 24, 2008 11:12 PM
Today is the 50th anniversary of a story hitting the Los Angeles papers that would become iconic in local literature. On June 22, 1958, 10-year-old James Ellroy came home in...
Posted June 23, 2008 07:23 PM
Tom Waldman is the chief of staff to Los Angeles school board member Tamar Galatzan (and he formerly was press secretary to Rep. Howard Berman.) He's also the author of...
Posted June 3, 2008 09:20 AM
The former E! Channel host, Elite model and daughter-in-law to Ed Asner (she's now married to Steven Soderbergh) has a new novel landing tomorrow. "Whacked" is set in Hollywood, of...
Posted June 2, 2008 12:43 AM
At least two Japanese gangsters who received liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center then donated $100,000, the LAT reports. (WitnessLA adds some context to the UCLA transplant stories.) Todd...
Posted June 1, 2008 09:24 PM
Book launch 2.0, the video: LA Observed channel on YouTube NOTES: Marketplace ran a nice piece on Skylight Books expanding, featuring owner Kerry Slattery...BEA party roundup from the New York...
Posted May 30, 2008 04:25 PM
Working through the pile on my desk in advance of this week's BookExpo America at the Downtown Convention Center. Sascha Rothchild's piece on ending her starter marriage ran in the...
Posted May 28, 2008 09:16 AM
A huge chunk of the book world will be here this week for BookExpo America, which opens Thursday at the Convention Center and runs through the weekend. BEA, last here...
Posted May 27, 2008 12:36 AM
Deanne Stillman, author of the forthcoming "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West," posts a Memorial Day paean to Buffalo Bill Cody and one of his...
Posted May 26, 2008 10:17 PM
Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria packed them in at the Central Library's ALOUD series last week and his new book, "The Post-American World," is getting mostly good reviews. His argument that...
Posted May 26, 2008 11:46 AM
Steve Harvey debunked some of author James Frey's so-called quirky facts about Los Angeles in his Only in L.A. column on Saturday. Author Frances Dinkelspiel picks up the cause and...
Posted May 19, 2008 11:54 PM
Actually it's just one book, the new novel set in Los Angeles by fabulist James Frey. But look at how differently it's being read. LAT Book Editor David Ulin holds...
Posted May 12, 2008 10:54 PM
The host of the long-running "Connie Martinson Talks Books" gave nearly 3,000 tapes of her cable show to Claremont Graduate University. "It's a pretty extraordinary gift," said Rick Wartzman, director...
Posted May 7, 2008 09:20 AM
You could say that former Dodger and product of Los Angeles Darryl Strawberry had the book thrown at him so often he should write one. Well, now he is. According...
Posted May 6, 2008 10:23 PM
Mark Sarvas is often biting in his reviews and commentaries at The Elegant Variation, a point that Scott Timberg makes up front in his Q&A with Sarvas in today's LAT...
Posted May 5, 2008 01:20 PM
Nice Q&A by Deanne Stillman over at Native Intelligence with Larry McMurtry, the author and screenwriter who was in town this week to receive the Los Angeles Public Library Award...
Posted May 2, 2008 09:25 AM
Denise Hamilton sits in at The Elegant Variation today and guest-interviews author Nina Revoyr about her new novel, "The Age of Dreaming." Excerpt: "The Age of Dreaming" recounts the story...
Posted April 30, 2008 11:57 AM
My panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ("California: The Great Experiment") was well-attended by an enthusiastic crowd that asked many provocative questions, provocatively answered by Bill Deverell,...
Posted April 29, 2008 03:01 PM
Before the first author was honored at Friday night's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Times critic Kenneth Turan delivered a tribute to Dutton's Brentwood Books, which closes April 30. As...
Posted April 26, 2008 12:41 AM
In her new travel guide "Great Escapes Southern California," Donna Wares describes author D.J. Waldie's ritual for the weekend of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. He takes the bus...
Posted April 25, 2008 02:10 PM
'Tis the season for new Los Angeles-focused releases — and the week for book parties — with the Times Festival of Books on tap this coming weekend. "Latinos in Lotusland:...
Posted April 21, 2008 12:36 AM
This year's L.A. Times Festival of Books is the weekend of April 26-27 at UCLA. I'm moderating a 3 pm Saturday panel called "California: The Great Experiment," with a distinguished...
Posted April 15, 2008 11:19 PM
He still makes appearances and will be talking about "KTLA's News at Ten: Sixty Years with Stan Chambers" tonight at 7:30 pm at the Beverly Hills City Hall. Info...
Posted April 14, 2008 07:24 AM
Unlike in New York, baseball steroid man Jose Canseco drew a muted response at this week's book signing here. Stuffed behind a counter in a dimly lit corner of a...
Posted April 11, 2008 04:24 PM
On the day that Michael Ramirez won a Pulitzer Prize, it's somewhat fitting to run a Robert Scheer item too. He and Ramirez were both dropped from the L.A. Times...
Posted April 7, 2008 11:13 PM
My prediction of this morning was correct, if general. The Washington Post cleaned up with six Pulitzer prizes, for coverage of Walter Reed, Virginia Tech, Dick Cheney and Blackwater among...
Posted April 7, 2008 12:25 PM
The OC Weekly's Nick Schou got a double dose of good news today. Universal is developing a film based on his 2006 book "Kill the Messenger," about the late journalist...
Posted April 3, 2008 09:20 PM
A few hundred fans applauded Dutton's Brentwood Books on Sunday afternoon, filling the courtyard where so many authors have spoken on their L.A. tours. The store closes April 30, and...
Posted March 30, 2008 10:40 PM
Friends, fans and employees of Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore will gather in the courtyard one last time this Sunday at 5 pm. The shelves already look rather sad, but the final...
Posted March 26, 2008 01:05 PM
As a reporter, I liked to write about L.A's infrastructure — freeways, water, refuse. I always thought there was a book in the history of the Los Angeles sewer system,...
Posted March 26, 2008 12:58 PM
Christian Lander, the Culver City-based writer of the hit satire blog Stuff White People Like, has gotten a William Morris agent (Erin Malone) and a book deal out of the...
Posted March 25, 2008 09:25 AM
The English-born writer of science fiction died in Sri Lanka, his home since 1956. NYT, BBC, AP...
Posted March 18, 2008 04:25 PM
Longtime L.A. Times pop critic Robert Hilburn has signed with ModernTimes/Rodale to do a "deeply personal and highly opinionated memoir" of his decades covering the music scene. From the flackage:...
Posted March 18, 2008 11:41 AM
Last weekend's New York Times did a nice spread on J. Michael Walker and his one-of-a-kind Los Angeles book, "All the Saints of the City of the Angels: Seeking the...
Posted March 11, 2008 06:40 PM
Her years in Los Angeles taught Nancy Rommelmann, an ex-New Yorker, that no one is more provincial than New Yorkers. So she isn't surprised that Manhattan's publishing industry and the...
Posted March 6, 2008 12:50 PM
Mark Lacter and I were just on "Airtalk" talking with Larry Mantle about the buyouts at the Times and other local papers. You can hear it in the archives at...
Posted March 5, 2008 12:35 PM
Celeste Fremon is expected to guest on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC at the top of the 2 pm hour, to talk about the fake Margaret B. Jones "memoir" and what...
Posted March 4, 2008 12:29 PM
She's Margaret Seltzer, she went to preppy Campbell Hall, and she never ran drugs for the Bloods in South L.A., she confessed to the New York Times. The publisher of...
Posted March 4, 2008 12:51 AM
Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston wins this year's Robert Kirsch Award. Nominees in the nine categories, announced tonight in New York, include Ron Brownstein, Naomi Klein and Tim Weiner. Winners are...
Posted February 28, 2008 06:06 PM
Charlie Munger, who owns and wants to redevelop the Brentwood block that includes Dutton's Books, promised to pay all of the bookstore's debts — and forgive the rent — in...
Posted February 25, 2008 11:44 PM
Poet T.S. Kerrigan lives in Burbank, so not precisely L.A.. And OK, it was Friday, not today. But some verse of his was the selection of the day at Best...
Posted February 25, 2008 05:33 PM
A lot of sites and media are reacting to the sad news — first posted here at LA Observed early this morning — that Dutton's Books in Brentwood will be...
Posted February 25, 2008 03:11 PM
Jacket Copy, the blog written by the staff of the L.A. Times' books section, today added a new voice: Carolyn Kellogg's. She is the former editor of LAist who left...
Posted February 25, 2008 01:53 PM
The words "speculative sports fiction" caught my eye and made me go: huh? But that's the genre that covers the anthology edited by Tujunga author Karen A. Romanko. She emails...
Posted February 25, 2008 12:44 PM
Dutton's Brentwood Books will close April 30 after a tough year. A clientele like Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton and half the authors in the city isn't enough to keep a...
Posted February 25, 2008 01:57 AM
When LA Observed was just a toddler of a blog, I watched Nancy Rommelmann chronicle her anxiety-filled but hopeful (and ultimately happy) move to Portland in a blog she called...
Posted February 20, 2008 11:15 PM
Slate editor Jacob Weisberg gave a little shout out to LA Observed in his remarks last night at a book party at Arianna Huffington's home. Actually, he noted that I...
Posted February 20, 2008 06:04 PM
L.A. author, humorist and kitschy snapshot collector Charles Phoenix will share his vintage Valentine's Day slides with Martha Stewart on her syndicated TV show on Thursday. I have no idea...
Posted February 12, 2008 11:27 PM
At least two Los Angeles blogs are included in a new book, "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web," edited by the NYT's Sarah Boxer. They are Go Fug Yourself...
Posted February 11, 2008 09:13 AM
Native Intelligence contributor Deanne Stillman has the cover of the new Los Angeles CityBeat with a nice piece on the Mojave Desert portion of L.A. County. Photos by Mark LaMonica...
Posted February 8, 2008 03:59 PM
Much honored Los Angeles sci-fi writer and alternate historian Harry Turtledove writes about time travel in his Crosstime Traffic series. Could he be predicting the future with the sixth book...
Posted February 8, 2008 09:23 AM
Last year's managing editor of the Los Angeles Times (actually he stayed nearly two years) will be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show Thursday. Frantz and his wife, Catherine Collins, will...
Posted February 6, 2008 09:42 PM
Who knew? I'm told, by Los Angeles poet Richard Beban, that this morning's verse about opossums was no lone wolf. He says there is something of a cult of local...
Posted January 30, 2008 04:29 PM
Author Samantha Dunn writes in today's Calendar section, "We should thank our lucky stars Mary McNamara's debut novel, 'Oscar Season,' arrives when it does, because if the writers strike goes...
Posted January 24, 2008 09:16 AM
An LA Observed reader who works at Cal State Long Beach stopped by Wilshire Books in Santa Monica and found the store cleared out. "Quietly closed at the end of...
Posted January 14, 2008 10:31 PM
The authors of that book claiming a slew of ethical breaches by former USC Trojans star Reggie Bush and his family have posted excerpts and documents on a website: TarnishedHeisman.com....
Posted January 14, 2008 03:06 PM
The author and widow of Aldous Huxley has died in Los Angeles, according to family friends. She was 96. She was born in Italy and became a top violinist at...
Posted December 14, 2007 05:11 PM
Publishers Lunch brings word that Maria Shriver has sold Just Who Will You Be, "presenting life lessons and reflections on what's important in her life, inspired by a poem she...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:28 PM
This one is more of a prank than yesterday's scam, also from Shelf Awareness: Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., has another cautionary tale about an...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:25 AM
John Evans, co-owner of Diesel: A Bookstore out in Malibu, told the newsletter Shelf Awareness about a strange come-on at his Oakland store. I guess with everything else they face,...
Posted December 10, 2007 01:42 PM
Remember Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, the journalist who quit the L.A. Times in a huffy outburst and resurfaced as a successful novelist? (And who more recently mourned the death of Cathy Seipp.)...
Posted November 27, 2007 11:56 AM
Katie O'Laughlin of Village Books, one of the city's best and coziest small bookstores, says she's losing the battle against the big boxes and rising rents in her Pacific Palisades...
Posted November 24, 2007 10:25 AM
In addition to his blog here at LA Observed, Bill Boyarsky is a regular columnist for Robert Scheer and Zuade Kaufman at Truthdig. They actually pay him, unlike here, and...
Posted November 19, 2007 10:25 PM
Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter Clancy Sigal turned up in today's letters section in the New York Times Book Review, offering a counter view to the description of mass-market writer...
Posted November 18, 2007 10:04 PM
Judith Regan today sued News Corp for $100 million over her firing last year and charged that a senior executive urged her to mislead federal investigators about her relationship with...
Posted November 13, 2007 05:34 PM
Events are starting up for Bill Boyarsky's major political history from University of California Press, Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics. Unruh, of course, was the...
Posted November 13, 2007 12:26 PM
In a post over at Native Intelligence, Denise Hamilton goes for a sidewalk adventure in the city with Judith Freeman, author of the new book The Long Embrace, Raymond Chandler...
Posted November 5, 2007 08:55 PM
Author Denise Hamilton and Eating L.A. blogger Pat Saperstein did a fun road trip recently, visiting many of the local dining spots patronized by Hamilton's lovelorn newspaper reporter protagonist, Eve...
Posted September 27, 2007 09:09 PM
Andrea Grossman's independent literary series Writers Bloc has become part of the Town Hall Los Angeles organization. Grossman will continue to select the programs, but there will be more promotion...
Posted September 12, 2007 04:55 AM
He did not pay anyone to threaten reporter Anita Busch and pretty much loathes PI Anthony Pellicano, says the actor whose name was prominently mentioned when the feds first began...
Posted August 16, 2007 11:51 PM
Former L.A. Times feature writer-turned-novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez had been a victim of journalist Cathy Seipp's gratuitous mean side, and gave it back to her. But she was sad to learn...
Posted August 14, 2007 08:47 AM
Steve Wasserman and Robert Scheer are together again. The former Los Angeles Times book editor, now managing director of the New York office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish &...
Posted August 9, 2007 10:49 AM
Douglas Anne Munson, author of an L.A. noir trilogy that opened with the admired Dogtown, has champions in Michael Connelly, Carolyn See, John Rechy and Jonathan Kellerman. Also in Denise...
Posted August 5, 2007 11:19 PM
PEN USA has chosen the winners of its 2007 literary awards for writers and journalists in the West. Among the local winners is Cynthia Kadohata, who won in children's literature...
Posted July 31, 2007 02:20 PM
Our post earlier this month on Hollywood tabloidist-turned-author Marlise Kast and her pursuit of blissful contentment inspired Luke Ford to interview her for his blog. Or was it the picture?...
Posted July 31, 2007 12:50 PM
Marlise Kast is a former Hollywood production assistant who began digging up dirt for The Globe at age 21. She now dishes about her three years on the tabloid beat...
Posted July 5, 2007 12:24 PM
A memoir, noted at Publishers Lunch: "Director of strategic alliances for global think tank, TalentSmart, Lac D. Su's THE CRIP WALK, a coming-of-age memoir about his life as a first-generation...
Posted July 5, 2007 08:20 AM
Don't Let the Lipstick Fool You will be "an uplifting memoir profiling the author's personal and professional life," says Publishers Lunch. Dafina bought it for publication next May. Leslie won...
Posted June 27, 2007 08:43 AM
Now Michelle Delgadillo has business tax problems, but abruptly took care of them Friday in advance of a new round of stories. LAT, DN Popular progressive and previously faceless...
Posted June 23, 2007 12:46 PM
The 30-year-old daughter of former VP Al Gore lives near downtown with husband Paul Cusack, writes for "Saturday Night Live" and "Futurama" and has a new novel, Sammy's House, coming...
Posted June 20, 2007 09:10 AM
Business was fine, but the building was sold and co-owner Ben Weinstein got a good offer for what Scott Timberg calls in the Times about $10 million worth of inventory....
Posted June 20, 2007 08:56 AM
Publishers Weekly leads today's Deals with Los Angeles Magazine staff writer Jesse Katz selling The Opposite Field to Crown in a preempt "said to be worth major dollars." Katz will...
Posted June 18, 2007 08:54 AM
Producer and author Tom Teicholz hit on a pretty good way to give his next book a shot at a favorable reception. He devoted his column in the Jewish Journal...
Posted June 14, 2007 03:44 PM
How's this for a tangible book prize? Charles Rappleye, formerly of the LA Weekly, won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, "honoring the most important new book about America's founding...
Posted May 23, 2007 11:54 PM
L.A. bloggers Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and Callie Miller (Counterbalance) were quoted in a weekend LAT story on the rise — to a point — of books blogs as...
Posted May 14, 2007 02:19 PM
Couple of additions to the lineup of LA Observed contributors at this weekend's L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. Veronique de Turenne has been added as moderator of the...
Posted April 28, 2007 12:44 AM
Snakeskin Shamesin, third in the series of Naomi Hirahara's novels set in Southern California that feature Japanese-American gardener Mas Arai, won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America...
Posted April 26, 2007 09:52 PM
Books editor David Ulin is scheduled to discuss the changes in the Times Sunday Book Review, the situation at the paper and this weekend's LAT Festival of Books with host...
Posted April 25, 2007 08:50 AM
The author and journalist was involved in a three-car crash this morning near the Dumbarton Bridge in San Mateo County, according to AP stories out of Menlo Park and San...
Posted April 23, 2007 04:00 PM
Erika Schickel and myself (along with Times columnist Al Martinez) were the guests on KABC 790 AM's show "Spotlight on the Community" this morning talking with hosts Nelkane Benton and...
Posted April 22, 2007 09:56 PM
T. Jefferson Parker's L.A. Outlaws is moving to Dutton as part of a two-book deal, with publication next February. But here's my favorite L.A. angle from Publishers Lunch: Adena Halpern's...
Posted April 18, 2007 08:58 AM
To juice up interest in Ray Bradbury's appearance this Sunday in Santa Clarita, this ad ran in The Signal. Dozens of mystified, angry calls flooded into the paper, the fire...
Posted April 13, 2007 02:26 PM
Kurt Vonnegut died tonight in Manhattan, several weeks after suffering brain injuries in a fall. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, confirmed the news for the Times. Elaine Woo's obituary calls...
Posted April 11, 2007 10:14 PM
President Bush has an evening fundraiser in Brentwood, there are accidents on both sides of the 405 near Wilshire, and the northbound Pasadena is backed up near I-5. Luckily, Bush...
Posted April 4, 2007 05:05 PM
The author and professor of creative writing at Cornell was born in East Los Angeles, graduated from Garfield High and Immaculate Heart College, and worked as a bottler at...
Posted April 2, 2007 08:15 AM
An L.A. Times press release announces several reductions in the value of what the paper give its dwindling readership — oops, I mean "editorial changes designed to meet the evolving...
Posted March 26, 2007 09:20 AM
I'm going to guess that the pressure to fold the Times' Sunday Book Review into a cheaper, thinner Saturday tabloid comes from the Chicagoans in temporary residence on Spring Street....
Posted March 7, 2007 08:25 AM
If Jeffrey Trachtenberg's Wall Street Journal report is accurate, that would mean the Times decided to face the critical music and launch the scaled-back Book Review before the big LAT...
Posted March 6, 2007 07:59 AM
The San Francisco Chronicle has a unique understanding of how readers here might react to the LAT folding its Book Review in with Current. The Chronicle merged its Sunday review...
Posted March 5, 2007 08:09 AM
Essayist William Kittredge will pick up the Robert Kirsch Award on April 27 when the winners in the following Los Angeles Times Book Prize categories will be announced. Finalists were...
Posted March 2, 2007 02:47 PM
Mark Sarvas, L.A.'s most recognized lit-blogger, has a post up at The Elegant Variation that he's been hoping to write for a long time. He sold his first novel, and...
Posted March 1, 2007 03:29 PM
L.A. freelancer Janelle Brown has sold her debut novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything — "about a woman and her two daughters coming together after their lives are dramatically...
Posted February 27, 2007 09:24 PM
Newsroom sources at the Times expect the Sunday Book Review will be folded into a new hybrid opinion section and delivered in Saturday papers. The new section that some staffers...
Posted February 22, 2007 02:24 AM
Results are in for The History Channel’s City of the Future design competition. On-line voters selected Chicago the winner. New York came in second. The Eric Owen Moss design for...
Posted February 8, 2007 09:49 PM
Daniel Olivas, the author of Devil Talk, writes at California Authors.com about trying to make the transition to novelist while also finding time to be a father, husband and full-time...
Posted February 6, 2007 03:22 PM
The New York Times received a partial transcript of O.J. Simpson's never-televised Fox interview with Judith Regan describing how the 1994 murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman might have...
Posted February 4, 2007 12:22 PM
Sidney Sheldon had won a screenwriting Oscar (The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), a Tony ("Redhead") and created TV sitcoms ("I Dream of Jeannie" and "Patty Duke") before beginning to write...
Posted January 30, 2007 11:09 PM
Denise Hamilton writes that Barbara Seranella, who died this week, was the rare mystery author who didn't have to rely on second-hand observations to create gritty, realistic characters and scenes....
Posted January 23, 2007 10:12 PM
Manhattan's 92nd Street Y is hosting a night this week with three L.A. literary types who happen to be ex-New Yorkers. In advance of Thursday's event, artist/writer/standup Beth Lapides answers...
Posted January 23, 2007 01:59 PM
Issue number three of Swink — the "bi-coastal, biannual print magazine dedicated to identifying and promoting literary talent in both established and emerging writers," edited by Leelila Strogov — will...
Posted January 23, 2007 02:34 AM
The best-selling mystery author from Laguna Beach died yesterday in Cleveland while awaiting a liver transplant. She had received two livers in 2005 and spent much time since at USC's...
Posted January 22, 2007 10:56 AM
Will the sad bookstore news never stop? Dutton's Brentwood Books on San Vicente "may soon succumb to its landlord's plans to redevelop the site," the Times' Scott Timberg and Martha...
Posted January 17, 2007 01:31 AM
Another independent bookstore is on the ropes. Tia Chucha's Cafe & Cultural Center in Sylmar lost its lease and has to move. Co-founder Luis J. Rodriguez writes on the website:...
Posted January 10, 2007 09:43 AM
A study at Central Connecticut State University ranks the most literate cities in the U.S. based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and...
Posted January 3, 2007 01:12 PM
Last-chance talks between Dutton's management and the city of Beverly Hills failed to stave off the Dec. 31 closure of the Canon Drive bookstore. The doors did not reopen today...
Posted January 2, 2007 07:57 PM
Judith Regan's upcoming fight for her honor with Rupert Murdoch's empire inspires the NYT's Sharon Waxman to muse on Hollywood court battles of yore: think Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford...
Posted January 2, 2007 04:36 PM
It was a big deal for Beverly Hills in 2004 when Dutton's opened the city's first general bookstore in a decade. Business has not been all it was hoped, however,...
Posted December 20, 2006 02:30 PM
Yeah, the former head of LAPD internal affairs cops to the affair with a sergeant under his command — but only for three years! Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally apologized (sort...
Posted December 19, 2006 05:55 PM
An "offensive" phone call to a HarperCollins attorney on Friday preceded Judith Regan's sudden firing, Sunday's Los Angeles Times says citing two unnamed but "highly placed corporate sources." Regan was...
Posted December 17, 2006 03:32 PM
Judith Regan, publisher of the terminated O.J. Simpson book, was abruptly fired tonight by HarperCollins. The company announced the dismissal, “effective immediately,” in a news release issued about 7 p.m....
Posted December 15, 2006 08:32 PM
On the occasion of the paperback release of his well-received first novel, The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia talks with guest blogger Daniel A. Olivas over at The Elegant Variation....
Posted December 1, 2006 11:39 AM
Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist "known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races," has died at home in Los Angeles, the...
Posted November 27, 2006 06:21 PM
John Shannon's literary private detective Jack Liffey has lived in Redondo Beach and (lovely) Mar Vista and I think even wandered up Highway 395 to the Eastern Sierra. But he's...
Posted November 22, 2006 12:15 PM
Caitlin Flanagan told the New York Observer a year ago that "You’d never, never, never leave The New Yorker," but now she has. Flanagan has left the magazine's staff to...
Posted November 22, 2006 09:22 AM
Rupert Murdoch pulls the plug on the Judith Regan book and the Fox TV special. "We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman...
Posted November 20, 2006 12:59 PM
Wendy Werris worked at some of the most cherished and long-vanished Los Angeles bookstores, starting at Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, where Susan Sontag developed her love for books on...
Posted November 7, 2006 01:55 AM
Jerry Blaz says he'll soon close his BOOKie Joint on Reseda Boulevard. His post at ValleyNews.com (via The Valley Observed) talks about the book biz and some of the clientele...
Posted October 24, 2006 09:34 AM
Authors, publishers and good bookstore people — revelers all — partied tonight in the Gold Room at the Biltmore downtown for the 2006 Southern California Booksellers Association awards. Carolyn See,...
Posted October 21, 2006 11:57 PM
PEN Center USA, based here, announced its annual awards for books, journalism, poetry and drama by writers living in the West. In addition to the winners below, the finalists in...
Posted October 12, 2006 06:11 PM
The L.A. Times' investigative reporters on the Getty story, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, didn't get the Pulitzer but they did get a book contract. Chasing Aphrodite was billed as...
Posted October 11, 2006 01:56 AM
Author and former Los Angeles cop Joseph Wambaugh, writing on the Times op-ed page, calls Rossmore Avenue his favorite L.A. street and only partly because James Ellroy lives on it....
Posted October 9, 2006 02:45 AM
Why yes, it is. On the cover of her new book, Democratic campaign steerer-turned-columnist and USC law professor Susan Estrich strikes an Ann Coulter pose. The pic, in fact, mimics...
Posted October 6, 2006 02:31 AM
LA Observed regulars may remember last year when Will Beall, a homicide investigator for the LAPD in 77th Street Division, sold a novel called L.A. Rex to Riverhead and the...
Posted October 4, 2006 02:37 AM
In an essay that ran in the Los Angeles Review, novelist Tara Ison writes about her six-month relationship with an actor who has worked enough to be familiar — and...
Posted October 3, 2006 11:53 PM
W.W. Norton picked up the world publishing rights to The Joy of Opera by Placido Domingo, general director of the Los Angeles Opera. Steve Wasserman, the former LAT book editor...
Posted October 2, 2006 10:01 AM
On Tuesday, News and Chatter noted that James Ellroy's copies of the Steve Hodel book, Black Dahlia Avenger, appear to be for sale on eBay. In today's CityBeat, Ellroy elaborates...
Posted September 7, 2006 02:22 PM
Arianna Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work and Life, has morphed instantly into a new feature section at the Huffington Post: "...devoted to promoting fearlessness in all aspects...
Posted September 5, 2006 10:54 AM
One of the surprising things about retired LAPD detective Steve Hodel's 2003 book arguing that his father killed Elizabeth Short was that James Ellroy endorsed the theory in his introduction...
Posted September 5, 2006 02:48 AM
Los Angeles mystery writer Naomi Hirahara, whose best-known character is Japanese American gardener Mas Arai, will be giving a private walking tour of Little Tokyo mystery sites later this year....
Posted August 30, 2006 08:52 AM
Kirk Douglas says that Let's Face It will be the last of his nine books. The announcement at Publishers Lunch calls it a "humorous and poignant examination of moments in...
Posted August 30, 2006 08:48 AM
Nice to hear that Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles (link) is a finalist for the Southern California Booksellers Association 2006 Book Awards. Especially nice to be included in...
Posted August 28, 2006 12:30 PM
Two letters make it into today's West magazine praising James Ellroy's July 30 essay about moving home to Los Angeles, but it's the zinger that's more notable. Ellroy must be...
Posted August 20, 2006 02:32 PM
Silman-James Press here is upset all over again with the New York Times for not allowing the title of its book, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport by...
Posted August 16, 2006 09:09 AM
The topic of Gary Webb and his treatment within the journalism world remains divisive. People I respect fall on both sides: that he was a courageous investigative digger who got...
Posted August 8, 2006 01:46 PM
First thing Amy Wilentz did when she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Nick Goldberg — op-ed editor at the LAT — was to write a book about California...
Posted August 2, 2006 09:43 AM
Author James Ellroy writes in today's West Magazine about returning in June to live in Los Angeles after a lengthy self-exile. "The L.A. mandate," he says, "was always enticement and...
Posted July 30, 2006 08:22 PM
Over at his blog From the Desert to the Sea, John Stodder goes literary and recalls that the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon wrote much of Gravity's Rainbow while high and...
Posted July 20, 2006 10:40 AM
Lucinda Michele Knapp, managing editor of the L.A. Alternative, nominates S.A. Griffin as Beat avatar and should-be poet laureate of Los Angeles. Her cover story in today's issue includes history...
Posted July 14, 2006 03:05 PM
The collection of close-to-home travel narratives titled My California has been newly chosen as the One City, One Book pick for Whittier, Santa Barbara and Sacramento. The collaborators at CalforniaAuthors.com...
Posted July 12, 2006 01:47 PM
Author, Emmy nominee and longtime LAT columnist Al Martinez is giving his literary archive to the Huntington Library. The library will fete him Thursday at 7:30 pm when he will...
Posted June 21, 2006 11:49 AM
Los Angeles now has a media-anointed Yahoo parents group—introduced to the national spotlight in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Peachhead has 3,000 members, about 500 of...
Posted June 18, 2006 10:33 PM
Paperback Mysteries, reviews of new books by Dick Adler, reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly and longtime Los Angeles author and journalist. Add books: Jailed PI Anthony Pellicano...
Posted June 5, 2006 02:45 AM
Seems to me that Michael Walker is doing the whole book-blog synergy the right way, and creating a readable and valuable Los Angeles neighborhood website. (I'd say this even if...
Posted June 1, 2006 07:05 PM
♦ The Clippers tie up their NBA playoff series 2-2, beating the Suns 114-107 at Staples Center on Sunday. ♦ USC basketball freshman Ryan Francis was shot and killed while...
Posted May 14, 2006 10:27 PM
♦ Answer: Mayor Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Magic Johnson, Natalie Cole, Johnny Grant and Councilman Tom LaBonge. Question: Who shows up when Channel...
Posted May 8, 2006 03:16 PM
For its June 4 fundraising auction at the Skirball Cultural Center, PEN Center USA plans to let guests bid to have their name used in a writer's next novel or...
Posted May 4, 2006 10:39 PM
Michael Hiltzik came up, of course, during my interview of Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. He beat me to the punch,...
Posted May 1, 2006 01:07 AM
Posting will be light (if that) this weekend due to time commitments at the Festival of Books thrown at UCLA by the Los Angeles Times. One of my roles is...
Posted April 28, 2006 05:15 PM
Best-selling mystery author Michael Connelly has pulled together a collection of articles from his days as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times and in Florida. Crime Beat: A...
Posted April 26, 2006 10:15 AM
When Gay Talese reported his famous 1966 Esquire story "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," his Beverly Hills hotel and restaurant tabs became legendary. Things have changed some. This week he's...
Posted April 23, 2006 11:56 PM
The fifth issue of Black Clock, the literary journal edited by Steve Erickson and published by California Institute of the Arts, focuses on Los Angeles fiction reaching from "the Hollywood...
Posted April 21, 2006 01:01 PM
♦ Longtime L.A. radio reporter and anchor Hettie Lynne Hurtes is joining KPCC as mid-day anchor. Her film credits include roles in Terminator and Throw Momma from the Train. ♦...
Posted April 19, 2006 06:49 PM
Black Dahlia expert Larry Harnisch has been blogging the errors he finds as he reads through Donald H. Wolfe's new book The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and...
Posted April 14, 2006 09:27 AM
Caitlin Flanagan perhaps "owes her success largely to a misogynistic media that loves a catfight...[but she] has so masterfully created a persona that it virtually guarantees literary celebrity," says the...
Posted April 12, 2006 11:01 PM
The good guy in Robert S. Levinson's new mystery, Where the Lies Begin, is an elected member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Nicknamed Duke, he used to...
Posted April 7, 2006 10:13 AM
Three Los Angeles TV stations are fingered in a Center for Media and Democracy report out today critical of news operations that package video releases from sources and PR agencies...
Posted April 6, 2006 11:20 AM
Joseph Wambaugh was (I think) the original LAPD detective to turn novelist. He's certainly the biggest. His books set in and around the department—beginning in 1970 with The New...
Posted April 4, 2006 01:15 PM
Eric Lynxwiler and I were pleased to give a little talk about Wilshire Boulevard yesterday at Round Table West, a venerable luncheon group that began meeting 29 years ago at...
Posted March 31, 2006 12:34 AM
Times columnist Steve Lopez has sold Putnam a book to be called Imagining Beethoven, based on his personal connection to the columns he has been writing about the homeless, Juilliard-trained...
Posted March 30, 2006 05:58 PM
Turn the page for items on Dean Singleton's California strategy, Sheriff Baca's Compton strategy, a Saudi prince gets booed at Town Hall Los Angeles, celebrities at the fashion shows and...
Posted March 22, 2006 12:58 AM
At this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Joan Didion will receive the Robert Kirsch Award previously accepted by Carolyn See, Tony Hillerman, Wallace Stegner and a list of other...
Posted March 10, 2006 01:34 PM
Runoff for school board...more strangeness around the Ferrari Enzo crash...Rob Reiner's campaign chief steps out of the limelight...L.A.'s blogging pet czar blasts the Animal Defense League...while Cardinal Mahony seeks a...
Posted March 8, 2006 01:37 AM
Dutton's North Hollywood and proprietor Davis Dutton are featured on the cover of the Studio City Sun. The bookstore on Laurel Canyon Boulevard is still in the throes of its...
Posted March 7, 2006 05:45 PM
Mr. Kipen goes to West Hollywood... Because I made up a little time on the way to L.A., and because it was just a few blocks from Book Soup, I...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:17 PM
Technical issues delayed my posting of Mr. Kipen's final dispatches from his drive through California. Here is the penultimate feed, a musing on the the undervaluing of screenwriters and a...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:14 PM
Closing in on L.A... I’m now in the central valley of California, the bread basket, passing some flowering pear trees. It's cloudy but in the distance the coastal range has...
Posted March 2, 2006 04:46 PM
Stuck in traffic, the mind tends to wander... I’m now in Morgan Hill, which used to be a wide spot in the road on El Camino Real (now 101) but...
Posted March 2, 2006 03:29 PM
Kipen enjoys his time at Stanford, but feels a little deadline pressure... I got back on El Camino Real after Kepler’s and before I knew it I was in Palo...
Posted March 2, 2006 02:15 PM
In which the intrepid critic-author-rookie book tourist pushes on toward L.A... Mission accomplished! Kepler’s was very nice. I managed to find a loading dock where I could park for 15...
Posted March 2, 2006 12:48 PM
The former books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle is driving south to appear tonight at Book Soup. He blogs from the road: I’m driving south on Highway 101 toward...
Posted March 2, 2006 11:58 AM
Even the Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts has to hit the road if he wants to sell books. And it is Oscar week, after all....
Posted March 2, 2006 12:01 AM
⇒ USC Annenberg awarded the Selden Ring investigative reporting prize to the Washington Post for stories on Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Copley News Service reporters Marcus A. Stern and Jerry...
Posted February 27, 2006 02:34 PM
Author Steven Barnes is reporting on his blog (picked up by Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow calls the news confirmed) that Octavia Butler has died in Seattle following a fall...
Posted February 26, 2006 04:53 PM
A piece in today's LAT Calendar asks why author Kate Braverman isn't more famous in Los Angeles, her hometown. She is more than happy to fill in Anne-Marie O'Connor on...
Posted February 24, 2006 10:23 AM
Full plate for a Friday morning: Plaschke rips the silver from Sasha Cohen's neck, Steve Cooley's least favorite Mexican fugitive is nabbed, the Writers Guild invites Cheryl Rhoden to stay...
Posted February 24, 2006 01:45 AM
Another near-miss at LAX, Vin Scully signs on for three more years (but that's probably it), chiding Erin Aubry Kaplan on race, the editor of the LAT's Home section moves...
Posted February 22, 2006 02:40 AM
Josh Getlin, New York bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, is moving over to the Calendar staff to cover the publishing beat. He will remain bureau chief, while mixing...
Posted February 21, 2006 05:10 PM
Murder sprees in Venice (maybe) and the gangland of Panorama City-North Hills...How Darry Sragow came to hire former Roy Romer advisor Glenn Gritzner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal is the...
Posted February 20, 2006 02:43 PM
Doug Dowie scores some points but not a knockdown, the police commission mums up, "Today" takes the Chino shooting story, a new Nina Zero review and paying tribute to the...
Posted February 7, 2006 11:42 AM
Former LAT book editor Steve Wasserman, now in New York as Managing Director at the compound-named agency Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson, has gotten a preempt deal for...
Posted February 6, 2006 09:54 AM
⇒ Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that the Democrats would have reached more Latino voters had Antonio Villaraigosa given the English-language State of the Union response: "the ethnic politics behind...
Posted February 5, 2006 12:30 PM
LAT book editor David Ulin responds to the James Frey controversy in Sunday's Book Review with an essay that argues the line is fuzzy between literary truth and lie. Ten...
Posted February 5, 2006 11:50 AM
Joel Stein will be on Oprah at 3 pm on Channel 7, but not to talk about his own controversy of the moment. The LAT op-ed columnist is one of...
Posted January 26, 2006 02:48 PM
This is the anniversary of the Metrolink disaster near Glassell Park. Unrelated, we think, fictionating non-fictionist James Frey will guest on Oprah to address the literary hubbub he has created....
Posted January 26, 2006 01:36 AM
On the LA Weekly website and in Thursday's paper: Navahoax Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself...
Posted January 24, 2006 04:36 PM
The Dutton's in North Hollywood is in the midst of a clearance sale and will be gone by mid-March, Davis Dutton tells Daily News columnist Dennis McCarthy. Davis and his...
Posted January 14, 2006 01:30 PM
Saving the convention center (really Staples Center) hotel and the mountain yellow-legged frog, photo op of the day, missing shotguns at the Long Beach PD and a sell-out for the...
Posted January 13, 2006 03:18 AM
This year's Los Angeles Times Book Festival at UCLA will be April 29-30—no repeat of last year's awkward overlap with Passover, which cost the festival some authors and probably some...
Posted January 12, 2006 06:18 PM
On Thursday at 6:30 pm, author Donald H. Wolfe will talk about his new book, The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles,...
Posted January 11, 2006 12:59 PM
Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles was at number eight on yesterday's Los Angeles Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list....
Posted December 26, 2005 11:45 AM
Four people were found dead on one day in different places on Skid Row, none of them due to crime. The City Council got the news just before creating a...
Posted December 21, 2005 02:20 AM
From L.A. writer, producer and blogger Lee Goldberg: Dear Friend, I am a former general in the Nigerian army who has managed to steal countless millions from my people. It...
Posted December 15, 2005 02:00 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa appears before the police commission at 9:30 am to urge more transparency in use of force investigations by the Inspector General. The LAT does an advancer on the...
Posted December 13, 2005 01:53 AM
Public Radio International's Tavis Smiley interviewed condemned Crips founder Tookie Williams by phone on San Quentin's Death Row. Calls are limited to fifteen minutes, so it took two redials to...
Posted December 8, 2005 02:25 AM
At 1:30 Mayor Villaraigosa will announce a deal to scale back the old LAX expansion plan (and settle the lawsuits) at a command audience of pols: two Congress members, two...
Posted December 1, 2005 01:16 AM
Patt Morrison reviews Sen. Barbara Boxer's co-written first novel in today's LAT and calls A Time to Run "a passable political thriller of wishful thinking and wish fulfillment — Capitol...
Posted November 5, 2005 10:57 AM
Sen. John McCain was on Airtalk with Larry Mantle (and John Rabe) during this morning's fund drive and was almost effusive in his praise for KPCC. Sure he was pitching...
Posted October 31, 2005 12:54 PM
Daniel A. Olivas at The Elegant Variation reviews the new release of Chicano, thirty-five years after the landmark book by L.A. journalist Richard Vasquez first made it into print. Rubén...
Posted October 21, 2005 01:12 AM
♦ City Hall lobbyists now have to disclose online their clients, the issues they advocated and how much they got paid every three months. Daily News ♦ Hollywood waits and worries over...
Posted October 19, 2005 02:44 AM
Happy news for the Angel City Press clan. Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History by Ernest Marquez won the Southern California Booksellers Association award for nonfiction on Saturday...
Posted October 16, 2005 02:33 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa today named an "independent peer review panel" to look into the idea of a Wilshire Boulevard subway west of Western Avenue. He wants a report in November. The...
Posted October 14, 2005 04:13 PM
Abel Salas did a nice q-and-a with me pegged to my Wilshire book in Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine. We met at the HMS Bounty and talked about the boulevard's importance...
Posted October 9, 2005 11:30 PM
♦ Adelphia blames equipment failure related to the Topanga fire for depriving thousands of their "Desperate Housewives" fix. ♦ Mayor Villaraigosa's plan for improving schools falls into the hands of the Times'...
Posted October 4, 2005 01:40 AM
I have a lot of distractions this Friday, so before it turns into an off day I'm declaring it a day off. No postings unless something big happens. For those...
Posted September 30, 2005 12:31 AM
♦ Tempers flared during the ten hours the city council locked itself in to finally select Gerry Miller as the CLA to replace Ron Deaton, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily...
Posted September 29, 2005 02:14 AM
♦ The school board picked up Supt. Roy Romer's option for another year. ♦ The state medical board opened an investigation of the St. Vincent's physicians who sold a liver transplant to...
Posted September 28, 2005 12:59 AM
Let's hope L.A. smells better today... ♦ Today's LA Weekly declares war on air pollution with a thirty-page special package that looks closely at the threat posed by ultrafine particles and...
Posted September 22, 2005 01:28 AM
New LAT books editor David L. Ulin sits for the Three Minute Interview at The Elegant Variation, the site by Mark Sarvas that regularly panned the Times Book Review under...
Posted September 21, 2005 01:29 PM
♦ In today's New York Times, Dennis McDougal reports that the Writers Guild is sitting on millions of dollars owed to writers it can't find—no-names like Tom Clancy, Mira Nair and...
Posted September 19, 2005 12:53 AM
• Michael Kinsley's departure from the LAT rates a bylined story in the New York Times, and to a cynic maybe that alone was good enough reason to give him a...
Posted September 13, 2005 10:05 PM
If you were wondering why Calvin and Hobbes suddenly returned to the LAT comics pages this week, here's what's up. It's to help sell a massive new collection by the...
Posted September 8, 2005 03:59 PM
Southern California writers dominate the books section in the current issue of The Nation. In fact, they write the whole thing. David L. Ulin, recently named Book Editor of the...
Posted September 8, 2005 11:59 AM
On Sunday, Mireya Navarro filled in New York Times readers on the horsey life in L.A. Life is good for Rocket, the urban horse. He lives in a wooded neighborhood...
Posted September 6, 2005 02:58 AM
Welcome to September... • Seems like every gas station between Hollywood and Santa Monica went to $3-plus a gallon overnight. The 76 station at Olympic and Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills...
Posted September 1, 2005 01:43 AM
Every week the Southern California Booksellers Association canvasses its member stores to find out what readers are buying. Here are the top fives from today's best-seller lists. HardcoverFictionHardcoverNon-fiction The Historian,...
Posted August 31, 2005 11:58 PM
Here's how it works: You send your resume, writing samples, family info and agent status to an anonymous email address. Then you submit to a background check and sign an...
Posted August 31, 2005 11:11 AM
A little morning briefing... • Brian Cullen, the suspected killer of model Iryna Singerman, was found dead in a Tijuana motel room. Authorities say he killed himself with a bullet to...
Posted August 31, 2005 02:18 AM
• The L.A. Conservancy threw in the towel on the fight to save the Ambassador Hotel from demolition. The school board votes today on a plan to donate $4.9-million toward conserving...
Posted August 30, 2005 02:37 AM
• KCAL and KTTV each won nine local Emmy Awards on Saturday night. Among the top honors, KCBS won for best daytime newscast ("CBS2 News" at 6 a.m.) and best daily...
Posted August 29, 2005 01:22 AM
David L. Ulin's choice as Book Editor of the L.A. Times is starting to get good blog reviews. Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation wishes him the best, writing: "We...
Posted August 25, 2005 10:52 AM
David Kipen, the Malibu-dwelling book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the new Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts. Here's how the release explains it:...
Posted August 24, 2005 01:36 PM
The Times has named David L. Ulin to run the Book Review. Ulin authored most recently The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and...
Posted August 24, 2005 11:42 AM
Sounds like there are a ton of insider references in Hollywood Hussein, the new novel by Ken Baker, West Coast editor for Us Weekly. Monday's Page Six says that the...
Posted August 14, 2005 11:25 PM
September's Vanity Fair has six images from photographer Tim Street-Porter's new entry on the list of books that are titled simply Los Angeles. I don't know about the book, but...
Posted August 11, 2005 12:12 AM
Not just a semi-vacation week, but a travel day too. • The New York Times catches up on David Shaw, General Motors and the Getty probe. • Author and former LAT Book...
Posted August 3, 2005 12:35 AM
Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW's weekly Bookworm, has been devoting the program to a ten-part series he calls "Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing." In a piece in...
Posted July 28, 2005 01:35 PM
Public Affairs has picked up Bigger Than Life, a collection by L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan. The book is due for publication in Fall 2006, says Publishers Lunch. Also:...
Posted July 27, 2005 02:20 AM
* Newest additions at the bottom... • Now that's a book party venue. Simon & Schuster threw Sunday's launch reception for Thomas Greanias' Raising Atlantis on the front lawn of the...
Posted July 24, 2005 06:21 PM
Former LAT Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman has not yet relocated to New York, where he'll run the office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson, the literary agency...
Posted July 19, 2005 04:53 PM
Summer weekends when there is no fog at the beach are no time to be blogging. But here are some items that fought their way out of the pile. • Shots...
Posted July 11, 2005 01:22 AM
• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect until July 1, of course....
Posted June 17, 2005 02:11 AM
Jacoba Urist is 28 and worked as a lawyer in the New York office of O'Melveny & Myers for eight months, before quitting two years ago. Page Six says she's...
Posted June 16, 2005 01:28 AM
Yeah, the photo is familar. I ran it in March — but it's a great downtown image from 1923, showing the old Farmers and Merchants Bank that still stands at...
Posted June 15, 2005 02:53 PM
Eric Stone, the Silver Lake author of Wrong Side of the Wall: The Story of Blackie Schwamb, the Greatest Ballplayer in Prison History, is driving the country for a summer-long...
Posted June 12, 2005 06:59 PM
Staffers close to Antonio Villaraigosa say that Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas is at work on a book about the mayor-elect's rise and the state of Latino politics. They knew...
Posted June 9, 2005 10:39 AM
Maria Shriver tells the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove that she had no contact with anyone at NBC about the Schwarzenegger biography by Laurence Leamer. "It never came up,...
Posted June 7, 2005 12:57 PM
The Times is converting a seat on the editorial board into a three-month visiting fellow slot, as a way to bring in more thinking from academics and foreign journalists. The...
Posted June 6, 2005 08:54 PM
The LA Weekly's recurring Weekly Literary Supplement has a cover piece on eighteeen local independent presses, sidebars on Tosh Berman’s TamTam Books, Feral House, Tsehai Publishers and Josh Kun writing...
Posted June 2, 2005 12:57 AM
Ever heard of Angelo Mozilo? He is chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., and king of the L.A. Business Journal's list of highest-paid local executives. His take last year:...
Posted May 31, 2005 01:18 AM
That's what the L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime is calling its June 11 conference on writing and selling "killer mysteries." Speakers and panelists include Lee Child, Robert S. Levinson,...
Posted May 25, 2005 02:28 AM
The latest Publishers Lunch Weekly says that Ecco will publish Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Edward Humes' next book, Monkey Girl. It's "about the modern-day Scopes trial taking place in schools...
Posted May 19, 2005 02:26 AM
A feature story about the Chinese student body at San Marino High School has promoted an outcry by students and threats of violence against Pasadena Star-News reporter Cindy Chang. Editor...
Posted May 13, 2005 04:01 PM
The San Francisco Chronicle swoops in with two pieces on Steve Wasserman's departure (which becomes official today) from the editorship of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In the newsfeature...
Posted May 13, 2005 09:06 AM
LAPD detective Will Beall sold the film rights to his novel LA Rex to Scott Rudin, in a deal put together by by Shari Smiley at CAA on behalf of...
Posted May 12, 2005 02:26 AM
• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if Monday's launch of the Huffington...
Posted May 6, 2005 02:27 PM
• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. He left KABC in...
Posted May 4, 2005 10:39 PM
Fresh off his LAT Book Prize, Evan Wright has sold his next book, The Seed — about his experience at a drug recovery camp in the 80s that used radical,...
Posted May 4, 2005 12:08 PM
Steve Wasserman is moving to New York. Today's press release is below, followed by this afternoon's memo to the Times staff saying a successor "will be named soon." First, the...
Posted May 3, 2005 11:13 AM
A new website, LAPDauthors.com, compiles links and information on books by almost two dozen current and former Los Angeles Police Department officers, from Bill Parker to Joseph Wambaugh to Bill...
Posted May 3, 2005 10:13 AM
The outgoing L.A. Times Book Review editor may be considering life as a book agent, says Steven Zeitchik on the Publishers Weekly website. [That's confirmed now.] Also, Tim Rutten —...
Posted May 3, 2005 09:47 AM
This spring Malibu is reading the original Frederick Kohner novella Gidget, inspired by the surfing subculture his daughter Kathy joined at the beach there one summer in the fifties. The...
Posted May 2, 2005 01:59 AM
Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca, the Daily Journal says...The Times...
Posted May 1, 2005 07:42 PM
* Newest at the bottom, including Bill Lockyer out of the race for governor... • Looks like an interesting cover package in LA Weekly on apartment living, under the theme of...
Posted April 28, 2005 10:49 AM
Surely you didn't think that baseball outcast Jose Canseco wrote Juiced, his tell-all book on steroids, by himself (if at all.) His uncredited ghostwriter was Steve Kettmann, a Brooklyn-based journalist...
Posted April 25, 2005 02:12 PM
Long but terser-than-usual roundup, due to a books-filled weekend away from the computer. It was great to chat with old friends, new readers, media people and bloggers and to hear...
Posted April 24, 2005 08:32 PM
Continuing the run-up to the book festival, Thursday's Calendar Weekend in the Times runs a piece by Scott Martelle that grasps for the soul of the city through literary references...
Posted April 20, 2005 06:11 PM
LAPD anti-gang investigator Will Beall has sold Riverhead a pair of novels set in South Los Angeles — and Hollywood powerhouse CAA is marketing the film rights. LA Rex and...
Posted April 19, 2005 11:09 PM
New items added at the bottom • Dawson's Books, the oldest bookseller in Los Angeles, celebrates its 100th anniversary this month with an exhibit at the store and Michael Dawson Gallery...
Posted April 16, 2005 06:24 PM
Judith Regan is vacating New York and moving her publishing and media group to Los Angeles by the end of the year, to concentrate on television and film projects —...
Posted April 12, 2005 03:01 AM
• Tracks magazine has gone on hiatus after a little more than a year, while management pursues "new financing support with the goal of relaunching the magazine in the future." • The...
Posted April 10, 2005 11:58 PM
• Denise Hamilton's newest Eve Diamond novel, Savage Garden, hits the shelves on May 3. There's a Jayson Blair-like subplot swirling around our favorite fictional LAT reporter. • Tim Brown, the LAT's...
Posted April 6, 2005 04:04 PM
LAT scribe-turned-author Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, The Closers, comes out May 15. On his website, Connelly narrates a five-minute video tour of downtown sites mentioned in the book,...
Posted April 3, 2005 11:21 PM
Drex Heikes, recently replaced as editor of the LAT Magazine [actually, he was doing the #1 job from the #2 slot, with the top editor job vacant], becomes deputy editor...
Posted March 29, 2005 09:14 PM
Evan Wright, who writes locally for Rolling Stone and others, has picked up this year's J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the...
Posted March 28, 2005 02:17 PM
Catching up with some reading and email after a slow online day: • Venice gets the 36 Hours treatment in Friday's NYT Escapes. Janelle Brown has the gig and visits the...
Posted March 18, 2005 12:45 AM
Here's some stuff that piled up while I was off. Updated a couple of times: • Gary Webb, the investigative reporter whose suicide has been partly blamed on his treatment in...
Posted March 16, 2005 09:44 AM
In this week's New Yorker, New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch takes a leisurely look at the life and work of the late Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski. His...
Posted March 9, 2005 01:22 AM
David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle, "Day to Day" and KCRW asked each of the Big 5 candidates for mayor to name their favorite book and also recommend one...
Posted March 8, 2005 12:29 PM
Daniel Olivas is profiled in Stanford magazine: At age 3, Daniel Olivas stopped speaking for an entire year. When his parents took him for tests, experts told them that growing...
Posted March 7, 2005 12:37 PM
Tracy Wilkinson, the L.A. Times bureau chief in Rome, has sold Warner a book on, as Publishers Lunch puts it, "the chief exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, Father Gabriele...
Posted March 3, 2005 10:48 PM
Hilary Kaplan of the website The Next American City sits down with D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and the new Where We Are Now: Notes from...
Posted February 23, 2005 02:18 AM
Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law professor and columnist Susan Estrich...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:03 AM
Updated through the weekend Lesbian chic: Screenwriter and "L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken is profiled in Sunday's NYT Arts section. "In 1999, after writing a magazine article about same-sex couples...
Posted February 6, 2005 12:58 PM
L.A. Observed reported back in September that the Times had promoted Tim Rutten to the new post of Associate Editor of Features and gave him authority over the Sunday Book...
Posted January 31, 2005 02:39 PM
I can't swear that PEN Center USA's website is new, but I just came across it for the first time. Bookmark it as another good place to find about literary...
Posted January 28, 2005 02:00 AM
The deck on the cover story by Brendan Bernhard in the LA Weekly observes that "Bruce Wagner infects his novels with madness, celebrity, name-dropping, drugs and sex. And that's just...
Posted January 27, 2005 01:50 AM
In a New York Observer diary that begins with a riff on the Hollywood swag season that is upon us and ends with a personal tribute to Johnny Carson, Bruce...
Posted January 26, 2005 11:51 PM
Johnny Carson: No shortage of appreciations and retrospectives online and on the air for the late-night pioneer who died Sunday at home in Malibu (of emphysema at age 79). David...
Posted January 23, 2005 09:20 PM
On Kitty Felde's Talk of the City yesterday, author Douglas Flamming told some great stories about the little-known history of African Americans in early Los Angeles (including in the expedition...
Posted January 18, 2005 05:58 PM
Author and journalist Rodger Jacobs hopes to convince the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to name the intersection of Hayworth Avenue and Sunset Boulevard for F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author and...
Posted January 17, 2005 10:45 PM
Short items for a new week: WeHo mayor: BoifromTroy comments on West Hollywood mayor John Duran buying a share of Frontiers, which bills itself as "California's gay biweekly." Hewitt book:...
Posted January 10, 2005 02:59 PM
The University of California Press has just published a book on Los Angeles politics by four Occidental College faculty members. Two authors of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for...
Posted January 9, 2005 10:02 PM
There's another book of then-and-now photographs about Los Angeles coming. Los Angeles Views of the Past and Present opens with a foreword by Catherine Mullholland, the historian and granddaughter of...
Posted January 7, 2005 02:22 PM
CaliforniaAuthors.com has freshened up its exclusive listing of books written by California authors or about the state. Those coming in 2005 include: Wrong Side of the Wall. By Eric Stone....
Posted January 4, 2005 11:45 PM
On today's L.A. Times op-ed page, author Patrick Moore chides the LAT and the New York Times for not stating in last week's Susan Sontag obituaries that she was a...
Posted January 4, 2005 02:39 AM
One of Los Angeles' more charming secrets is that there are still families here whose ancestors were original settlers of the pueblo and surrounding Spanish and Mexican ranchos. Bob Pool...
Posted January 3, 2005 02:49 AM
Sontag died today [Tuesday] of leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The L.A. Times online obituary by her good friend, Book Editor Steve Wasserman, calls Sontag...
Posted December 28, 2004 12:16 PM
Author Penny Rudolph lives in Albuquerque but she is setting her newest murder mystery Thicker Than Blood here. Her website describes it: In this latter-day Chinatown, recovering alcoholic Rachel Chavez...
Posted December 15, 2004 12:04 AM
Updated through the weekend, newest at the bottom • Mayor Jim Hahn and councilman Bernard Parks both opened their 2005 campaign headquarters on Saturday. Hahn's (photo provided by his campaign) is...
Posted December 12, 2004 01:29 AM
Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review rolled out its dignified selection of the "best books of 2004," a fiction list of two dozen works including the latest by Philip Roth, E.L....
Posted December 5, 2004 11:21 PM
When the author and former Daily News book editor Bruce Cook died last year, a number of fans posted comments here on the blog. His wife Judith Aller also came...
Posted December 3, 2004 09:38 AM
• Milton Bradley did it again. The volatile Dodgers outfielder was cited for disorderly conduct after allegedly interfering with a police traffic stop near Akron, Ohio. The winter baseball meetings are...
Posted November 29, 2004 05:29 PM
Long before Hollywood came into being, a photographer for motion picture pioneer Thomas Edison traveled the Southern Pacific railroad shooting the first movie footage of locales in the West. Snippets...
Posted November 28, 2004 03:47 PM
Steve Wasserman, editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, joined other editors (including Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times) in a roundtable discussion at BookReporter.com. An excerpt from Wasserman's...
Posted November 24, 2004 01:11 PM
My post on last Sunday's story about the Black Dahlia case in the L.A. Times Magazine prompted the following email from Elisabeth Reynolds. Other thoughts are welcome, as are signed...
Posted November 23, 2004 10:24 PM
Retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel is still trying to convince people that his father was a 1940s serial killer who mutilated Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia. His book,...
Posted November 22, 2004 11:32 AM
California historian Kevin Starr chats with Saul Gonzales tonight at 6:30 on Life and Times on KCET, then tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. sits down for a half-hour conversation about his...
Posted November 15, 2004 01:22 PM
Janelle Brown gives downtown the 36 Hours treatment in today's New York Times Escapes section. Chinatown galleries, dinner at Ciudad, Saturday morning at the flower market, a walking tour with...
Posted November 12, 2004 10:25 AM
From Publishers Lunch Weekly: • Joe Keenan, the author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz and former writer and producer of "Frasier," sells My Lucky Star to Little, Brown:...
Posted November 9, 2004 09:56 PM
Dutton's warns anyone who comes to see Tom Wolfe at the Brentwood store next Monday that the author has laid down a few ground rules. Violate them and, I guess,...
Posted November 9, 2004 03:27 PM
The Southern California Booksellers Association gives its 2004 awards to Jamesland by Michelle Huneven for fiction, The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of the Secret American...
Posted November 9, 2004 10:14 AM
The downtown Long Beach institution with an inventory of one million books celebrates seven decades in business, the last 45 years at 240 Long Beach Boulevard. In a Press-Telegram feature...
Posted November 1, 2004 12:38 PM
In the new Classic Hollywood issue of Los Angeles magazine (not yet online), Steve Erickson nominates ten classic films that don't belong in the pantheon, and ten that aren't regarded...
Posted October 29, 2004 12:22 AM
The Washington Post has a piece today on a problem with the long-awaited Gourmet cookbook produced by Ruth Reichl, who was the L.A. Times food editor before heading off to...
Posted October 27, 2004 10:12 AM
Philip Roth will promote The Plot Against America on "The Today Show" Thursday morning. Liz Smith says the taped interview with Katie Couric will be his first television appearance since...
Posted October 27, 2004 09:52 AM
Darcy Cosper writes that if you were planning to attend the LA Lit party tomorrow night, don't. "Circumstances have arisen...," she says. Cynthia Ozick's appearance on Thursday evening at the...
Posted October 26, 2004 10:13 PM
Mas Arai, "a diminutive man in his late 60s with a dwindling number of regular customers whose yards he tends with loving care and a practiced eye," is the center...
Posted October 24, 2004 10:17 PM
Dutton's celebrates the opening of its new Beverly Hills store on Sunday. It's at 447 N. Canon Drive, around the corner from Taschen's Beverly Drive showroom, and is said to...
Posted October 23, 2004 03:37 PM
William Grimes, the former New York Times restaurant critic, will focus on nonfiction books. He joins Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani as full-time reviewers....
Posted October 22, 2004 08:19 AM
The Greek rights to Steve Hodel's Black Dahlia Avenger were sold to Patakis Publishers. (Via Publishers Lunch)...
Posted October 21, 2004 01:39 AM
That's the title of Court TV's new show based on access to the files of the Los Angeles County Coroner's morgue, located at 1104 N. Mission Road. I haven't watched...
Posted October 15, 2004 11:25 AM
Miles Corwin, who accompanied police to Robert Blake's home while researching his book, Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit, was ordered to testify at a pre-trial...
Posted October 15, 2004 10:30 AM
• John Gabree, the author and former Newsday book reviewer who created Santa Monica's late L.A. (The Bookstore), writes a wide-ranging blog that he calls Impractical Proposals. He noted yesterday that...
Posted October 12, 2004 11:58 PM
Publishers Lunch brings word that Stacey Grenrock Woods (of Esquire, Oprah, "The Daily Show" and L.A. Innuendo) has signed a book deal. I, California will be "a memoir of being...
Posted October 8, 2004 12:05 AM
Xeni Jardin reports at Boing Boing on the return to the web of writer-about-sex Susannah Breslin. Her new website, The Invisible Cowgirl, offers an excerpt of her forthcoming semi-autobiographical novel...
Posted October 7, 2004 12:05 PM
The Jane Austen Society of North America sweeps into the Biltmore downtown today for a weekend-long conference. Among the day's events are a subway outing to Phillipe's, a guided tour...
Posted October 7, 2004 11:23 AM
I've been busy the last couple of days helping judge entries in the Online News Association awards to be handed out next month. Perusing and discussing the examples of great...
Posted October 2, 2004 05:06 PM
Janet Maslin gives the thumbs up in Friday's New York Times to Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession, the new book by Variety editors Dade Hayes...
Posted September 29, 2004 10:12 PM
• The good people behind My California: Journeys by Great Writers — Angel City Press and California Authors.com — gave the first $10,000 check from the book's proceeds to the California...
Posted September 24, 2004 10:54 AM
Times reporter Scott Martelle, currently assigned to the Barbara Boxer-Bill Jones Senate race, will move over to the Style desk after the election to cover the L.A. literary beat. The...
Posted September 22, 2004 09:22 PM
Hollywood A-listers and assorted other liberals turned out at David Geffen's Beverly Hills manse last night to celebrate New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's visit to tout her new book,...
Posted September 22, 2004 09:14 PM
Elderly and living in a Santa Monica nursing home, the former editor and poet Joyce Fante — mother of writer Dan Fante — wants a strong-voiced actor to read classic...
Posted September 22, 2004 10:13 AM
The Hollywood Reporter is taking over the Hollywood Creative Directory line of guides and Lone Eagle Publishing. "We are thrilled to add such strong brands to our entertainment portfolio," THR's...
Posted September 22, 2004 09:42 AM
This look at Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 is by Cathy Seipp in today's Wall Street Journal (online here for subscribers): Kevin Starr's latest California chronicle, covering...
Posted September 21, 2004 10:15 AM
Seymour Hersh chats about his book Chain of Command with Lawrence O'Donnell on The Politics of Culture Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9 FM or live on the web)....
Posted September 20, 2004 10:55 PM
• The contents page in Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine had a posed photograph of a faux prisoner in a faux cell, to illustrate a cover story on the Three Strikes law....
Posted September 20, 2004 11:00 AM
This ad ran in Sunday's LAT Book Review: Writer to collaborate on sensational, unsolved murder of prominent, wealthy L.A. businessman in early 30s. The first time two people (my grandparents)...
Posted September 20, 2004 09:46 AM
I'm about halfway through reading Slick, the funny debut novel by Daniel Price about a deviously creative Los Angeles crisis PR guy — "a shameless man living in shameless times"...
Posted September 14, 2004 02:37 PM
The literary scene knows Tom Curwen as the one-time deputy editor of the L.A. Times Book Review and an erudite writer in his own right. Today, he was named editor...
Posted September 14, 2004 11:47 AM
Publishers Marketplace, the site that issues Publishers Lunch, has added blogs to its menu of services to authors and others in the book world. Mark Sarvas of the local literary...
Posted September 9, 2004 10:22 AM
LAist excerpts an interview about the beauty and other qualities of Los Angeles with author and New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, a Valley boy from Van Nuys who spoke with...
Posted September 9, 2004 09:48 AM
Authors Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons have sold Gay L.A., "a history of the gay culture that took root on the Western frontier in the mid-19th century and evolved with...
Posted September 8, 2004 12:42 AM
Andrew Gumbel, the L.A. correspondent for the Independent, has sold Steal This Vote! to Nation Books. They call it "an entertaining history of American electoral fraud, and the larger than...
Posted August 31, 2004 09:08 PM
The magazine's September issue out now is a good one, and I'd say that even if I didn't have the cover story on Mayor Jim Hahn and his political conundrum....
Posted August 30, 2004 01:12 AM
I'm reading The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith by David L. Ulin, which must be the prettiest, most thought-provoking writing about...
Posted August 9, 2004 01:58 AM
• They're out there: George Noory sends "Coast to Coast AM" into the overnight air from a studio on Ventura Blvd. (LAT Mag) • Business as usual: Mayoral candidates still raising money...
Posted August 8, 2004 11:40 AM
New entries added at end • Former LAT publisher David Laventhol is writing the history of Times Mirror for Public Affairs. The company's former chief exec, his working title is A...
Posted August 6, 2004 11:21 AM
Yes, blook. Ian Williams in the LA Weekly uses the term to describe the recent books by Arianna Huffington and the sister-brother team of Amy and David Goodman. He calls...
Posted August 5, 2004 01:17 AM
For the third year, the Pasadena Public Library is selecting a book for its "One City, One Story" program. Star-News editor Larry Wilson had the short list of prospects in...
Posted August 2, 2004 06:15 PM
Kem Nunn broke into fiction writing with Tapping the Source, his 1984 "surfing novel" set in the beach culture of Huntington Beach, "a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic...
Posted July 27, 2004 11:31 AM
The Da Vinci Code has been knocked off, finally, from the #1 spot on the L.A. Times fiction bestseller list. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason...
Posted July 18, 2004 08:56 PM
Ken Ellingwood's Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border, based on his experiences as a reporter based in San Diego and Tijuana for the L.A. Times, is featured...
Posted July 14, 2004 11:28 AM
New book deals from the latest Publishers Lunch: Writer and co-producer of "Six Feet Under" Jill Soloway's memoir WHY JEWS GO TO THE BATHROOM WITH THE DOOR OPEN, a look...
Posted July 13, 2004 06:22 PM
Tuesday's "Politics of Culture" show on KCRW is devoted to Isaac Bashevis Singer, who would have been 100 on July 14. Ruth Seymour will discuss Singer's writing and life with...
Posted July 12, 2004 04:15 PM
I'm told that on Wednesday night, the new travel anthology-for-a-cause My California ranked in the 20,000s on Amazon. On Thursday morning, a contributor to the book, critic David Kipen, mentioned...
Posted July 9, 2004 03:39 PM
A couple of stories in today's Times features section survey aspects of the local literary scene. Lynell George's piece looks in on the three journals to start here recently: Black...
Posted July 6, 2004 12:26 AM
From this week's Publishers Lunch roundup of book sales: • Film rights to Bernard Cooper's THE BILL FROM MY FATHER, a memoir about his difficult relationship with his father, and how...
Posted June 30, 2004 11:11 AM
Reyner Banham in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies coined the label "Plains of Id" for the vast basin of mostly suburbs that surrounds and defines the city. In...
Posted June 27, 2004 12:33 PM
Bill Clinton brings his book tour to L.A. today and tomorrow, and Gayle Pollard-Terry in the Times Calendar section has a feature on the preparations. Brentano's in the Century City...
Posted June 25, 2004 08:55 AM
The L.A. Times' Tim Rutten steps away from his media column for the day to review the Bill Clinton memoir and finds it a bit thin for a 957-page effort....
Posted June 23, 2004 11:16 AM
How insane will it be in Century City when Bill Clinton drops in at rush hour for a 5 p.m. Friday appearance at Brentano's? Here's a clue. Blogger Jeff Jarvis...
Posted June 22, 2004 03:47 PM
Michiko Kakutani gave a bad review to Bill Clinton's book, but Publishers Lunch says the only surprise there is that the New York Times let her do the review. Given...
Posted June 21, 2004 10:31 AM
CaliforniaAuthors.com on Sunday notes the release of a new collection of essays from D.J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, published by Angel City Press. Patt Morrison...
Posted June 20, 2004 11:57 PM
The New York Post reported last week that Elvis Mitchell is pitching an "unusual" book on Richard Pryor. In today's Page Six, Pryor says he's got his own book in...
Posted June 14, 2004 12:35 AM
Elvis Mitchell, host of "The Treatment" on KCRW, is using his time (now that's he's stopped reviewing films for the New York Times) to write a book on Richard Pryor....
Posted June 11, 2004 02:48 PM
Two Marines who fought in Iraq help tout Evan Wright's new book on the war in a Sharon Waxman story out of Oceanside in today's New York Times. They are...
Posted June 10, 2004 10:23 AM
Bestselling local Young Adult author Francesca Lia Block has sold her first adult novel Necklace of Kisses to Harper. In the book, her long-running character Weetzie Bat turns 40, faces...
Posted June 9, 2004 10:29 AM
Aside from the threat of editorial staff reductions at the L.A. Times, there has already been a cutback on the business side that has a personal effect. After more than...
Posted June 7, 2004 04:40 PM
Angel City Press and CaliforniaAuthors.com took their new anthology of travel and adventure essays to last week's Book Expo America in Chicago. And it was a hit with the West...
Posted June 7, 2004 11:55 AM
When the National Magazine Awards were handed out last month, I blew it. There was a winner from Los Angeles. Evan Wright, who writes from here for Rolling Stone, got...
Posted June 2, 2004 04:03 PM
L.A. Observed is the newest co-sponsor of the "Public Square" Lecture Series presented by Zócalo and the Los Angeles Public Library. Zócalo seeks to create a non-partisan and multiethnic forum...
Posted June 1, 2004 01:10 AM
Angel City Press in Santa Monica and CaliforniaAuthors.com collaborated to produce an anthology of essays about California to benefit the budget-starved state arts council. All of the pieces in My...
Posted May 27, 2004 10:41 AM
Today's New York Observer "Off the Record" column offers some background on that Michael Kinsley review of conservative pundit David Brooks' new book that was excerpted here yesterday, eight posts...
Posted May 26, 2004 12:02 PM
As Spoken Interludes closes in on its final event in Los Angeles, June 6 at the Skirball Cultural Center, a couple of new online literary venues have launched. Fresh Yarn,...
Posted May 26, 2004 01:47 AM
The "Goodnight Midnight" party is Friday, May 28 at 7 p.m. at the soon-to-close bookstore at 1450 2nd Street in Santa Monica. Pilar Perez and David Warshofsky of Perceval Press...
Posted May 25, 2004 11:46 AM
Novelist and food critic (LA Weekly) Michelle Huneven and L.A. Times literary critic Bernadette Murphy have sold Bloomsbury a book to be called The Tao Girl's Guide to Real Estate....
Posted May 24, 2004 05:48 PM
USC creative writing professor Percival Everett is profiled in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers magazine, the CaliforniaAuthors.com blog notes. His newest novel is American Desert....
Posted May 20, 2004 11:41 AM
The author of The Mailroom and the forthcoming The Little Stuff Matters Most (with Bernie Brillstein) has had a good week. Rensin's latest project All for a Few Perfect Waves:...
Posted May 17, 2004 11:19 PM
David Kipen, the San Francisco Chronicle book critic and KCRW commentator, takes a look at the growing scene of West Coast literary journals. He spends a lot of time with...
Posted May 17, 2004 11:00 AM
Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin's New Millennium Entertainment, the Beverly Hills publisher of Jayson Blair's book, was ordered liquidated by a bankruptcy judge, the New York Daily News says. The...
Posted May 13, 2004 09:52 AM
Nice splash in the Times Calendar section today for author Denise Hamilton, the ex-LAT reporter whose main character in her Los Angeles-based mystery novels, Eve Diamond, is (as she was)...
Posted May 12, 2004 10:52 AM
The LAT scribe-turned-successful novelist was the subject of a Bruce Weber profile in Sunday's New York Times magazine. The piece opened with Connelly sitting with a bunch of LAPD homicide...
Posted May 10, 2004 11:20 AM
J.D. Lasica, the Bay Area-based senior editor at USC's Online Journalism Review, has put online the introduction and first four chapters of the book he is writing and asked for...
Posted May 9, 2004 03:55 PM
The venerable Midnight Special bookstore tried to make a go of it after moving off the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, but it didn't work out. The store has...
Posted May 7, 2004 12:04 PM
L.A. screenwriter Andrew Leigh complains at National Review Online that the Times book festival had too many left-identified books on sale and writers on panels, and not enough right-identified panelists...
Posted May 7, 2004 09:03 AM
Karl Fleming, the former Newsweek bureau chief in L.A. and editor at Channel 2, has sold a book called Nothing to be Ashamed Of: The Memoir Of A Civil Rights...
Posted May 3, 2004 07:24 PM
Janet Maslin in the New York Times gives a glowing review to Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, The Narrows, which takes its name from a portion of the L.A....
Posted May 2, 2004 11:41 PM
The Millions, by Max Magee. He works at Book Soup and blogs daily, but catch him fast. He's moving to Chicago this summer to attend the Medill School of Journalism...
Posted May 1, 2004 01:36 AM
Nick Tosches announces his death with a tribute at Selby's official website. Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile of his, and those blue...
Posted April 28, 2004 09:38 AM
Local author Thomas Greanias's Raising Atlantis was a bestselling ebook on Amazon and a Web phenomenon. Now the novel about an iconoclastic American archeologist and a beautiful Vatican linguist, rivals...
Posted April 27, 2004 11:51 AM
Pete Dexter (Train: A Novel) gave the funniest acceptance speech, Anthony Hecht (Collected Later Poems) the most poignant, and Bruce Wagner and R.L. Stine were the most entertaining presenters, based...
Posted April 25, 2004 12:23 PM
It's not the writing that Tim Rutten likes about the new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack. He writes in today's LAT review, "Woodward's prose can charitably be described as...
Posted April 23, 2004 11:44 AM
The Times Festival of Books is this weekend at UCLA, which means there will be a lot of authors around the city (doing TV and radio, making bookstore appearances, giving...
Posted April 21, 2004 12:15 AM
Columbia has picked up Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies with plans for John Calley to produce a feature film. Some other local sales in this week's Publishers Lunch newsletter: Steven...
Posted April 19, 2004 06:27 PM
Michael Silverblatt's guest today on "Bookworm" is novelist Octavia Butler, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Kindred. KCRW's new Tuesday book commentator, David Kipen, had a piece in the San Francisco...
Posted April 15, 2004 12:13 AM
Local journalist Deanne Stillman writes in today's New York Observer about the Robert Blake and Phil Spector murder cases, which she has been covering since the start. As I’ve become...
Posted April 14, 2004 11:20 AM
It's been decades since anyone has written a serious biography of Hugh Hefner (Hef's Little Black Book, co-authored by Hefner and Bill Zehme, to be published in May by HarperEntertainment,...
Posted April 12, 2004 07:04 PM
Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review carries reviews of the new books by Eric Lax and Joe Domanick, and sees Richard Clarke displace Suzanne Somers from atop the non-fiction bestseller list......
Posted April 10, 2004 11:38 PM
CityBeat's cover story says that Los Angeles is home to "the most dangerous publishers in America." The piece by Mick Farren profiles Adam Parfrey and his Feral House, and Richard...
Posted April 8, 2004 01:51 AM
Hollywood, Interrupted, the book by Mark Ebner and Andrew Breitbart, includes a chapter about Heather Robinson, who says she used her job at AOL to purloin the screen names of...
Posted April 7, 2004 11:14 AM
Too Much of Nothing is the title of a new novel by Michael Scott Moore set in the fictional South Bay town of Calaveras Beach, in which a Jewish surfer-teenager-ghost...
Posted April 6, 2004 10:12 PM
NPR commentator and autism expert Christina Adams has turned an essay about her son's recovery that she wrote last year for the L.A. Times Magazine into a memoir. Publishers Lunch...
Posted April 5, 2004 05:26 PM
Local author Steve Oney's And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan & the Lynching of Leo Frank didn't quite win the $10,000 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project...
Posted March 29, 2004 05:39 PM
That happy and by now very rich (we hope) writing couple, Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, have finally done a book together. Double Homicide, out in the fall, will be a...
Posted March 26, 2004 11:36 AM
Oops, I missed this earlier in the week. Mayor Hahn has chosen Lauren Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit as this year's One Book, One City selection. Hahn's previous book choices were Fahrenheit 451...
Posted March 25, 2004 06:18 PM
The April issue of Los Angeles with Shaq on the cover (not yet online) has an on-balance unfavorable review by Tom Carson of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax,...
Posted March 25, 2004 04:53 PM
Jayson Blair is scheduled to appear and sign his book on April 2 at 7 p.m. at Eso Won Books on South La Brea....
Posted March 23, 2004 05:43 PM
Mark Sarvas' blog The Elegant Variation has a report from the launch party for Black Clock, the new literary journal from CalArts edited by Steve Erickson. It was held at...
Posted March 22, 2004 11:05 PM
William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down runs seven volumes and 3,000 pages and costs $120 from McSweeney's. David L. Ulin confesses in tomorrow's LA Weekly that he hasn't...
Posted March 17, 2004 08:54 PM
L.A. journalist and author Hilary de Vries, whose first novel So Five Minutes Ago follows the life of fictional celebrity publicist Alex Davidson, has sold The Gift Bag Matters and...
Posted March 16, 2004 06:53 PM
David Ehrenstein of the LA Weekly sits down at home with British ex-pat Gavin Lambert to reminisce about Hollywood and Natalie Wood, the subject of Lambert's latest book. "I came...
Posted March 11, 2004 11:27 AM
A sampling of book deals from today's Publishers Lunch weekly. Non-fiction: • Journalist and critic James Sullivan's AMERICAN BLUE, the story of blue jeans, from their development in the days of...
Posted March 8, 2004 06:39 PM
The March calendar of events has picked up some new listings. Among them is a book party to be thrown by the LA Weekly next week for its own writer,...
Posted March 8, 2004 12:41 AM
Tim Rutten reviews Jayson Blair's Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times, in the L.A. Times Book Review: Blair owes the readers and colleagues he...
Posted March 7, 2004 10:56 AM
Some of the finalists for this year's L.A. Times Book Prizes are listed in the paper today (full list is below). Among the local nominees are Michelle Huneven for her...
Posted March 6, 2004 12:23 PM
The author of Los Angeles studies City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear has a new science-adventure tale for children out called Land of the Lost Mammoths. Susan Salter...
Posted March 3, 2004 08:43 AM
Sara Nelson in the New York Observer: By my count, the reviews and the ranking system on Amazon.com count for about 95 percent of writers’ hopes, anxieties and dreams. Which...
Posted March 3, 2004 12:50 AM
Publishers Lunch is amused by LAT baseball writer Ross Newhan's reference to Judith Regan (in a story today about ex-star Jose Canseco's book) as a "mansucript developer for HarperCollins." Quoting...
Posted March 2, 2004 12:21 PM
This should provide inspiration (of the pull your hair, bang your head on the wall kind) for the aspiring novelists among you. Publishers Lunch reports that Ralph "Sonny" Barger, who...
Posted March 1, 2004 06:15 PM
Deanne Stillman recently got Amazon.com to delete 16 customer "reviews" of Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave that she calls "vindictive, malicious, and possibly libelous"...
Posted February 29, 2004 01:13 PM
New book deals from Publishers Lunch: Los Angeles Magazine editor R.J. Smith has sold The Great Black Way: Central Avenue and the Legacy of African-American Los Angeles to PublicAffairs at...
Posted February 23, 2004 06:04 PM
One of the books in Susan Salter Reynolds' "Discovery" column in Sunday's LAT Book Review is Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee. It's by Penelope Grenoble O'Malley, an ex-upstate...
Posted February 22, 2004 07:00 PM
What is it about novels based in Los Angeles and books with journalists as the main characters? Publishers Lunch reports a low six-figure deal for this first novel with both...
Posted February 17, 2004 09:58 PM
Southland by Nina Revoyr, Steve Oney's And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan & the Lynching of Leo Frank and Steve Hodel's Black Dahila Avenger are local...
Posted February 16, 2004 10:55 AM
Business Week Online's Thane Peterson reviews Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film and finds it revealing as a look at the foibles...
Posted February 11, 2004 12:57 PM
The Smoking Gun has posted a photocopy of the 12-page book proposal for Tongue in Chic: Paris Hilton's Confessions of an Heiress. Yes, it's just like you'd think it would...
Posted February 9, 2004 10:17 AM
Nice in-depth treatment in the latest New York Review of Books for Steve Oney's impressive 742-page investigation of anti-Semitism and racism in Georgia, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder...
Posted February 4, 2004 03:21 PM
Cory Doctorow, one of the co-editors at the blog Boing Boing, has released his second sci-fi novel Eastern Standard Tribe as a free online download at the same time it...
Posted February 4, 2004 10:00 AM
Publishers Lunch brings word that actress Teri Garr is writing a memoir that will include her current battle with multiple sclerosis. She's calling it Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look...
Posted February 3, 2004 12:42 AM
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is backtracking from last week's surprise comments on the future of the paper's Sunday Book Review. He told the Poynter.com "Book Babes" then...
Posted January 28, 2004 08:47 AM
Publishers Lunch reports that Paris Hilton (or her agent, Dan Strone at Trident Media Group) is circulating a book proposal for Tongue in Chic: Confessions of an Heiress. Her co-author...
Posted January 22, 2004 10:34 AM
Author Susan Choi is the guest today on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt (KCRW, 2:30 p.m.). Her novel is American Woman, told from the point of view of the Asian American...
Posted January 22, 2004 12:10 AM
The Daily Dish (meaning gossip page) at the N.Y. Daily News says today that bad-boy Beverly Hills publisher Michael Viner, no stranger to the pages of L.A. Observed, and his...
Posted January 21, 2004 11:52 PM
The L.A. Press Club and Reason magazine are teaming up to throw a book party for ABC co-anchor John Stossel and his latest, Give Me a Break: How I Exposed...
Posted January 21, 2004 12:05 AM
Richard Horgan writes at FilmStew that Peter Biskind's new book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, will be the talk of the parties at...
Posted January 14, 2004 11:56 AM
Here's a way you know your book is having an impact -- when the New York Times national staff runs a feature on what people think about it. Los Angeles...
Posted January 9, 2004 01:02 PM
Author and New Yorker writer James B. Stewart's next book target is Disney. He's well along on the project, which Simon and Schuster will publish in the fall, says Paul...
Posted January 9, 2004 01:25 AM
The ESPN columnist who scored an early copy of the Pete Rose book and posted the first review -- Alysse Minkoff -- works out of her home in Brentwood, says...
Posted January 8, 2004 11:51 PM
In today's L.A. Times Calendar, Lynell George interviews three authors whose settings are fragments of the Los Angeles whole: Alan Rifkin (Signal Hill: Stories), Elizabeth Stromme (Joe's Word: An Echo...
Posted January 6, 2004 11:36 AM
From the L.A. Times news obit: John Gregory Dunne, the journalist, screenwriter and novelist who chronicled the Hollywood movie industry in his book "The Studio," then went on to write...
Posted December 31, 2003 03:30 PM
SportsLetter, the online newsletter from the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, interviews author and journalist Don Wallace about his book on Long Beach Polytechnic High School, One Great Game....
Posted December 28, 2003 02:41 PM
California Authors.com posts on a San Francisco Chronicle story by Edward Guthmann about the raging partisanship on best-seller lists, and has a separate entry on Wil Wheaton's public ecstasy over...
Posted December 3, 2003 12:50 AM
In his Westword column in the L.A. Times Book Review, Jonathan Kirsch reviews Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Playwrights and pop singers...
Posted November 30, 2003 11:52 PM
Los Angeles has quite a few gorgeous old churches, temples and shuls. On Wilshire Boulevard alone are a half-dozen striking landmarks from the 1920s, such as the dark gothic Immanuel...
Posted November 24, 2003 10:42 PM
Eugene Volokh has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of some writerly names, among them Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Scott Turow, Harry Shearer, Ron Shelton and...
Posted November 24, 2003 06:03 PM
Scott Timberg has a pair of Calendar pieces in the Sunday LAT on German art book publisher Benedikt Taschen, who adopted Los Angeles as home and last week opened a...
Posted November 22, 2003 10:57 PM
Tonight at 7 p.m., Leo Braudy will discuss his book, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, with Los Angeles magazine editor Kit Rachlis. Then on...
Posted November 18, 2003 12:35 AM
The L.A. Times chose syndicated columnist Robert Scheer to review the Rick Bragg book on PFC Jessica Lynch, and he makes of it about what you'd expect of a guy...
Posted November 12, 2003 09:25 AM
Bruce Cook was the books editor of the L.A. Daily News from 1984-90 and had been a senior editor at Newsweek and books editor at USA Today. He died Sunday...
Posted November 11, 2003 11:23 PM
The book deals on Publishers Lunch this week include a sale by J. D. Lasica, a senior editor at USC's Online Journalism Review who blogs his musings on New Media....
Posted November 11, 2003 01:15 AM
The L.A. Central Library's Aloud program for this week: Wednesday, November 12, 7 p.m. NATHANIEL PHILBRICK "Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842." National Book...
Posted November 9, 2003 12:13 PM
The bookstore has sent email to customers saying it will reopen in Santa Monica today at 5 p.m., in the new location at 1450 2nd Street. Earlier post....
Posted November 6, 2003 02:54 PM
Favorite L.A. blurb from this week's Publishers Lunch round-up of fiction sales, but try not to picture it: Lynn Isenberg's MY LIFE UNCOVERED, likened to Mary Tyler Moore meets Boogie...
Posted November 4, 2003 12:52 AM
He talks about Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power at LAPL's "Aloud at Central Library" program Tuesday night at 7 p.m. On Wednesday, Simon Winchester comes in to talk...
Posted November 3, 2003 12:45 AM
Rochelle Krich slips onto the L.A. Times Book Review bestseller list at #11 with Dream House, her novel of an "Orthodox Jewish true crime reporter [who] investigates vandalism, arson and...
Posted November 2, 2003 11:26 PM
The Midnight Special bookstore won't reopen at its new location on 2nd Street in Santa Monica -- off the Promenade, its home until last spring -- before December. City permit...
Posted November 1, 2003 12:28 AM
Today's Christian Science Monitor reports on the "hot, new indie-lit scene" in Los Angeles and says it is especially hot in the neighborhood around Skylight Books on Vermont in Los...
Posted October 31, 2003 10:27 AM
Last week's book sales by L.A. writers or of local interest, from Publishers Lunch Weekly email: Journalist Christopher Noxon's Rejuvenile: How a New Species of Reluctant Adults is Redefining Maturity...
Posted October 27, 2003 05:52 PM
Author Mark Salzman was invited to visit a writing class at L.A.'s Central Juvenile Hall and was so blown away by the experience that he became a teacher there. His...
Posted October 25, 2003 01:37 AM
Susannah Breslin, the L.A. writer of the late Reverse Cowgirl blog, is out with You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, billed as "a short story collection of sordidly sexual tales,"...
Posted October 24, 2003 11:06 AM
I left Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) off yesterday's list of local authors nomnated this week for a National Book Award. Rene Tawa in the L.A. Times has more...
Posted October 16, 2003 04:22 PM
Couple of prominent locals are nominees for the National Book Awards: T.C. Boyle in fiction for Drop City and Carol Muske-Dukes in poetry for Sparrow. Tim Rutten also has a...
Posted October 15, 2003 12:54 PM
Poynter has a feature up about Michael Connelly, who went from covering night cops in the Valley for the L.A. Times to writing best-selling mysteries. Clint Eastwood starred in last...
Posted October 15, 2003 12:37 PM
John Connolly, the author of the Premiere magazine profile on Schwarzenegger, can't sell his expose book, but humorist Andy Borowitz (or actually his agent Mort Janklow) has sold Governor Arnold:...
Posted October 15, 2003 02:07 AM
Jamesland by Michelle Huneven, dining columnist for LA Weekly, gets a good review in the New York Times. And Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books, gives a full thumbs up...
Posted October 12, 2003 11:16 AM
Cathy Seipp takes a read of Peter Bart's new collection of short stories, Dangerous Company: Dark Tales from Tinseltown, and says the Variety editor "has an ear for dialogue even...
Posted October 9, 2003 12:32 PM
Thomas Curwen in the L.A. Times Book Review and Thomas Mallon in the New York Times Book Review both weigh in on Joan Didion's dark take on a California spoiled,...
Posted September 28, 2003 01:36 PM
The new memoir by novelist James Brown, The Los Angeles Diaries, visits a side of L.A. not frequently traveled or well chronicled. Anne-Marie O'Connor of the Times joins Brown for...
Posted September 26, 2003 12:58 AM
T. Coraghessan Boyle's next novel The Inner Circle -- his sixteenth -- has just sold to Viking. The agent's blurb is intriguing for a Boyle work, from Publishers Lunch: "...at...
Posted September 22, 2003 06:29 PM
Amy Wilentz, the author of Martyrs' Crossing, is writing a book on the recall and California. She opined in Sunday Opinion on the 9th Circuit....
Posted September 22, 2003 02:44 AM
Roger L. Simon has posted a nice report from the weekend's Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival, two days after posting that he was through blogging for the moment. Glad...
Posted September 21, 2003 10:01 PM
The second annual West Hollywood Book Fair is today. Plenty of local authors will be there, among them Carolyn See, Janet Fitch. Aimee Liu, Denise Hamilton and Charles Phoenix and...
Posted September 21, 2003 01:56 AM
In Ramblin' Man, his upcoming biography of Woody Guthrie, USC journalism professor Ed Cray explores Guthrie's years in Glendale, Topanga and Silverlake hanging out with other notable lefties of 1930s...
Posted September 18, 2003 01:14 AM
California Authors notes two contrasting reviews of Joan Didion's Where I Was From: Patt Morrison, LAT: "...a soul–searching look at California’s complexities and contradictions." Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic: "He laments...
Posted September 17, 2003 11:12 PM
A new Los Angeles literary event, "Our Favorite Writers," begins tonight with Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the The Virgin Suicides. He will read and talk with Mona Simpson, the author...
Posted September 15, 2003 12:15 PM
Slate takes a quick look at the four influential book review publications Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal and Booklist. You've probably never read these magazines, even if you've seen...
Posted September 15, 2003 10:44 AM
Frances Ring, the former editor of Westways, wrote a poignant piece in the Sunday LAT Opinion section about being old and losing her license to drive. Perhaps the test would...
Posted September 15, 2003 01:05 AM
Just yesterday, the New York Post and Variety ran planted stories about disgraced New York Timeser Jayson Blair getting a book deal at New Millennium Entertainment here. Today, the NYT...
Posted September 11, 2003 09:57 AM
As we've noted before, Leslie Epstein's Los Angeles novel San Remo has gotten nice treatment in the New York Times. He had to have been nervous about it though, the...
Posted September 10, 2003 10:27 AM
The humiliated ex-journalist was turned down by New York publishers but struck a deal with New Millennium, the Beverly Hills publishing house run by Michael Viner and Daborah Raffin, says...
Posted September 10, 2003 10:12 AM
Now that Matt Miller has his own book out, the moderate moderator of KCRW's politics show Left, Right & Center is being a guest and his colleagues are playing the...
Posted September 8, 2003 12:38 AM
In his day job Ken Baker is the West Coast executive editor in L.A. for Us Weekly. Somehow he also finds the time to write personal books. His first, Man...
Posted September 5, 2003 12:20 AM
The former Form Zero bookstore has reopened on the Miracle Mile as Art Haus Books. They are in one of those Wilshire Boulevard buildings with a past. It was designed...
Posted August 28, 2003 02:08 AM
Denise Hamilton has sold two more Eve Diamond novels to Scribner, "for six figures"... Deborah Martinson has sold a biography, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels, to Counterpoint...
Posted August 26, 2003 02:13 PM
Recently I mentioned the Variety piece on Michael Viner, the somewhat controversial owner of Beverly Hills-based publisher New Millennium. There's a follow-up in the LAT today (picked up here on...
Posted August 21, 2003 10:13 AM
Jane Leavy wrote last year's bestseller on Sandy Koufax and a previous comic novel, Squeeze Play, loosely based on herself, about a sportswriter making her way in the man's world...
Posted August 21, 2003 12:05 AM
Paul Newman writes in the New York Times that he'll sue the federal department of Housing and Urban Development for misusing the name HUD. Also: Fox Sues Dr. Seuss Over...
Posted August 19, 2003 11:28 AM
William Rehder spent three decades chasing bank robbers in Los Angeles for the FBI. Now he and Gordon Dillow have co-written a book about it, Where the Money Is: True...
Posted August 19, 2003 12:55 AM
Michael Viner publishes Bill Maher, Larry King and Gene Simmons -- and books about Heidi Fleiss and the O.J. Simpson case -- but he wants no part of the recall,...
Posted August 13, 2003 11:56 AM
Law professor Eugene Volokh says the Fox lawsuit against Al Franken over the phrase "fair and balanced" in his book title is much weaker than even Spike Lee's claim to...
Posted August 12, 2003 12:32 PM
Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel regularly bat around book topics on the Poynter website -- the place where Romenesko has a home. This week, they examine Los Angeles as a...
Posted August 7, 2003 01:47 PM
Suzan Lori Parks is scheduled to be on Life and Times Monday, Paula L. Woods on Tuesday....
Posted August 4, 2003 01:00 AM
A. Scott Berg's Kate Remembered takes over the best seller spot in his hometown L.A. Times Book Review (he did it last week in the New York Times). Living History...
Posted August 3, 2003 01:45 AM
Phil Garlington reported for the Los Angeles Times many years ago, and later for the Register. After getting canned from his last job, he slunk off to a remote desert...
Posted August 1, 2003 07:32 PM
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Edward Humes' eighth book, out in September, chronicles life inside California’s best public high school, Whitney High here in Cerritos. He spent a year at...
Posted July 30, 2003 01:13 AM
Michael Walker, a former editor at the L.A. Times Magazine and at Los Angeles, has sold a book on the city's place in 1970s pop music. Lions in the Street:...
Posted July 29, 2003 01:00 AM
The book on Enron's demise by a couple of prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporters in the Los Angeles bureau will be officially released August 5. 24 Days: How Two Wall...
Posted July 22, 2003 04:23 PM
For those who like to plan way, way ahead, here are the guests scheduled to be on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW (Thursdays from 2:30 to 3:00 PM )...
Posted July 22, 2003 01:26 AM
He still hasn't gotten a review of his Los Angeles-centric book here in L.A., but Donnell Alexander got a break today -- his Deadline L.A. appearance ran for an extra...
Posted July 20, 2003 02:44 PM
A little more than a month since the New York Times did a nice interview with author Leslie Epstein, his novel partly set in 1940s Pacific Palisades, San Remo Drive:...
Posted July 19, 2003 01:21 PM
Northern California writer Kathryn Chetkovich confesses a major case of jealousy over the literary success of her former lover, who she loved most of all because he was struggling. She...
Posted July 19, 2003 01:20 AM
Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times of "Kate Remembered" blames author A. Scott Berg for too few revelations and too much hyperbole. A strange hybrid: part biography, part...
Posted July 16, 2003 12:55 AM
Former LA Weekly (and ESPN the Magazine) writer Donnell Alexander is back from a seven-city book tour and will read from his memoir Ghetto Celebrity at Book Soup next Monday...
Posted July 14, 2003 02:57 PM
Tim Rutten reports in the LAT today that Benjamin Schwarz, who has changed the profile of The Atlantic book section in his three years as literary editor, is moving to...
Posted July 12, 2003 01:20 AM
We're late on this one, but last week's Downtown News carried the news that Form Zero Books has given up on the Arts District and will relocate to Mid-Wilshire. The...
Posted July 11, 2003 11:30 AM
James Pinkerton, the former White House aide to Reagan and Bush senior, rips into Ann Coulter in his L.A. Times op-ed column. Not only does she fail to bring the...
Posted July 10, 2003 01:08 AM
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