Chronicle Book Editor Oscar Villalon inventories the books of summer.

The LAT’s Scott Martelle previews Book Expo America, which begins Thursday in New York. “It’s 30% party, 30% buzz, 20% exposition specials, and the other 20% we don’t usually talk about in a family newspaper,” joked Doug Dutton of Dutton Books.
Browse the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression’s online auction here and its BEA silent [...]

“(Editor Howard) Junker should be proud of this anthology. He put these writers into print, some for the first time. These diverse voices tell us in their own words what it is to be them. And because of their eloquence, we do walk in their shoes for a short but exhilarating while.” — LA [...]

David Kipen revisits Ross Thomas (”He died in 1995, and only now is St. Martin’s Press mercifully rolling out much of his glorious backlist”) and his 1978 spy novel, Chinaman’s Chance, which opens with a dead pelican on a California beach. “This is the quintessential book to take to a deserted island,” David says, [...]

“The malaise, you can cut it with a knife,” Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, when asked why a new $6 million dollar project to revamp journalism education is being launched now. University of Southern California, and University of California, Berkeley are two of the five participating schools [...]

Veteran journalist Karl Fleming was on Larry Mantle’s radio show today talking about Son of the Rough South, his new memoir about growing up in a North Carolina orphanage and later covering the civil rights movement for Newsweek. After finding himself in the middle of so much violence in the south, Fleming was glad [...]

New today at CaliforniaAuthors.com: devorah major’s introduction to The Other Side of the Postcard. “In creating my project I wanted to show how the music of truth laid on the rhythms of compassion could build the world we want, not by shying away from the realities of our streets, but by embracing them in their [...]

as our new release of the week: Oh the Glory of It All. by Sean Wilsey (Penguin, May 19, 2005) Sara Nelson, the new editor of Publisher’s Weekly offers her take on this new book in a recent column on “nobody memoirs,” recollections by more or less ordinary folks who just believe they have [...]

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” — actress Annette Bening, reading from To Kill a Mockingbird at a Los Angeles Public Library dinner honoring Harper Lee.

Michael Connelly may not live here anymore, but he still travels to Los Angeles about once a month to research his crime novels … Beach Boy Al Jardine is testing the publishing waters with his new children’s book, Sloop John B: A Pirate’s Tale … The Rocky Mountain News fawns over LA Times writer [...]

Ghost Word points us to a Slate discussion on writing history: academic historians vs. populizers.

A Southern California woman who says she received a desecrated Quran from an Amazon.com third party seller “wants more than a gift certificate and an apology,” according to the SF Chronicle.

D.J. Waldie, Patt Morrison, Joel Kotkin and others chew on the mayor’s race at the LA Times election blog.

The Commonwealth Club gives its gold medals to novelist Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli) poet Adrienne Rich (The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004) and UC San Diego Professor Emeritus Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic). Read more in the San Francico Chronicle.

Our Marketplace has great leads on summer workshops for writers. See them here. Looking to fill that beach bag with summer reads? Find the freshest in our one-of-a-kind list of new California books. Updated today.

as our new release of the week: The Geneticist who Played Hoops with My DNA…And Other Masterminds from the Frontiers of Biotech. By David Ewing Duncan (HarperCollins, May 2005). Duncan, a science writer from San Francisco, blends science and personality in his new book, delving into stem cell research, cloning, bioengineering, extending life span, [...]

Newsweek features Hector Tobar’s new Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.
The overarching story of today’s Latinos, he writes, is that of a population living close enough to home that the slow dissolution of their own culture never takes place. An essential latinidad remains preserved, and its cultural influence will [...]

Last week Julee Morris shut her Long Beach shop, Once upon a Story, and put up a sign, “gone to look at bookstores.” Then Morris and her staff joined an all-day tour of other Southern California indies.
They browsed Vromans in Pasadena and Book’em Mysteries in nearby South Pasadena. Next the bus headed to [...]

The California Arts Council has a fresh new website.

The governor picks Al Young, a poet, screenwriter and novelist who lives in Berkeley, as California’s next Poet Laureate. Read more in the Contra Costa Times.