In the LAT Book Review, Steve Almond tries to explain Dave Eggers and his new What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. “Eggers has ditched the ironic cleverness in which he draped previous efforts, including his bestselling 2000 memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” The new novel is unremittingly earnest, a direct and stirring effort to engage the sympathies of its audience.”
• The NYT remembers Los Angeles novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, who died last week. “Along with writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of black novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction,” Margalit Fox writes. “Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, Ms. Campbell’s work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women.”
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Andrew Sean Greer, a San Francisco novelist whose latest book, 
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