• The LAT’s Maria Russo on Jane Smiley’s new novel, Ten Days in the Hills: “It’s billed as a Hollywood novel, but it’s just as much a novel about sex, and it’s a novel that feels burrowed into Los Angeles’ landscape and real estate.”

• LA Weekly’s Tom Christie on Michele Matheson, an actress-turned-novelist who found her voice in Jim Krusoe’s beginning writing class at Santa Monica College. “Saving Angelfish,” Christie writes, “is a relentlessly dark tale — no non-junkie reading it is going to run out to buy heroin — suffused with, and buoyed by, light.”

• Steve Heilig on Lisa Gray-Garcia’s Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America: “Contrary to some enduring American mythologies,” Helig writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Gray-Garcia shows that it is possible to be smart, work hard, avoid the perils of addiction, violence, HIV and so many other afflictions that beset the poor, and still get stuck in a lifetime of poverty.”

• The NYT shares a Baghdad librarian’s journal: “Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory ‘was hit by 5 bullets’; and ‘another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat…‘”

• The March issue of Elle magazine has a spread on Aimee’s Liu’s Gaining: The Truth about Life After Eating Disorders, the author’s own story. Aimee’s website includes more information, photos and resources, too.

• Christy Coyne is bucking the indy bookstore trend: She’s opened two new children’s bookstores in Orange County and has plans to expand The First Page further. “I threw away all the ideas of what a bookstore should be,” she says.