Litquake, San Francisco’s freewheeling storytelling festival, opens on Friday. The San Francisco Chronicle previews.
Michael Pollan is the Diesel Books choice for “Author of the Month.”
Kevin Roderick shares a slice of Sunday’s West Hollywood Book Fair on video.
Ayelet Waldman wraps up her Books for Barack campaign, $68,000 later.
Susan Paterno triumphs against Santa [...]
Stories in Buzz:
Litquake & a few notes from the fall bookscape
Suddenly interested in all things Alaska?
A reader at the NYT’s Paper Cuts blog shares this suggestion: “A wonderful book that features Alaska is Drop City by the incredible T.C. Boyle. A group of hippies from California move to a remote part of Alaska in 1970.”
Attention book editors and book lovers too
Help Wanted: San Francisco needs a new book editor.
This weekend: Check out Saturday’s Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival. Highlights include an impressive line up of poets reading their work and the city’s Pass it Forward Book Exchange.
Sunday in the sunshine: This year’s West Hollywood Book Fair features headliner Ray Bradbury and three hundred [...]
Monday morning miscellany
Five thousand book lovers savor the 9th Annual Sonoma County Book Festival in Santa Rosa. Press Democrat.
Diesel Books opens in Brentwood. Adrienne Crew.
Harper’s opens its archives of David Foster Wallace stories. Browse here.
Hearst Castle welcomes overnight guests for the first time in fifty years. SoCal SoCool.
OJR is back. LAObserved.
A few new Bay Area [...]
Authors rally for Obama
A few weeks ago Ayelet Waldman emailed a few writer friends and asked them to donate signed books for a Barack Obama fundraiser hosted by Bay Area chef Alice Waters on Sept. 26. “Well, the thing went completely viral,” Ayelet writes at her blog. “I have hundreds of books in my living room…. I’ve [...]
Hot Hot Hot on an August afternoon
Dean Koontz rides high in Bookscan’s Hot Ten.
Arianna Huffington reigns as “queen of the attention economy.”
Donna Foote releases Relentless Pursuit, her year in the Teach For America trenches.
Derek Powazek reveals his Self-Portrait with Squid.
So many parties, so far apart
Downtown LA is ground zero of this weekend’s massive BookExpo, but the parties are scattered all the way to Santa Monica and back. So conventioneers had to plot their party treks carefully, as Carolyn Kellogg notes in the LA Times. On Saturday night I had to chuckle at the rare parade of yellow cabs pulling [...]
Some BookExpo grazing
I’m enjoying browsing the wealth of eco-friendly books at BEA, including the new Greenopia guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco and the just-released A Spring without Bees by Michael Schacker.
Other choice goodies that found their way into my 100% reusable and recyclable book bag (courtesy of Chronicle Books) are this trio of Big [...]
Photos from opening day of The Big Show
Here’s Donna’s eye-view of the floor at BookExpo America this morning, where she was at the beginning of a great day. Click “Read more…” below for more Day One BEA Pix.
Biggest book party of the year
For the first time in five years, the publishing world returns this week to Los Angeles. The mighty BookExpo is bigger and bolder than ever. You’ll find digital innovations and green-come-lately initiatives galore, and everyone from print-on-demand authors to A-list celebs touting new books. This spring, however, you also may detect a jittery edge to [...]
A trio of author updates
After I wrote yesterday about Latinos In Lotusland, editor Daniel Olivas shared the backstory of the anthology’s magical cover. He says, “Yes, it is a beautiful cover. Bilingual Press is affiliated with Arizona State University, which has the largest Chicano art collection in the country. So, last year, they flew me out to [...]
Overheard
“I’m sitting in an airport where someone just had Elliot Spitzer paged to Gate 32. No one seemed to notice. Though it would have been funnier to have him paged to Gate 9.” — author Mark Sarvas blogging at the Elegant Variation.
LA landmark bookstore calls it quits
LAObserved reports the very sad news this morning that Dutton’s Brentwood Books is closing April 30 after a tough year. “Be assured, especially those of you who have regularly asked, ‘How are things going at the store,’ that every effort has been made to try to sensibly and rationally save this enterprise,” says owner Doug [...]
Deal or no deal?
Writers vote tonight on a tentative pact to end the three-month-old strike, sez Mark Lacter at LABizObserved.
Out there
Lotsa California Authors in the headlights this week. Among them:
• Patt Morrison goes to San Onofre tonight to debate nuclear power.
• Mark Arax goes to war over the Armenian Genocide with his boss at the LA Times.
• Sandra Tsing Loh goes on about safe speech.
• Peter Jackson goes to Hollywood to shop his screenplay [...]
Steinbeck sale
Rare copies of John Steinbeck’s first novel and other works are on the auction block today. From the LA Times:
“Cup of Gold” and more than two dozen other first editions from the collection of Steinbeck’s late sister will be auctioned today by Bonhams & Butterfields in a sale to be simulcast in Los Angeles and [...]
Up all night
Lotsa buzz around the web about Edward Humes’ Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, just released today.
From top science blogger PZ Myers:
Oh but I am dragging this morning. Have you ever done that thing where you start reading a book and you don’t want to put it down, and [...]
The boss of me
Memoirist Debra Ginsberg gets fiction-y in her new book Blind Submission and the California publishing world gets dishy about the similarities between the author’s boss-from-hell West Coast literary agent character and her real-world former employer Sandra Dijkstra. Says Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times:
In Blind Submission, Lucy Fiamma, the central character, is a [...]
Litquake & a few notes from the fall bookscape
Suddenly interested in all things Alaska?
A reader at the NYT’s Paper Cuts blog shares this suggestion: “A wonderful book that features Alaska is Drop City by the incredible T.C. Boyle. A group of hippies from California move to a remote part of Alaska in 1970.”
Attention book editors and book lovers too
Help Wanted: San Francisco needs a new book editor.
This weekend: Check out Saturday’s Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival. Highlights include an impressive line up of poets reading their work and the city’s Pass it Forward Book Exchange.
Sunday in the sunshine: This year’s West Hollywood Book Fair features headliner Ray Bradbury and three hundred [...]
Monday morning miscellany
Five thousand book lovers savor the 9th Annual Sonoma County Book Festival in Santa Rosa. Press Democrat.
Diesel Books opens in Brentwood. Adrienne Crew.
Harper’s opens its archives of David Foster Wallace stories. Browse here.
Hearst Castle welcomes overnight guests for the first time in fifty years. SoCal SoCool.
OJR is back. LAObserved.
A few new Bay Area [...]
Authors rally for Obama
A few weeks ago Ayelet Waldman emailed a few writer friends and asked them to donate signed books for a Barack Obama fundraiser hosted by Bay Area chef Alice Waters on Sept. 26. “Well, the thing went completely viral,” Ayelet writes at her blog. “I have hundreds of books in my living room…. I’ve [...]
Hot Hot Hot on an August afternoon
Dean Koontz rides high in Bookscan’s Hot Ten.
Arianna Huffington reigns as “queen of the attention economy.”
Donna Foote releases Relentless Pursuit, her year in the Teach For America trenches.
Derek Powazek reveals his Self-Portrait with Squid.
So many parties, so far apart
Downtown LA is ground zero of this weekend’s massive BookExpo, but the parties are scattered all the way to Santa Monica and back. So conventioneers had to plot their party treks carefully, as Carolyn Kellogg notes in the LA Times. On Saturday night I had to chuckle at the rare parade of yellow cabs pulling [...]
Some BookExpo grazing
I’m enjoying browsing the wealth of eco-friendly books at BEA, including the new Greenopia guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco and the just-released A Spring without Bees by Michael Schacker.
Other choice goodies that found their way into my 100% reusable and recyclable book bag (courtesy of Chronicle Books) are this trio of Big [...]
Photos from opening day of The Big Show
Here’s Donna’s eye-view of the floor at BookExpo America this morning, where she was at the beginning of a great day. Click “Read more…” below for more Day One BEA Pix.
Biggest book party of the year
For the first time in five years, the publishing world returns this week to Los Angeles. The mighty BookExpo is bigger and bolder than ever. You’ll find digital innovations and green-come-lately initiatives galore, and everyone from print-on-demand authors to A-list celebs touting new books. This spring, however, you also may detect a jittery edge to [...]
A trio of author updates
After I wrote yesterday about Latinos In Lotusland, editor Daniel Olivas shared the backstory of the anthology’s magical cover. He says, “Yes, it is a beautiful cover. Bilingual Press is affiliated with Arizona State University, which has the largest Chicano art collection in the country. So, last year, they flew me out to [...]
Overheard
“I’m sitting in an airport where someone just had Elliot Spitzer paged to Gate 32. No one seemed to notice. Though it would have been funnier to have him paged to Gate 9.” — author Mark Sarvas blogging at the Elegant Variation.
LA landmark bookstore calls it quits
LAObserved reports the very sad news this morning that Dutton’s Brentwood Books is closing April 30 after a tough year. “Be assured, especially those of you who have regularly asked, ‘How are things going at the store,’ that every effort has been made to try to sensibly and rationally save this enterprise,” says owner Doug [...]
Deal or no deal?
Writers vote tonight on a tentative pact to end the three-month-old strike, sez Mark Lacter at LABizObserved.
Out there
Lotsa California Authors in the headlights this week. Among them:
• Patt Morrison goes to San Onofre tonight to debate nuclear power.
• Mark Arax goes to war over the Armenian Genocide with his boss at the LA Times.
• Sandra Tsing Loh goes on about safe speech.
• Peter Jackson goes to Hollywood to shop his screenplay [...]
Steinbeck sale
Rare copies of John Steinbeck’s first novel and other works are on the auction block today. From the LA Times:
“Cup of Gold” and more than two dozen other first editions from the collection of Steinbeck’s late sister will be auctioned today by Bonhams & Butterfields in a sale to be simulcast in Los Angeles and [...]
Up all night
Lotsa buzz around the web about Edward Humes’ Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, just released today.
From top science blogger PZ Myers:
Oh but I am dragging this morning. Have you ever done that thing where you start reading a book and you don’t want to put it down, and [...]
The boss of me
Memoirist Debra Ginsberg gets fiction-y in her new book Blind Submission and the California publishing world gets dishy about the similarities between the author’s boss-from-hell West Coast literary agent character and her real-world former employer Sandra Dijkstra. Says Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times:
In Blind Submission, Lucy Fiamma, the central character, is a [...]
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Christina Meldrum, a Bay Area attorney whose book Madapple was just released this month. “In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, 
You can shop online from your local independent booksellers. 