LA Observed reports that four past book editors of the Los Angeles Times — Sonja Bolle, Digby Diehl, Jack Miles, and Steve Wasserman — have released a letter protesting the elimination of the paper’s Sunday Book Review. “We urge readers and writers alike to join with us as we protest this sad and backward step,” [...]
Stories in Reviews:
Audio files: taking Michael Chabon on the road
“I just finished listening to the audiobook of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a hardboiled alternate history novel set in a world where Israel falls in 1948 and its population of Jews relocate to a territory carved out of Alaska, a territory that is theirs for 60 years only…. I’m a great [...]
What I’m reading
Author Edward Humes reviews LA Times columnist Steve Lopez’s new book and finds it “a very human drama that is hard to put down.” A snippet:
Los Angeles’ skid row, as Steve Lopez writes in “The Soloist,” is the homeless capital of the nation.
Hidden in plain sight just down the street from City Hall and mere [...]
Books by the Bay
Frances Dinkelspiel, host of the Ghost Word blog, checks out the new San Francisco Chronicle Book Review and sez “I must pronounce it a success.”
The Chronicle’s editors reduced the size of the section to save printing costs, but it has the unintended consequence of making the review feel more intimate and cohesive. Editor Oscar Villalon [...]
Exploring California’s Wine Country
In today’s San Diego Union-Tribune, Michele Parente samples four wine-related tales and travelogues. He saves the juiciest, The House of Mondavi, for last. “In her sweeping saga of four generations of Mondavis — which starts in small-town Italy in 1883 and ends in a corporate coup in Napa in 2004 — Wall Street Journal reporter [...]
Casa California
Author D.J. Waldie teamed with actress Diane Keaton to create a lovely new book, California Romantica. The LAT’s Thomas Curwen describes the effort as “the culmination of a lifelong obsession for Keaton and nearly two years of study for Waldie…
“Their collaboration is a love affair — in words and in pictures — with Spanish [...]
Mirror worlds
The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle both delve into The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman in today’s papers. They come away with very different takes:
From Richard Rayner in the LAT:
“The Long Embrace” is an exploration of these two relationships — Ray and Cissy, Chandler and [...]
From this Sunday’s NYT Book Review
David Leavitt reviews (and mostly likes) Michael Tolliver Lives, the latest tales of the city from Armistead Maupin, while Thomas Mallon plods through This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood, the memoir Jack Valenti completed before he died in April. “The Hollywood portion of his book is [...]
Contemporary crime fiction
Daniel Olivas reviews the Los Angeles Noir anthology, edited by Denise Hamilton with stories by seventeen SoCal writers, for the Elegant Variation. Olivas loves the book (”the authors featured in Los Angeles Noir have big gumshoes to fill. And fill them they do”) and shares some choice tidbits.
Like this one:
Some of the stories take place [...]
Book reviewer v. litblogger smackdown
from the LAT.
The National Book Critics Circle
has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. From their website:
Over the past five years, one by one, newspapers have begun to forsake books and their readers. While book review sections at the Washington Post and the New York Times continue strongly, many other newspapers have begun packing up and winnowing down their book [...]
All about me
It’s Memoir Week over at Slate, which delves into a rash of new autobiographies and some older ones, too. Various memorists also talk about the experience of writing a book about their lives, among them Sean Wilsey in an essay called “Publish then Flee.”
Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All, recounts [...]
What the hay, WSJ?
It’s not that the Wall Street Journal hired long-time intelligent design proponent Pamela Winnick to review Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul, it’s that they didn’t bother to identify her as a partisan in the culture wars. Winnick, a Discovery Institute lecturer and the author of A Jealous God: Science’s [...]
Audio files: taking Michael Chabon on the road
“I just finished listening to the audiobook of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a hardboiled alternate history novel set in a world where Israel falls in 1948 and its population of Jews relocate to a territory carved out of Alaska, a territory that is theirs for 60 years only…. I’m a great [...]
What I’m reading
Author Edward Humes reviews LA Times columnist Steve Lopez’s new book and finds it “a very human drama that is hard to put down.” A snippet:
Los Angeles’ skid row, as Steve Lopez writes in “The Soloist,” is the homeless capital of the nation.
Hidden in plain sight just down the street from City Hall and mere [...]
Books by the Bay
Frances Dinkelspiel, host of the Ghost Word blog, checks out the new San Francisco Chronicle Book Review and sez “I must pronounce it a success.”
The Chronicle’s editors reduced the size of the section to save printing costs, but it has the unintended consequence of making the review feel more intimate and cohesive. Editor Oscar Villalon [...]
Exploring California’s Wine Country
In today’s San Diego Union-Tribune, Michele Parente samples four wine-related tales and travelogues. He saves the juiciest, The House of Mondavi, for last. “In her sweeping saga of four generations of Mondavis — which starts in small-town Italy in 1883 and ends in a corporate coup in Napa in 2004 — Wall Street Journal reporter [...]
Casa California
Author D.J. Waldie teamed with actress Diane Keaton to create a lovely new book, California Romantica. The LAT’s Thomas Curwen describes the effort as “the culmination of a lifelong obsession for Keaton and nearly two years of study for Waldie…
“Their collaboration is a love affair — in words and in pictures — with Spanish [...]
Mirror worlds
The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle both delve into The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman in today’s papers. They come away with very different takes:
From Richard Rayner in the LAT:
“The Long Embrace” is an exploration of these two relationships — Ray and Cissy, Chandler and [...]
From this Sunday’s NYT Book Review
David Leavitt reviews (and mostly likes) Michael Tolliver Lives, the latest tales of the city from Armistead Maupin, while Thomas Mallon plods through This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood, the memoir Jack Valenti completed before he died in April. “The Hollywood portion of his book is [...]
Contemporary crime fiction
Daniel Olivas reviews the Los Angeles Noir anthology, edited by Denise Hamilton with stories by seventeen SoCal writers, for the Elegant Variation. Olivas loves the book (”the authors featured in Los Angeles Noir have big gumshoes to fill. And fill them they do”) and shares some choice tidbits.
Like this one:
Some of the stories take place [...]
Book reviewer v. litblogger smackdown
from the LAT.
The National Book Critics Circle
has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. From their website:
Over the past five years, one by one, newspapers have begun to forsake books and their readers. While book review sections at the Washington Post and the New York Times continue strongly, many other newspapers have begun packing up and winnowing down their book [...]
All about me
It’s Memoir Week over at Slate, which delves into a rash of new autobiographies and some older ones, too. Various memorists also talk about the experience of writing a book about their lives, among them Sean Wilsey in an essay called “Publish then Flee.”
Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All, recounts [...]
What the hay, WSJ?
It’s not that the Wall Street Journal hired long-time intelligent design proponent Pamela Winnick to review Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul, it’s that they didn’t bother to identify her as a partisan in the culture wars. Winnick, a Discovery Institute lecturer and the author of A Jealous God: Science’s [...]
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, 