They’re not famous for it, but they are famous, and they’ve got books out this month.
Speaker of the US House of Representatives California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi will celebrate the launch of her book Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters with three TV appearances on Monday (NBC’s “Today,” ABC’s “The View” and Comedy [...]
Stories in New Release 2007:
They’re California authors, too.
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 [...]
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 [...]
A few stray notes from this morning
• Edward Humes, author of Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Tranformed the American Dream, was on NPR’s Morning Edition today, along with George McGovern and director Arthur Penn, talking about the remarkable initiative that sent an entire generation to college to college for the first time. Ed says, “Interest in the history and aftermath [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. By Alex Steffen (Sterling Books). Steffen and an army of contributors have compiled a roadmap for a future that is ‘bright, green, free and tough.” Business Week says WorldChanging “reads like a smart, hip mini-encyclopedia of what’s new 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 [...]
Scary movies & other stray notes
• LaObserved reports today that Heritage Book Shop, LA’s rare book store, has been sold.
• LAO also notes that Kristin Gore is now an LA writer. “The 30-year-old daughter of former VP Al Gore lives near downtown with husband Paul Cusack, writes for ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Futurama’ and has a new novel, Sammy’s House, [...]
More LB
Over at LaBloga, Daniel Olivas has a Q&A with Long Beach high school teacher Myriam Gurba, author of a new collection of short stories and a novella called Dahlia Season.
What I’m reading
“I’ve just read Ray Bradbury’s Farewell Summer, the 50+-years-later sequel to Dandelion Wine, and it feels like I’m drunk.” — Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing.
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 [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Lost City Radio. By Daniel Alarcorn
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: First Exposures. By Eric Auerbach; foreword by Dave Eggers. This new collection looks at the world through the eyes of kids in the SF Camerawork mentoring program. The book celebrates ten years of pairing Bay Area photographers with young people, ages 11 through 18, with backgrounds of [...]
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 [...]
New (and newish) tidbits
… from here and there:
• Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti receives one of France’s top cultural honors: Commandeur des Arts et Lettres.
• Michael Wolff expounds in Vanity Fair on Billionaires and Broadsheets.
• AP’s Lynn Elber does a Q&A with Tavis Smiley, the L.A. talk show host with two books on the New York Times bestseller list. [...]
They’re California authors, too.
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 [...]
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 [...]
A few stray notes from this morning
• Edward Humes, author of Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Tranformed the American Dream, was on NPR’s Morning Edition today, along with George McGovern and director Arthur Penn, talking about the remarkable initiative that sent an entire generation to college to college for the first time. Ed says, “Interest in the history and aftermath [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. By Alex Steffen (Sterling Books). Steffen and an army of contributors have compiled a roadmap for a future that is ‘bright, green, free and tough.” Business Week says WorldChanging “reads like a smart, hip mini-encyclopedia of what’s new 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 [...]
Scary movies & other stray notes
• LaObserved reports today that Heritage Book Shop, LA’s rare book store, has been sold.
• LAO also notes that Kristin Gore is now an LA writer. “The 30-year-old daughter of former VP Al Gore lives near downtown with husband Paul Cusack, writes for ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Futurama’ and has a new novel, Sammy’s House, [...]
More LB
Over at LaBloga, Daniel Olivas has a Q&A with Long Beach high school teacher Myriam Gurba, author of a new collection of short stories and a novella called Dahlia Season.
What I’m reading
“I’ve just read Ray Bradbury’s Farewell Summer, the 50+-years-later sequel to Dandelion Wine, and it feels like I’m drunk.” — Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing.
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 [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Lost City Radio. By Daniel Alarcorn
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: First Exposures. By Eric Auerbach; foreword by Dave Eggers. This new collection looks at the world through the eyes of kids in the SF Camerawork mentoring program. The book celebrates ten years of pairing Bay Area photographers with young people, ages 11 through 18, with backgrounds of [...]
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 [...]
New (and newish) tidbits
… from here and there:
• Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti receives one of France’s top cultural honors: Commandeur des Arts et Lettres.
• Michael Wolff expounds in Vanity Fair on Billionaires and Broadsheets.
• AP’s Lynn Elber does a Q&A with Tavis Smiley, the L.A. talk show host with two books on the New York Times bestseller list. [...]
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. 