Authors getting ink (and electrons)

Daniel Olivas is profiled in Stanford magazine:

At age 3, Daniel Olivas stopped speaking for an entire year. When his parents took him for tests, experts told them that growing up in a bilingual home was too confusing and advised them to stop speaking Spanish to him. Olivas did start talking again, but when it came time for school, other kids teased the “little white boy” for not knowing the lingua franca of his neighborhood, Pico Heights in Los Angeles.

So there’s some irony in the fact that today, Olivas, ’81, finds himself an emerging voice in Chicano fiction. First came his novella, The Courtship of María Rivera Peña (Silver Lake Publishing, 2000), then a book of short stories, Assumption and Other Stories (Bilingual Press, 2003). He published a second collection, Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press) last summer, and his first children’s book, Benjamin and the Word (Arte Publico Press) is due out in April. Although he writes in English, his works center on Latinos in Los Angeles, and Spanish expressions pepper their dialogue.

The link is from The Elegant Variation, where Olivas guest blogs. TEV also does a detailed review of Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review. The LAist Interview puts questions to Michelle Huneven, the ex-LA Weekly restaurant critic (and California magazine and LAT writer) whose novels are Jamesland and Round Rock. And California Authors.com makes Peter Lefcourt's The Manhattan Beach Project its new release of the week.