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Topic Archive: Books and authors
Actually it's just one book, the new novel set in Los Angeles by fabulist James Frey. But look at how differently it's being read. LAT...
Posted May 12, 2008 10:54 PM
The host of the long-running "Connie Martinson Talks Books" gave nearly 3,000 tapes of her cable show to Claremont Graduate University. "It's a pretty extraordinary...
Posted May 7, 2008 09:20 AM
You could say that former Dodger and product of Los Angeles Darryl Strawberry had the book thrown at him so often he should write one....
Posted May 6, 2008 10:23 PM
Mark Sarvas is often biting in his reviews and commentaries at The Elegant Variation, a point that Scott Timberg makes up front in his Q&A...
Posted May 5, 2008 01:20 PM
Nice Q&A by Deanne Stillman over at Native Intelligence with Larry McMurtry, the author and screenwriter who was in town this week to receive the...
Posted May 2, 2008 09:25 AM
Denise Hamilton sits in at The Elegant Variation today and guest-interviews author Nina Revoyr about her new novel, "The Age of Dreaming." Excerpt: "The Age...
Posted April 30, 2008 11:57 AM
My panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ("California: The Great Experiment") was well-attended by an enthusiastic crowd that asked many provocative questions,...
Posted April 29, 2008 03:01 PM
Before the first author was honored at Friday night's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Times critic Kenneth Turan delivered a tribute to Dutton's Brentwood Books,...
Posted April 26, 2008 12:41 AM
In her new travel guide "Great Escapes Southern California," Donna Wares describes author D.J. Waldie's ritual for the weekend of the L.A. Times Festival of...
Posted April 25, 2008 02:10 PM
'Tis the season for new Los Angeles-focused releases — and the week for book parties — with the Times Festival of Books on tap this...
Posted April 21, 2008 12:36 AM
This year's L.A. Times Festival of Books is the weekend of April 26-27 at UCLA. I'm moderating a 3 pm Saturday panel called "California: The...
Posted April 15, 2008 11:19 PM
He still makes appearances and will be talking about "KTLA's News at Ten: Sixty Years with Stan Chambers" tonight at 7:30 pm at the Beverly...
Posted April 14, 2008 07:24 AM
Unlike in New York, baseball steroid man Jose Canseco drew a muted response at this week's book signing here. Stuffed behind a counter in a...
Posted April 11, 2008 04:24 PM
On the day that Michael Ramirez won a Pulitzer Prize, it's somewhat fitting to run a Robert Scheer item too. He and Ramirez were both...
Posted April 7, 2008 11:13 PM
My prediction of this morning was correct, if general. The Washington Post cleaned up with six Pulitzer prizes, for coverage of Walter Reed, Virginia Tech,...
Posted April 7, 2008 12:25 PM
The OC Weekly's Nick Schou got a double dose of good news today. Universal is developing a film based on his 2006 book "Kill the...
Posted April 3, 2008 09:20 PM
A few hundred fans applauded Dutton's Brentwood Books on Sunday afternoon, filling the courtyard where so many authors have spoken on their L.A. tours. The...
Posted March 30, 2008 10:40 PM
Friends, fans and employees of Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore will gather in the courtyard one last time this Sunday at 5 pm. The shelves already look...
Posted March 26, 2008 01:05 PM
As a reporter, I liked to write about L.A's infrastructure — freeways, water, refuse. I always thought there was a book in the history of...
Posted March 26, 2008 12:58 PM
Christian Lander, the Culver City-based writer of the hit satire blog Stuff White People Like, has gotten a William Morris agent (Erin Malone) and a...
Posted March 25, 2008 09:25 AM
The English-born writer of science fiction died in Sri Lanka, his home since 1956. NYT, BBC, AP...
Posted March 18, 2008 04:25 PM
Longtime L.A. Times pop critic Robert Hilburn has signed with ModernTimes/Rodale to do a "deeply personal and highly opinionated memoir" of his decades covering the...
Posted March 18, 2008 11:41 AM
Last weekend's New York Times did a nice spread on J. Michael Walker and his one-of-a-kind Los Angeles book, "All the Saints of the City...
Posted March 11, 2008 06:40 PM
Her years in Los Angeles taught Nancy Rommelmann, an ex-New Yorker, that no one is more provincial than New Yorkers. So she isn't surprised that...
Posted March 6, 2008 12:50 PM
Mark Lacter and I were just on "Airtalk" talking with Larry Mantle about the buyouts at the Times and other local papers. You can hear...
Posted March 5, 2008 12:35 PM
Celeste Fremon is expected to guest on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC at the top of the 2 pm hour, to talk about the fake Margaret...
Posted March 4, 2008 12:29 PM
She's Margaret Seltzer, she went to preppy Campbell Hall, and she never ran drugs for the Bloods in South L.A., she confessed to the New...
Posted March 4, 2008 12:51 AM
Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston wins this year's Robert Kirsch Award. Nominees in the nine categories, announced tonight in New York, include Ron Brownstein, Naomi Klein...
Posted February 28, 2008 06:06 PM
Charlie Munger, who owns and wants to redevelop the Brentwood block that includes Dutton's Books, promised to pay all of the bookstore's debts — and...
Posted February 25, 2008 11:44 PM
Poet T.S. Kerrigan lives in Burbank, so not precisely L.A.. And OK, it was Friday, not today. But some verse of his was the selection...
Posted February 25, 2008 05:33 PM
A lot of sites and media are reacting to the sad news — first posted here at LA Observed early this morning — that Dutton's...
Posted February 25, 2008 03:11 PM
Jacket Copy, the blog written by the staff of the L.A. Times' books section, today added a new voice: Carolyn Kellogg's. She is the former...
Posted February 25, 2008 01:53 PM
The words "speculative sports fiction" caught my eye and made me go: huh? But that's the genre that covers the anthology edited by Tujunga author...
Posted February 25, 2008 12:44 PM
Dutton's Brentwood Books will close April 30 after a tough year. A clientele like Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton and half the authors in the city...
Posted February 25, 2008 01:57 AM
When LA Observed was just a toddler of a blog, I watched Nancy Rommelmann chronicle her anxiety-filled but hopeful (and ultimately happy) move to Portland...
Posted February 20, 2008 11:15 PM
Slate editor Jacob Weisberg gave a little shout out to LA Observed in his remarks last night at a book party at Arianna Huffington's home....
Posted February 20, 2008 06:04 PM
L.A. author, humorist and kitschy snapshot collector Charles Phoenix will share his vintage Valentine's Day slides with Martha Stewart on her syndicated TV show on...
Posted February 12, 2008 11:27 PM
At least two Los Angeles blogs are included in a new book, "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web," edited by the NYT's Sarah Boxer....
Posted February 11, 2008 09:13 AM
Native Intelligence contributor Deanne Stillman has the cover of the new Los Angeles CityBeat with a nice piece on the Mojave Desert portion of L.A....
Posted February 8, 2008 03:59 PM
Much honored Los Angeles sci-fi writer and alternate historian Harry Turtledove writes about time travel in his Crosstime Traffic series. Could he be predicting the...
Posted February 8, 2008 09:23 AM
Last year's managing editor of the Los Angeles Times (actually he stayed nearly two years) will be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show Thursday. Frantz and...
Posted February 6, 2008 09:42 PM
Who knew? I'm told, by Los Angeles poet Richard Beban, that this morning's verse about opossums was no lone wolf. He says there is something...
Posted January 30, 2008 04:29 PM
Author Samantha Dunn writes in today's Calendar section, "We should thank our lucky stars Mary McNamara's debut novel, 'Oscar Season,' arrives when it does, because...
Posted January 24, 2008 09:16 AM
An LA Observed reader who works at Cal State Long Beach stopped by Wilshire Books in Santa Monica and found the store cleared out. "Quietly...
Posted January 14, 2008 10:31 PM
The authors of that book claiming a slew of ethical breaches by former USC Trojans star Reggie Bush and his family have posted excerpts and...
Posted January 14, 2008 03:06 PM
The author and widow of Aldous Huxley has died in Los Angeles, according to family friends. She was 96. She was born in Italy and...
Posted December 14, 2007 05:11 PM
Publishers Lunch brings word that Maria Shriver has sold Just Who Will You Be, "presenting life lessons and reflections on what's important in her life,...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:28 PM
This one is more of a prank than yesterday's scam, also from Shelf Awareness: Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., has...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:25 AM
John Evans, co-owner of Diesel: A Bookstore out in Malibu, told the newsletter Shelf Awareness about a strange come-on at his Oakland store. I guess...
Posted December 10, 2007 01:42 PM
Remember Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, the journalist who quit the L.A. Times in a huffy outburst and resurfaced as a successful novelist? (And who more recently mourned...
Posted November 27, 2007 11:56 AM
Katie O'Laughlin of Village Books, one of the city's best and coziest small bookstores, says she's losing the battle against the big boxes and rising...
Posted November 24, 2007 10:25 AM
In addition to his blog here at LA Observed, Bill Boyarsky is a regular columnist for Robert Scheer and Zuade Kaufman at Truthdig. They actually...
Posted November 19, 2007 10:25 PM
Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter Clancy Sigal turned up in today's letters section in the New York Times Book Review, offering a counter view to...
Posted November 18, 2007 10:04 PM
Judith Regan today sued News Corp for $100 million over her firing last year and charged that a senior executive urged her to mislead federal...
Posted November 13, 2007 05:34 PM
Events are starting up for Bill Boyarsky's major political history from University of California Press, Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics....
Posted November 13, 2007 12:26 PM
In a post over at Native Intelligence, Denise Hamilton goes for a sidewalk adventure in the city with Judith Freeman, author of the new book...
Posted November 5, 2007 08:55 PM
Author Denise Hamilton and Eating L.A. blogger Pat Saperstein did a fun road trip recently, visiting many of the local dining spots patronized by Hamilton's...
Posted September 27, 2007 09:09 PM
Andrea Grossman's independent literary series Writers Bloc has become part of the Town Hall Los Angeles organization. Grossman will continue to select the programs, but...
Posted September 12, 2007 04:55 AM
He did not pay anyone to threaten reporter Anita Busch and pretty much loathes PI Anthony Pellicano, says the actor whose name was prominently mentioned...
Posted August 16, 2007 11:51 PM
Former L.A. Times feature writer-turned-novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez had been a victim of journalist Cathy Seipp's gratuitous mean side, and gave it back to her. But...
Posted August 14, 2007 08:47 AM
Steve Wasserman and Robert Scheer are together again. The former Los Angeles Times book editor, now managing director of the New York office of Kneerim...
Posted August 9, 2007 10:49 AM
Douglas Anne Munson, author of an L.A. noir trilogy that opened with the admired Dogtown, has champions in Michael Connelly, Carolyn See, John Rechy and...
Posted August 5, 2007 11:19 PM
PEN USA has chosen the winners of its 2007 literary awards for writers and journalists in the West. Among the local winners is Cynthia Kadohata,...
Posted July 31, 2007 02:20 PM
Our post earlier this month on Hollywood tabloidist-turned-author Marlise Kast and her pursuit of blissful contentment inspired Luke Ford to interview her for his blog....
Posted July 31, 2007 12:50 PM
Marlise Kast is a former Hollywood production assistant who began digging up dirt for The Globe at age 21. She now dishes about her three...
Posted July 5, 2007 12:24 PM
A memoir, noted at Publishers Lunch: "Director of strategic alliances for global think tank, TalentSmart, Lac D. Su's THE CRIP WALK, a coming-of-age memoir about...
Posted July 5, 2007 08:20 AM
Don't Let the Lipstick Fool You will be "an uplifting memoir profiling the author's personal and professional life," says Publishers Lunch. Dafina bought it for...
Posted June 27, 2007 08:43 AM
Now Michelle Delgadillo has business tax problems, but abruptly took care of them Friday in advance of a new round of stories. LAT, DN...
Posted June 23, 2007 12:46 PM
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...
Posted June 20, 2007 09:10 AM
Business was fine, but the building was sold and co-owner Ben Weinstein got a good offer for what Scott Timberg calls in the Times about...
Posted June 20, 2007 08:56 AM
Publishers Weekly leads today's Deals with Los Angeles Magazine staff writer Jesse Katz selling The Opposite Field to Crown in a preempt "said to be...
Posted June 18, 2007 08:54 AM
Producer and author Tom Teicholz hit on a pretty good way to give his next book a shot at a favorable reception. He devoted his...
Posted June 14, 2007 03:44 PM
How's this for a tangible book prize? Charles Rappleye, formerly of the LA Weekly, won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, "honoring the most important...
Posted May 23, 2007 11:54 PM
L.A. bloggers Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and Callie Miller (Counterbalance) were quoted in a weekend LAT story on the rise — to a point...
Posted May 14, 2007 02:19 PM
Couple of additions to the lineup of LA Observed contributors at this weekend's L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. Veronique de Turenne has been...
Posted April 28, 2007 12:44 AM
Snakeskin Shamesin, third in the series of Naomi Hirahara's novels set in Southern California that feature Japanese-American gardener Mas Arai, won the Edgar Award from...
Posted April 26, 2007 09:52 PM
Books editor David Ulin is scheduled to discuss the changes in the Times Sunday Book Review, the situation at the paper and this weekend's LAT...
Posted April 25, 2007 08:50 AM
The author and journalist was involved in a three-car crash this morning near the Dumbarton Bridge in San Mateo County, according to AP stories out...
Posted April 23, 2007 04:00 PM
Erika Schickel and myself (along with Times columnist Al Martinez) were the guests on KABC 790 AM's show "Spotlight on the Community" this morning talking...
Posted April 22, 2007 09:56 PM
T. Jefferson Parker's L.A. Outlaws is moving to Dutton as part of a two-book deal, with publication next February. But here's my favorite L.A. angle...
Posted April 18, 2007 08:58 AM
To juice up interest in Ray Bradbury's appearance this Sunday in Santa Clarita, this ad ran in The Signal. Dozens of mystified, angry calls flooded...
Posted April 13, 2007 02:26 PM
Kurt Vonnegut died tonight in Manhattan, several weeks after suffering brain injuries in a fall. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, confirmed the news for the...
Posted April 11, 2007 10:14 PM
President Bush has an evening fundraiser in Brentwood, there are accidents on both sides of the 405 near Wilshire, and the northbound Pasadena is backed...
Posted April 4, 2007 05:05 PM
The author and professor of creative writing at Cornell was born in East Los Angeles, graduated from Garfield High and Immaculate Heart College, and...
Posted April 2, 2007 08:15 AM
An L.A. Times press release announces several reductions in the value of what the paper give its dwindling readership — oops, I mean "editorial changes...
Posted March 26, 2007 09:20 AM
I'm going to guess that the pressure to fold the Times' Sunday Book Review into a cheaper, thinner Saturday tabloid comes from the Chicagoans in...
Posted March 7, 2007 08:25 AM
If Jeffrey Trachtenberg's Wall Street Journal report is accurate, that would mean the Times decided to face the critical music and launch the scaled-back Book...
Posted March 6, 2007 07:59 AM
The San Francisco Chronicle has a unique understanding of how readers here might react to the LAT folding its Book Review in with Current. The...
Posted March 5, 2007 08:09 AM
Essayist William Kittredge will pick up the Robert Kirsch Award on April 27 when the winners in the following Los Angeles Times Book Prize categories...
Posted March 2, 2007 02:47 PM
Mark Sarvas, L.A.'s most recognized lit-blogger, has a post up at The Elegant Variation that he's been hoping to write for a long time. He...
Posted March 1, 2007 03:29 PM
L.A. freelancer Janelle Brown has sold her debut novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything — "about a woman and her two daughters coming together...
Posted February 27, 2007 09:24 PM
Newsroom sources at the Times expect the Sunday Book Review will be folded into a new hybrid opinion section and delivered in Saturday papers. The...
Posted February 22, 2007 02:24 AM
Results are in for The History Channel’s City of the Future design competition. On-line voters selected Chicago the winner. New York came in second. The...
Posted February 8, 2007 09:49 PM
Daniel Olivas, the author of Devil Talk, writes at California Authors.com about trying to make the transition to novelist while also finding time to be...
Posted February 6, 2007 03:22 PM
The New York Times received a partial transcript of O.J. Simpson's never-televised Fox interview with Judith Regan describing how the 1994 murders of Nicole Simpson...
Posted February 4, 2007 12:22 PM
Sidney Sheldon had won a screenwriting Oscar (The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), a Tony ("Redhead") and created TV sitcoms ("I Dream of Jeannie" and "Patty...
Posted January 30, 2007 11:09 PM
Denise Hamilton writes that Barbara Seranella, who died this week, was the rare mystery author who didn't have to rely on second-hand observations to create...
Posted January 23, 2007 10:12 PM
Manhattan's 92nd Street Y is hosting a night this week with three L.A. literary types who happen to be ex-New Yorkers. In advance of Thursday's...
Posted January 23, 2007 01:59 PM
Issue number three of Swink — the "bi-coastal, biannual print magazine dedicated to identifying and promoting literary talent in both established and emerging writers," edited...
Posted January 23, 2007 02:34 AM
The best-selling mystery author from Laguna Beach died yesterday in Cleveland while awaiting a liver transplant. She had received two livers in 2005 and spent...
Posted January 22, 2007 10:56 AM
Will the sad bookstore news never stop? Dutton's Brentwood Books on San Vicente "may soon succumb to its landlord's plans to redevelop the site," the...
Posted January 17, 2007 01:31 AM
Another independent bookstore is on the ropes. Tia Chucha's Cafe & Cultural Center in Sylmar lost its lease and has to move. Co-founder Luis J....
Posted January 10, 2007 09:43 AM
A study at Central Connecticut State University ranks the most literate cities in the U.S. based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical...
Posted January 3, 2007 01:12 PM
Last-chance talks between Dutton's management and the city of Beverly Hills failed to stave off the Dec. 31 closure of the Canon Drive bookstore. The...
Posted January 2, 2007 07:57 PM
Judith Regan's upcoming fight for her honor with Rupert Murdoch's empire inspires the NYT's Sharon Waxman to muse on Hollywood court battles of yore: think...
Posted January 2, 2007 04:36 PM
It was a big deal for Beverly Hills in 2004 when Dutton's opened the city's first general bookstore in a decade. Business has not been...
Posted December 20, 2006 02:30 PM
Yeah, the former head of LAPD internal affairs cops to the affair with a sergeant under his command — but only for three years!...
Posted December 19, 2006 05:55 PM
An "offensive" phone call to a HarperCollins attorney on Friday preceded Judith Regan's sudden firing, Sunday's Los Angeles Times says citing two unnamed but "highly...
Posted December 17, 2006 03:32 PM
Judith Regan, publisher of the terminated O.J. Simpson book, was abruptly fired tonight by HarperCollins. The company announced the dismissal, “effective immediately,” in a news...
Posted December 15, 2006 08:32 PM
On the occasion of the paperback release of his well-received first novel, The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia talks with guest blogger Daniel A. Olivas...
Posted December 1, 2006 11:39 AM
Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist "known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races," has died at...
Posted November 27, 2006 06:21 PM
John Shannon's literary private detective Jack Liffey has lived in Redondo Beach and (lovely) Mar Vista and I think even wandered up Highway 395 to...
Posted November 22, 2006 12:15 PM
Caitlin Flanagan told the New York Observer a year ago that "You’d never, never, never leave The New Yorker," but now she has. Flanagan has...
Posted November 22, 2006 09:22 AM
Rupert Murdoch pulls the plug on the Judith Regan book and the Fox TV special. "We are sorry for any pain that his has caused...
Posted November 20, 2006 12:59 PM
Wendy Werris worked at some of the most cherished and long-vanished Los Angeles bookstores, starting at Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, where Susan Sontag developed...
Posted November 7, 2006 01:55 AM
Jerry Blaz says he'll soon close his BOOKie Joint on Reseda Boulevard. His post at ValleyNews.com (via The Valley Observed) talks about the book biz...
Posted October 24, 2006 09:34 AM
Authors, publishers and good bookstore people — revelers all — partied tonight in the Gold Room at the Biltmore downtown for the 2006 Southern California...
Posted October 21, 2006 11:57 PM
PEN Center USA, based here, announced its annual awards for books, journalism, poetry and drama by writers living in the West. In addition to the...
Posted October 12, 2006 06:11 PM
The L.A. Times' investigative reporters on the Getty story, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, didn't get the Pulitzer but they did get a book contract....
Posted October 11, 2006 01:56 AM
Author and former Los Angeles cop Joseph Wambaugh, writing on the Times op-ed page, calls Rossmore Avenue his favorite L.A. street and only partly because...
Posted October 9, 2006 02:45 AM
Why yes, it is. On the cover of her new book, Democratic campaign steerer-turned-columnist and USC law professor Susan Estrich strikes an Ann Coulter pose....
Posted October 6, 2006 02:31 AM
LA Observed regulars may remember last year when Will Beall, a homicide investigator for the LAPD in 77th Street Division, sold a novel called L.A....
Posted October 4, 2006 02:37 AM
In an essay that ran in the Los Angeles Review, novelist Tara Ison writes about her six-month relationship with an actor who has worked enough...
Posted October 3, 2006 11:53 PM
W.W. Norton picked up the world publishing rights to The Joy of Opera by Placido Domingo, general director of the Los Angeles Opera. Steve Wasserman,...
Posted October 2, 2006 10:01 AM
On Tuesday, News and Chatter noted that James Ellroy's copies of the Steve Hodel book, Black Dahlia Avenger, appear to be for sale on eBay....
Posted September 7, 2006 02:22 PM
Arianna Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work and Life, has morphed instantly into a new feature section at the Huffington Post: "...devoted to...
Posted September 5, 2006 10:54 AM
One of the surprising things about retired LAPD detective Steve Hodel's 2003 book arguing that his father killed Elizabeth Short was that James Ellroy endorsed...
Posted September 5, 2006 02:48 AM
Los Angeles mystery writer Naomi Hirahara, whose best-known character is Japanese American gardener Mas Arai, will be giving a private walking tour of Little Tokyo...
Posted August 30, 2006 08:52 AM
Kirk Douglas says that Let's Face It will be the last of his nine books. The announcement at Publishers Lunch calls it a "humorous and...
Posted August 30, 2006 08:48 AM
Nice to hear that Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles (link) is a finalist for the Southern California Booksellers Association 2006 Book Awards. Especially...
Posted August 28, 2006 12:30 PM
Two letters make it into today's West magazine praising James Ellroy's July 30 essay about moving home to Los Angeles, but it's the zinger that's...
Posted August 20, 2006 02:32 PM
Silman-James Press here is upset all over again with the New York Times for not allowing the title of its book, Chess Bitch: Women in...
Posted August 16, 2006 09:09 AM
The topic of Gary Webb and his treatment within the journalism world remains divisive. People I respect fall on both sides: that he was a...
Posted August 8, 2006 01:46 PM
First thing Amy Wilentz did when she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Nick Goldberg — op-ed editor at the LAT — was to...
Posted August 2, 2006 09:43 AM
Author James Ellroy writes in today's West Magazine about returning in June to live in Los Angeles after a lengthy self-exile. "The L.A. mandate," he...
Posted July 30, 2006 08:22 PM
Over at his blog From the Desert to the Sea, John Stodder goes literary and recalls that the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon wrote much of...
Posted July 20, 2006 10:40 AM
Lucinda Michele Knapp, managing editor of the L.A. Alternative, nominates S.A. Griffin as Beat avatar and should-be poet laureate of Los Angeles. Her cover story...
Posted July 14, 2006 03:05 PM
The collection of close-to-home travel narratives titled My California has been newly chosen as the One City, One Book pick for Whittier, Santa Barbara and...
Posted July 12, 2006 01:47 PM
Author, Emmy nominee and longtime LAT columnist Al Martinez is giving his literary archive to the Huntington Library. The library will fete him Thursday at...
Posted June 21, 2006 11:49 AM
Los Angeles now has a media-anointed Yahoo parents group—introduced to the national spotlight in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Peachhead has...
Posted June 18, 2006 10:33 PM
Paperback Mysteries, reviews of new books by Dick Adler, reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly and longtime Los Angeles author and journalist. Add...
Posted June 5, 2006 02:45 AM
Seems to me that Michael Walker is doing the whole book-blog synergy the right way, and creating a readable and valuable Los Angeles neighborhood website....
Posted June 1, 2006 07:05 PM
♦ The Clippers tie up their NBA playoff series 2-2, beating the Suns 114-107 at Staples Center on Sunday. ♦ USC basketball freshman Ryan Francis...
Posted May 14, 2006 10:27 PM
♦ Answer: Mayor Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Magic Johnson, Natalie Cole, Johnny Grant and Councilman Tom LaBonge. Question:...
Posted May 8, 2006 03:16 PM
For its June 4 fundraising auction at the Skirball Cultural Center, PEN Center USA plans to let guests bid to have their name used in...
Posted May 4, 2006 10:39 PM
Michael Hiltzik came up, of course, during my interview of Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. He...
Posted May 1, 2006 01:07 AM
Posting will be light (if that) this weekend due to time commitments at the Festival of Books thrown at UCLA by the Los Angeles Times....
Posted April 28, 2006 05:15 PM
Best-selling mystery author Michael Connelly has pulled together a collection of articles from his days as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times and...
Posted April 26, 2006 10:15 AM
When Gay Talese reported his famous 1966 Esquire story "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," his Beverly Hills hotel and restaurant tabs became legendary. Things have...
Posted April 23, 2006 11:56 PM
The fifth issue of Black Clock, the literary journal edited by Steve Erickson and published by California Institute of the Arts, focuses on Los Angeles...
Posted April 21, 2006 01:01 PM
♦ Longtime L.A. radio reporter and anchor Hettie Lynne Hurtes is joining KPCC as mid-day anchor. Her film credits include roles in Terminator and Throw...
Posted April 19, 2006 06:49 PM
Black Dahlia expert Larry Harnisch has been blogging the errors he finds as he reads through Donald H. Wolfe's new book The Black Dahlia Files:...
Posted April 14, 2006 09:27 AM
Caitlin Flanagan perhaps "owes her success largely to a misogynistic media that loves a catfight...[but she] has so masterfully created a persona that it virtually...
Posted April 12, 2006 11:01 PM
The good guy in Robert S. Levinson's new mystery, Where the Lies Begin, is an elected member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors....
Posted April 7, 2006 10:13 AM
Three Los Angeles TV stations are fingered in a Center for Media and Democracy report out today critical of news operations that package video releases...
Posted April 6, 2006 11:20 AM
Joseph Wambaugh was (I think) the original LAPD detective to turn novelist. He's certainly the biggest. His books set in and around the department—beginning...
Posted April 4, 2006 01:15 PM
Eric Lynxwiler and I were pleased to give a little talk about Wilshire Boulevard yesterday at Round Table West, a venerable luncheon group that began...
Posted March 31, 2006 12:34 AM
Times columnist Steve Lopez has sold Putnam a book to be called Imagining Beethoven, based on his personal connection to the columns he has been...
Posted March 30, 2006 05:58 PM
Turn the page for items on Dean Singleton's California strategy, Sheriff Baca's Compton strategy, a Saudi prince gets booed at Town Hall Los Angeles, celebrities...
Posted March 22, 2006 12:58 AM
At this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Joan Didion will receive the Robert Kirsch Award previously accepted by Carolyn See, Tony Hillerman, Wallace Stegner...
Posted March 10, 2006 01:34 PM
Runoff for school board...more strangeness around the Ferrari Enzo crash...Rob Reiner's campaign chief steps out of the limelight...L.A.'s blogging pet czar blasts the Animal Defense...
Posted March 8, 2006 01:37 AM
Dutton's North Hollywood and proprietor Davis Dutton are featured on the cover of the Studio City Sun. The bookstore on Laurel Canyon Boulevard is still...
Posted March 7, 2006 05:45 PM
Mr. Kipen goes to West Hollywood... Because I made up a little time on the way to L.A., and because it was just a few...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:17 PM
Technical issues delayed my posting of Mr. Kipen's final dispatches from his drive through California. Here is the penultimate feed, a musing on the the...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:14 PM
Closing in on L.A... I’m now in the central valley of California, the bread basket, passing some flowering pear trees. It's cloudy but in the...
Posted March 2, 2006 04:46 PM
Stuck in traffic, the mind tends to wander... I’m now in Morgan Hill, which used to be a wide spot in the road on El...
Posted March 2, 2006 03:29 PM
Kipen enjoys his time at Stanford, but feels a little deadline pressure... I got back on El Camino Real after Kepler’s and before I knew...
Posted March 2, 2006 02:15 PM
In which the intrepid critic-author-rookie book tourist pushes on toward L.A... Mission accomplished! Kepler’s was very nice. I managed to find a loading dock where...
Posted March 2, 2006 12:48 PM
The former books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle is driving south to appear tonight at Book Soup. He blogs from the road: I’m driving...
Posted March 2, 2006 11:58 AM
Even the Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts has to hit the road if he wants to sell books. And it...
Posted March 2, 2006 12:01 AM
⇒ USC Annenberg awarded the Selden Ring investigative reporting prize to the Washington Post for stories on Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Copley News Service reporters...
Posted February 27, 2006 02:34 PM
Author Steven Barnes is reporting on his blog (picked up by Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow calls the news confirmed) that Octavia Butler has died...
Posted February 26, 2006 04:53 PM
A piece in today's LAT Calendar asks why author Kate Braverman isn't more famous in Los Angeles, her hometown. She is more than happy to...
Posted February 24, 2006 10:23 AM
Full plate for a Friday morning: Plaschke rips the silver from Sasha Cohen's neck, Steve Cooley's least favorite Mexican fugitive is nabbed, the Writers Guild...
Posted February 24, 2006 01:45 AM
Another near-miss at LAX, Vin Scully signs on for three more years (but that's probably it), chiding Erin Aubry Kaplan on race, the editor of...
Posted February 22, 2006 02:40 AM
Josh Getlin, New York bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, is moving over to the Calendar staff to cover the publishing beat. He will...
Posted February 21, 2006 05:10 PM
Murder sprees in Venice (maybe) and the gangland of Panorama City-North Hills...How Darry Sragow came to hire former Roy Romer advisor Glenn Gritzner at Sonnenschein...
Posted February 20, 2006 02:43 PM
Doug Dowie scores some points but not a knockdown, the police commission mums up, "Today" takes the Chino shooting story, a new Nina Zero review...
Posted February 7, 2006 11:42 AM
Former LAT book editor Steve Wasserman, now in New York as Managing Director at the compound-named agency Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson, has...
Posted February 6, 2006 09:54 AM
⇒ Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that the Democrats would have reached more Latino voters had Antonio Villaraigosa given the English-language State of the Union...
Posted February 5, 2006 12:30 PM
LAT book editor David Ulin responds to the James Frey controversy in Sunday's Book Review with an essay that argues the line is fuzzy between...
Posted February 5, 2006 11:50 AM
Joel Stein will be on Oprah at 3 pm on Channel 7, but not to talk about his own controversy of the moment. The LAT...
Posted January 26, 2006 02:48 PM
This is the anniversary of the Metrolink disaster near Glassell Park. Unrelated, we think, fictionating non-fictionist James Frey will guest on Oprah to address the...
Posted January 26, 2006 01:36 AM
On the LA Weekly website and in Thursday's paper: Navahoax Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated...
Posted January 24, 2006 04:36 PM
The Dutton's in North Hollywood is in the midst of a clearance sale and will be gone by mid-March, Davis Dutton tells Daily News columnist...
Posted January 14, 2006 01:30 PM
Saving the convention center (really Staples Center) hotel and the mountain yellow-legged frog, photo op of the day, missing shotguns at the Long Beach PD...
Posted January 13, 2006 03:18 AM
This year's Los Angeles Times Book Festival at UCLA will be April 29-30—no repeat of last year's awkward overlap with Passover, which cost the festival...
Posted January 12, 2006 06:18 PM
On Thursday at 6:30 pm, author Donald H. Wolfe will talk about his new book, The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the...
Posted January 11, 2006 12:59 PM
Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles was at number eight on yesterday's Los Angeles Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list....
Posted December 26, 2005 11:45 AM
Four people were found dead on one day in different places on Skid Row, none of them due to crime. The City Council got the...
Posted December 21, 2005 02:20 AM
From L.A. writer, producer and blogger Lee Goldberg: Dear Friend, I am a former general in the Nigerian army who has managed to steal countless...
Posted December 15, 2005 02:00 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa appears before the police commission at 9:30 am to urge more transparency in use of force investigations by the Inspector General. The LAT...
Posted December 13, 2005 01:53 AM
Public Radio International's Tavis Smiley interviewed condemned Crips founder Tookie Williams by phone on San Quentin's Death Row. Calls are limited to fifteen minutes, so...
Posted December 8, 2005 02:25 AM
At 1:30 Mayor Villaraigosa will announce a deal to scale back the old LAX expansion plan (and settle the lawsuits) at a command audience of...
Posted December 1, 2005 01:16 AM
Patt Morrison reviews Sen. Barbara Boxer's co-written first novel in today's LAT and calls A Time to Run "a passable political thriller of wishful thinking...
Posted November 5, 2005 10:57 AM
Sen. John McCain was on Airtalk with Larry Mantle (and John Rabe) during this morning's fund drive and was almost effusive in his praise for...
Posted October 31, 2005 12:54 PM
Daniel A. Olivas at The Elegant Variation reviews the new release of Chicano, thirty-five years after the landmark book by L.A. journalist Richard Vasquez first...
Posted October 21, 2005 01:12 AM
♦ City Hall lobbyists now have to disclose online their clients, the issues they advocated and how much they got paid every three months. Daily News...
Posted October 19, 2005 02:44 AM
Happy news for the Angel City Press clan. Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History by Ernest Marquez won the Southern California Booksellers Association...
Posted October 16, 2005 02:33 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa today named an "independent peer review panel" to look into the idea of a Wilshire Boulevard subway west of Western Avenue. He wants...
Posted October 14, 2005 04:13 PM
Abel Salas did a nice q-and-a with me pegged to my Wilshire book in Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine. We met at the HMS Bounty and...
Posted October 9, 2005 11:30 PM
♦ Adelphia blames equipment failure related to the Topanga fire for depriving thousands of their "Desperate Housewives" fix. ♦ Mayor Villaraigosa's plan for improving schools falls into...
Posted October 4, 2005 01:40 AM
I have a lot of distractions this Friday, so before it turns into an off day I'm declaring it a day off. No postings unless...
Posted September 30, 2005 12:31 AM
♦ Tempers flared during the ten hours the city council locked itself in to finally select Gerry Miller as the CLA to replace Ron Deaton, Rick...
Posted September 29, 2005 02:14 AM
♦ The school board picked up Supt. Roy Romer's option for another year. ♦ The state medical board opened an investigation of the St. Vincent's physicians who...
Posted September 28, 2005 12:59 AM
Let's hope L.A. smells better today... ♦ Today's LA Weekly declares war on air pollution with a thirty-page special package that looks closely at the threat...
Posted September 22, 2005 01:28 AM
New LAT books editor David L. Ulin sits for the Three Minute Interview at The Elegant Variation, the site by Mark Sarvas that regularly panned...
Posted September 21, 2005 01:29 PM
♦ In today's New York Times, Dennis McDougal reports that the Writers Guild is sitting on millions of dollars owed to writers it can't find—no-names like...
Posted September 19, 2005 12:53 AM
• Michael Kinsley's departure from the LAT rates a bylined story in the New York Times, and to a cynic maybe that alone was good enough...
Posted September 13, 2005 10:05 PM
If you were wondering why Calvin and Hobbes suddenly returned to the LAT comics pages this week, here's what's up. It's to help sell a...
Posted September 8, 2005 03:59 PM
Southern California writers dominate the books section in the current issue of The Nation. In fact, they write the whole thing. David L. Ulin, recently...
Posted September 8, 2005 11:59 AM
On Sunday, Mireya Navarro filled in New York Times readers on the horsey life in L.A. Life is good for Rocket, the urban horse. He...
Posted September 6, 2005 02:58 AM
Welcome to September... • Seems like every gas station between Hollywood and Santa Monica went to $3-plus a gallon overnight. The 76 station at Olympic and...
Posted September 1, 2005 01:43 AM
Every week the Southern California Booksellers Association canvasses its member stores to find out what readers are buying. Here are the top fives from today's...
Posted August 31, 2005 11:58 PM
Here's how it works: You send your resume, writing samples, family info and agent status to an anonymous email address. Then you submit to a...
Posted August 31, 2005 11:11 AM
A little morning briefing... • Brian Cullen, the suspected killer of model Iryna Singerman, was found dead in a Tijuana motel room. Authorities say he killed...
Posted August 31, 2005 02:18 AM
• The L.A. Conservancy threw in the towel on the fight to save the Ambassador Hotel from demolition. The school board votes today on a plan...
Posted August 30, 2005 02:37 AM
• KCAL and KTTV each won nine local Emmy Awards on Saturday night. Among the top honors, KCBS won for best daytime newscast ("CBS2 News" at...
Posted August 29, 2005 01:22 AM
David L. Ulin's choice as Book Editor of the L.A. Times is starting to get good blog reviews. Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation wishes...
Posted August 25, 2005 10:52 AM
David Kipen, the Malibu-dwelling book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the new Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts. Here's...
Posted August 24, 2005 01:36 PM
The Times has named David L. Ulin to run the Book Review. Ulin authored most recently The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the...
Posted August 24, 2005 11:42 AM
Sounds like there are a ton of insider references in Hollywood Hussein, the new novel by Ken Baker, West Coast editor for Us Weekly. Monday's...
Posted August 14, 2005 11:25 PM
September's Vanity Fair has six images from photographer Tim Street-Porter's new entry on the list of books that are titled simply Los Angeles. I don't...
Posted August 11, 2005 12:12 AM
Not just a semi-vacation week, but a travel day too. • The New York Times catches up on David Shaw, General Motors and the Getty probe....
Posted August 3, 2005 12:35 AM
Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW's weekly Bookworm, has been devoting the program to a ten-part series he calls "Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and...
Posted July 28, 2005 01:35 PM
Public Affairs has picked up Bigger Than Life, a collection by L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan. The book is due for publication in Fall...
Posted July 27, 2005 02:20 AM
* Newest additions at the bottom... • Now that's a book party venue. Simon & Schuster threw Sunday's launch reception for Thomas Greanias' Raising Atlantis on...
Posted July 24, 2005 06:21 PM
Former LAT Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman has not yet relocated to New York, where he'll run the office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish...
Posted July 19, 2005 04:53 PM
Summer weekends when there is no fog at the beach are no time to be blogging. But here are some items that fought their way...
Posted July 11, 2005 01:22 AM
• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect...
Posted June 17, 2005 02:11 AM
Jacoba Urist is 28 and worked as a lawyer in the New York office of O'Melveny & Myers for eight months, before quitting two years...
Posted June 16, 2005 01:28 AM
Yeah, the photo is familar. I ran it in March — but it's a great downtown image from 1923, showing the old Farmers and Merchants...
Posted June 15, 2005 02:53 PM
Eric Stone, the Silver Lake author of Wrong Side of the Wall: The Story of Blackie Schwamb, the Greatest Ballplayer in Prison History, is driving...
Posted June 12, 2005 06:59 PM
Staffers close to Antonio Villaraigosa say that Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas is at work on a book about the mayor-elect's rise and the state...
Posted June 9, 2005 10:39 AM
Maria Shriver tells the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove that she had no contact with anyone at NBC about the Schwarzenegger biography by Laurence...
Posted June 7, 2005 12:57 PM
The Times is converting a seat on the editorial board into a three-month visiting fellow slot, as a way to bring in more thinking from...
Posted June 6, 2005 08:54 PM
The LA Weekly's recurring Weekly Literary Supplement has a cover piece on eighteeen local independent presses, sidebars on Tosh Berman’s TamTam Books, Feral House, Tsehai...
Posted June 2, 2005 12:57 AM
Ever heard of Angelo Mozilo? He is chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., and king of the L.A. Business Journal's list of highest-paid local...
Posted May 31, 2005 01:18 AM
That's what the L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime is calling its June 11 conference on writing and selling "killer mysteries." Speakers and panelists include...
Posted May 25, 2005 02:28 AM
The latest Publishers Lunch Weekly says that Ecco will publish Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Edward Humes' next book, Monkey Girl. It's "about the modern-day Scopes...
Posted May 19, 2005 02:26 AM
A feature story about the Chinese student body at San Marino High School has promoted an outcry by students and threats of violence against Pasadena...
Posted May 13, 2005 04:01 PM
The San Francisco Chronicle swoops in with two pieces on Steve Wasserman's departure (which becomes official today) from the editorship of the Los Angeles Times...
Posted May 13, 2005 09:06 AM
LAPD detective Will Beall sold the film rights to his novel LA Rex to Scott Rudin, in a deal put together by by Shari Smiley...
Posted May 12, 2005 02:26 AM
• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if...
Posted May 6, 2005 02:27 PM
• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11...
Posted May 4, 2005 10:39 PM
Fresh off his LAT Book Prize, Evan Wright has sold his next book, The Seed — about his experience at a drug recovery camp in...
Posted May 4, 2005 12:08 PM
Steve Wasserman is moving to New York. Today's press release is below, followed by this afternoon's memo to the Times staff saying a successor "will...
Posted May 3, 2005 11:13 AM
A new website, LAPDauthors.com, compiles links and information on books by almost two dozen current and former Los Angeles Police Department officers, from Bill Parker...
Posted May 3, 2005 10:13 AM
The outgoing L.A. Times Book Review editor may be considering life as a book agent, says Steven Zeitchik on the Publishers Weekly website. [That's confirmed...
Posted May 3, 2005 09:47 AM
This spring Malibu is reading the original Frederick Kohner novella Gidget, inspired by the surfing subculture his daughter Kathy joined at the beach there one...
Posted May 2, 2005 01:59 AM
Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca,...
Posted May 1, 2005 07:42 PM
* Newest at the bottom, including Bill Lockyer out of the race for governor... • Looks like an interesting cover package in LA Weekly on apartment...
Posted April 28, 2005 10:49 AM
Surely you didn't think that baseball outcast Jose Canseco wrote Juiced, his tell-all book on steroids, by himself (if at all.) His uncredited ghostwriter was...
Posted April 25, 2005 02:12 PM
Long but terser-than-usual roundup, due to a books-filled weekend away from the computer. It was great to chat with old friends, new readers, media people...
Posted April 24, 2005 08:32 PM
Continuing the run-up to the book festival, Thursday's Calendar Weekend in the Times runs a piece by Scott Martelle that grasps for the soul of...
Posted April 20, 2005 06:11 PM
LAPD anti-gang investigator Will Beall has sold Riverhead a pair of novels set in South Los Angeles — and Hollywood powerhouse CAA is marketing the...
Posted April 19, 2005 11:09 PM
New items added at the bottom • Dawson's Books, the oldest bookseller in Los Angeles, celebrates its 100th anniversary this month with an exhibit at the...
Posted April 16, 2005 06:24 PM
Judith Regan is vacating New York and moving her publishing and media group to Los Angeles by the end of the year, to concentrate on...
Posted April 12, 2005 03:01 AM
• Tracks magazine has gone on hiatus after a little more than a year, while management pursues "new financing support with the goal of relaunching the...
Posted April 10, 2005 11:58 PM
• Denise Hamilton's newest Eve Diamond novel, Savage Garden, hits the shelves on May 3. There's a Jayson Blair-like subplot swirling around our favorite fictional LAT...
Posted April 6, 2005 04:04 PM
LAT scribe-turned-author Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, The Closers, comes out May 15. On his website, Connelly narrates a five-minute video tour of downtown...
Posted April 3, 2005 11:21 PM
Drex Heikes, recently replaced as editor of the LAT Magazine [actually, he was doing the #1 job from the #2 slot, with the top editor...
Posted March 29, 2005 09:14 PM
Evan Wright, who writes locally for Rolling Stone and others, has picked up this year's J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Generation Kill: Devil Dogs,...
Posted March 28, 2005 02:17 PM
Catching up with some reading and email after a slow online day: • Venice gets the 36 Hours treatment in Friday's NYT Escapes. Janelle Brown has...
Posted March 18, 2005 12:45 AM
Here's some stuff that piled up while I was off. Updated a couple of times: • Gary Webb, the investigative reporter whose suicide has been partly...
Posted March 16, 2005 09:44 AM
In this week's New Yorker, New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch takes a leisurely look at the life and work of the late Los...
Posted March 9, 2005 01:22 AM
David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle, "Day to Day" and KCRW asked each of the Big 5 candidates for mayor to name their favorite...
Posted March 8, 2005 12:29 PM
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,...
Posted March 7, 2005 12:37 PM
Tracy Wilkinson, the L.A. Times bureau chief in Rome, has sold Warner a book on, as Publishers Lunch puts it, "the chief exorcist for the...
Posted March 3, 2005 10:48 PM
Hilary Kaplan of the website The Next American City sits down with D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and the new Where...
Posted February 23, 2005 02:18 AM
Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:03 AM
Updated through the weekend Lesbian chic: Screenwriter and "L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken is profiled in Sunday's NYT Arts section. "In 1999, after writing a...
Posted February 6, 2005 12:58 PM
L.A. Observed reported back in September that the Times had promoted Tim Rutten to the new post of Associate Editor of Features and gave him...
Posted January 31, 2005 02:39 PM
I can't swear that PEN Center USA's website is new, but I just came across it for the first time. Bookmark it as another good...
Posted January 28, 2005 02:00 AM
The deck on the cover story by Brendan Bernhard in the LA Weekly observes that "Bruce Wagner infects his novels with madness, celebrity, name-dropping, drugs...
Posted January 27, 2005 01:50 AM
In a New York Observer diary that begins with a riff on the Hollywood swag season that is upon us and ends with a personal...
Posted January 26, 2005 11:51 PM
Johnny Carson: No shortage of appreciations and retrospectives online and on the air for the late-night pioneer who died Sunday at home in Malibu (of...
Posted January 23, 2005 09:20 PM
On Kitty Felde's Talk of the City yesterday, author Douglas Flamming told some great stories about the little-known history of African Americans in early Los...
Posted January 18, 2005 05:58 PM
Author and journalist Rodger Jacobs hopes to convince the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to name the intersection of Hayworth Avenue and Sunset Boulevard for F....
Posted January 17, 2005 10:45 PM
Short items for a new week: WeHo mayor: BoifromTroy comments on West Hollywood mayor John Duran buying a share of Frontiers, which bills itself as...
Posted January 10, 2005 02:59 PM
The University of California Press has just published a book on Los Angeles politics by four Occidental College faculty members. Two authors of The Next...
Posted January 9, 2005 10:02 PM
There's another book of then-and-now photographs about Los Angeles coming. Los Angeles Views of the Past and Present opens with a foreword by Catherine Mullholland,...
Posted January 7, 2005 02:22 PM
CaliforniaAuthors.com has freshened up its exclusive listing of books written by California authors or about the state. Those coming in 2005 include: Wrong Side of...
Posted January 4, 2005 11:45 PM
On today's L.A. Times op-ed page, author Patrick Moore chides the LAT and the New York Times for not stating in last week's Susan Sontag...
Posted January 4, 2005 02:39 AM
One of Los Angeles' more charming secrets is that there are still families here whose ancestors were original settlers of the pueblo and surrounding Spanish...
Posted January 3, 2005 02:49 AM
Sontag died today [Tuesday] of leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The L.A. Times online obituary by her good friend, Book...
Posted December 28, 2004 12:16 PM
Author Penny Rudolph lives in Albuquerque but she is setting her newest murder mystery Thicker Than Blood here. Her website describes it: In this latter-day...
Posted December 15, 2004 12:04 AM
Updated through the weekend, newest at the bottom • Mayor Jim Hahn and councilman Bernard Parks both opened their 2005 campaign headquarters on Saturday. Hahn's (photo...
Posted December 12, 2004 01:29 AM
Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review rolled out its dignified selection of the "best books of 2004," a fiction list of two dozen works including the...
Posted December 5, 2004 11:21 PM
When the author and former Daily News book editor Bruce Cook died last year, a number of fans posted comments here on the blog. His...
Posted December 3, 2004 09:38 AM
• Milton Bradley did it again. The volatile Dodgers outfielder was cited for disorderly conduct after allegedly interfering with a police traffic stop near Akron, Ohio....
Posted November 29, 2004 05:29 PM
Long before Hollywood came into being, a photographer for motion picture pioneer Thomas Edison traveled the Southern Pacific railroad shooting the first movie footage of...
Posted November 28, 2004 03:47 PM
Steve Wasserman, editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, joined other editors (including Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times) in a roundtable discussion at...
Posted November 24, 2004 01:11 PM
My post on last Sunday's story about the Black Dahlia case in the L.A. Times Magazine prompted the following email from Elisabeth Reynolds. Other thoughts...
Posted November 23, 2004 10:24 PM
Retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel is still trying to convince people that his father was a 1940s serial killer who mutilated Elizabeth Short, the...
Posted November 22, 2004 11:32 AM
California historian Kevin Starr chats with Saul Gonzales tonight at 6:30 on Life and Times on KCET, then tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. sits down for...
Posted November 15, 2004 01:22 PM
Janelle Brown gives downtown the 36 Hours treatment in today's New York Times Escapes section. Chinatown galleries, dinner at Ciudad, Saturday morning at the flower...
Posted November 12, 2004 10:25 AM
From Publishers Lunch Weekly: • Joe Keenan, the author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz and former writer and producer of "Frasier," sells My...
Posted November 9, 2004 09:56 PM
Dutton's warns anyone who comes to see Tom Wolfe at the Brentwood store next Monday that the author has laid down a few ground rules....
Posted November 9, 2004 03:27 PM
The Southern California Booksellers Association gives its 2004 awards to Jamesland by Michelle Huneven for fiction, The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the...
Posted November 9, 2004 10:14 AM
The downtown Long Beach institution with an inventory of one million books celebrates seven decades in business, the last 45 years at 240 Long Beach...
Posted November 1, 2004 12:38 PM
In the new Classic Hollywood issue of Los Angeles magazine (not yet online), Steve Erickson nominates ten classic films that don't belong in the pantheon,...
Posted October 29, 2004 12:22 AM
The Washington Post has a piece today on a problem with the long-awaited Gourmet cookbook produced by Ruth Reichl, who was the L.A. Times food...
Posted October 27, 2004 10:12 AM
Philip Roth will promote The Plot Against America on "The Today Show" Thursday morning. Liz Smith says the taped interview with Katie Couric will be...
Posted October 27, 2004 09:52 AM
Darcy Cosper writes that if you were planning to attend the LA Lit party tomorrow night, don't. "Circumstances have arisen...," she says. Cynthia Ozick's appearance...
Posted October 26, 2004 10:13 PM
Mas Arai, "a diminutive man in his late 60s with a dwindling number of regular customers whose yards he tends with loving care and a...
Posted October 24, 2004 10:17 PM
Dutton's celebrates the opening of its new Beverly Hills store on Sunday. It's at 447 N. Canon Drive, around the corner from Taschen's Beverly Drive...
Posted October 23, 2004 03:37 PM