Happy weekend from Boris Kachka, the books editor at the Los Angeles Times. Starting this week, I’ll be peeking out regularly from behind the curtain to contribute to the Book Club newsletter — sharing the events, pieces and ideas animating book-world in L.A. and beyond. Let me know what you think! You can email me at boris.kachka@latimes.com.
Not so coincidentally, my first contribution falls just at the moment we’re all beginning to pivot from summer doldrums to the panoply of major cultural offerings — including books — that drop after Labor Day.
Kicking off this year’s fall-preview section is Myriam Gurba, whose new collection of essays, “Creep,” ranges from cultural criticism to deeply personal memoir on topics including Joan Didion, Latin American Boom novelist Juan Rulfo, the fog that cloaked the Santa Maria of her childhood and the sexual violence that clouded her early adulthood.
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“You may have heard of Gurba, but it’s unlikely that you know her,” writes Times culture columnist Carolina Miranda. Gurba’s incendiary review in a tiny online journal crystallized the backlash to Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt” as an inauthentic representation of Mexico’s struggles with emigration and drug cartels — and sent shock waves all the way up to Oprahland.
Miranda met with Gurba (in a perfect match of journalist and subject) and found a writer very ready to move on from “American Dirt.” There was only room for so much in the piece, so I asked Miranda for some impressions and outtakes.
“The ‘American Dirt’ controversy may have given Gurba prominence, but I think it also had the effect of overshadowing her work,” Miranda said. “And that is too bad, because her essays can be so darkly funny and artfully constructed and she has a voice that defies how women — especially Latinx women — are expected to write/sound.”
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
Gurba told Miranada she found inspiration in Sylvia Plath’s writing — ”I was a teenage Goth and she’s our muse” — but also in her work ethic. “She was on a schedule,” Gurba told Miranda. A long bout with COVID led to a routine of writing in bed — in homage to another muse. “I was like ‘Omigod this is so Frida.”
Didion is a more complicated influence on Gurba than Plath or Frida Kahlo; Gurba devotes a piece to calling out the iconic late essayist’s erasure of California’s Mexican presence, but she still acknowledges a debt. “I’m very in love with California,” Gurba told Miranda. “I wanted to honor that admiration and that affection I had for this place and I knew I could do that once I encountered Didion’s work.”
I’ll leave final words to Miranda on getting to know the real Gurba:
“What most impresses me about her work is how she’s willing to break with the ways in which people write about topics like sexual assault. Gurba does away with that. She uses humor; she can be crude; she will go places we think but don’t articulate. ‘We fall into habits with storytelling,’ she told me. ‘When those habits don’t serve us, we need to break those habits. … Let’s break the bones and reset them.’”
“Creep” will be out Sept. 5. Gurba will conclude a tour of major cities in three hometown venues: Diesel in Brentwood on Sept. 21, Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena on Sept. 25 and a final event in Long Beach on Sept. 27 at the best-named bookstore in L.A. County: Page Against the Machine.
More fall, more previews
Speaking of Sylvia Plath, she was a major inspiration for another fall book featured in the Times, Safiya Sinclair’s “How to Say Babylon.” Recounting her upbringing in a Rastafari family in Montego Bay, the award-winning poet is both lyrical and unsparing in describing the psychological and physical brutalities of her father’s patriarchal version of the religion. But as she tells Mark Athitakis, it took Sinclair a decade to find the right perspective on her upbringing. “Instead of ending on a wound,” she says, “… I really wanted the book to be written from a place of hope where I could find it.”
Daniel Gumbiner, in his home in Oakland, is the author of the forthcoming fall novel “Fire in the Canyon.”
(Marissa Leshnov / For The Times)
Disaster recovery is becoming a requisite skill in an age of climate crisis. This urgent theme runs through Lorraine Berry’s profile of Daniel Gumbiner, author of the novel “Fire in the Canyon” and editor of the newly reincarnated magazine the Believer. The novel follows a family led by a former pot-grower struggling to go legit in the Sierra foothills — until a wildfire threatens to destroy their second chance. The Believer, as we’ve covered in The Times, was recently resold to its founding publisher, McSweeney’s, after a troubled run at UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. In both situations, the solutions to catastrophe are obvious: resilience and community.
A Hunter S. Thompson musical? Yes, it’s a crazy idea, and staff writer Ashley Lee breaks down exactly why composer-lyricist Joe Iconis was the right person for the job. “The Untitled, Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” starring Gabriel Ebert as “the esteemed, eccentric, irreverent, intoxicated, gun-wielding godfather of gonzo journalism,” will open in October at the La Jolla Playhouse — with Broadway well in its sights.
Bonnie Garmus is quite happy with Brie Larson’s take on the main character in “Lessons in Chemistry,” the upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of her blockbuster novel about a woman chemist who becomes a TV chef in the 1950s. But Garmus is honest about her decision to stay away from the script-writing process. “I wanted to keep everything intact,” she tells Yvonne Villarreal in the course of a wide-ranging Q&A. “This is why I had to remove myself.”
30 books we can’t wait to read this fall: “Fire in the Canyon” and “How to Say Babylon” hit shelves Oct. 3, but that’s just one week. The Times gathered five contributing critics to recommend 15 works of fiction and 15 more of nonfiction. There are new historical novels from Zadie Smith, Alice McDermott and Jesmyn Ward; rising stars include Bryan Washington, C Pam Zhang and Benjamin Labatut; Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sly Stone and Werner Herzog will soon publish memoirs.
And 10 more for September: Bethanne Patrick’s monthly dispatch on goodies to come ramps up for fall publishing season: new novels from Ben Fountain and Anne Enright, bittersweet stories by Yiyun Li and nonfiction on mental illness, AR-15s and why it matters that Naomi Klein is sometimes confused with Naomi Wolf.
Klein will pop into town to discuss “Doppelganger,” her book on the phenomenon, with Cory Doctorow at the Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium on Sept. 6. Check out this handy mnemonic popular on Twitter/X, as well as New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai’s terrific profile in that paper’s magazine.
The week in books
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “The Fraud,” examines populist anger through the lens of historical fiction.
(Ben Bailey-Smith)
It’s Zadie Time. Zadie Smith’s new novel, “The Fraud,” out just after Labor Day, is ostensibly a historical novel, though former Times books editor Carolyn Kellogg wouldn’t call it that. The account of a 19th century British trial over a butcher’s claim to be the heir to a great fortune captures the popular chaos of that moment through the eyes of a crafty narrator. Kellogg picks out the clear parallels to our own era of populist adulation of an obvious fraud; she deems the novel a “Dickensian delight” and so much more. Smith will come to L.A. Sept. 20 for a conversation with David Ulin at Aratani Theater downtown.
When Emma Donoghue was nominated for an Oscar after adapting her own bestselling novel, “Room,” it might have given readers the wrong impression of her work — which tends toward effortlessly vivid, deeply researched historical fiction. She talked to Times contributor Chris Vognar about her latest novel, “Learned by Heart,” which expands on an early boarding school romance in the life of pioneering queer writer Anne Lister.
Angie Kim follows up her bestselling novel “Miracle Creek” with “Happiness Falls,” about a boy who knows something about his father’s disappearance but literally can’t express it; he suffers from Angelman syndrome. Kim, a lawyer-turned-consultant-turned-novelist, tells Bethanne Patrick how she channeled her own experience of linguistic isolation — her preteen years as a South Korean immigrant who knew no English.
Nikhil Goyal is another career-switcher, of a sort. As a former policy advisor on education to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), he helped implement parts of the American Rescue Plan and worked on its failed sequel, Build Back Better. Now he’s turned his research into immersive journalism, following three Latino teenagers in a last-chance reform high school in Philadelphia. He talked to Stuart Miller about what he learned by writing “Live to See the Day.”
Author-historian Jill Lepore, whose new essay collection “The Deadline” drew an admiring Times review from Jonathan Russell Clark, has published one of the compendium’s most personal pieces — about her bookish, working-class father — in the New York Review of Books.
The New York Times has an “Essential Guide to Ursula K. LeGuin,” prefaced by a quick, handy biographical sketch of the influential sci-fi bender of genres and genders from Shreya Chattopadhyay.
Walter Isaacson is the author of the biography “Elon Musk,” which will be published Sept. 12.
(Simon & Schuster)
Next Book Club: Make way for Musk
Walter Isaacson has undoubtedly had a busy few months; his biography of Elon Musk is out Sept. 12, and, well, when do you stop revising? We’ll find out soon, and just in time to bone up for the Oct. 1 L.A. Times Book Club. Isaacson, in his only L.A. appearance, will speak with Times columnist Anita Chabria at the El Segundo Performing Arts Center.
At the risk of overhyping a biography of a hype-man, I did hear this from a friend of Isaacson: “I can’t imagine any modern biographer (and maybe none in history including Boswell) has ever had as much access to a subject.” Get tickets to the Book Club, and watch this space for more print coverage.
Bookstore faves: Skylight Books
Every couple of weeks, we’ll ask an L.A. bookseller what they’re selling and what they’re loving. This time: Mary Williams, general manager of Skylight Books in Los Feliz.
Mary Williams, manager and co-owner of Skylight Books.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
What’s flying off your shelves?
Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” is still our bestselling book, even months after its release. Our top-selling fiction book is Emma Cline’s “The Guest,” and L.A.-based authors of present and past, like Sarah Rose Etter (“Ripe”), Rosecrans Baldwin (“Everything Now”), Edan Lepucki (“Time’s Mouth”) and Eve Babitz (“Slow Days, Fast Company”), have been doing great this summer.
What are your customers asking for?
Not one consistent thing (except for Rick Rubin!). The Claire Keegan novellas (“Foster” and “Small Things Like These”), both so perfectly bite-size, have been doing well with those looking for a slice of perfection to read on a lazy summer afternoon. The brand-new novel from James McBride, “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” has started off with a bang. And “All About Love” by bell hooks is a perennial favorite.
What are you recommending and why?
Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto.” There’s a killer sentence on every page.
What are you looking forward to that isn’t out yet?
Definitely “The Vaster Wilds” by Lauren Groff. I’ve never read anything of hers that I didn’t love.