author

Tomi Adeyemi, the author of the bestselling fantasy “Children of Blood and Bone,” isn’t planning to see the forthcoming film adaptation — even though she co-wrote it.

Over the weekend, the Nigerian American author posted a video on TikTok addressing fans who have been asking her the same question, “Why don’t you post about the adaptation of your first film adaptation anymore?”

“There is a reason I will not post anything about the adaptation of my work,” the author wrote in what appear to be screenshots of a group chat. “I have not seen the film, and I will not watch it.”

The adaptation of the first installment of Adeyemi’s “Legacy of Orïsha” fantasy trilogy is slated to hit theaters in January 2027. Gina Prince-Bythewood — who wrote and directed “Love & Basketball” and helmed “The Woman King” — is directing. The film stars Amandla Stenberg, Thuso Mbedu, Tosin Cole, Damson Idris, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Regina King, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Viola Davis.

Alongside the screenshots of her comments in the group chat, she shared a February 2025 exchange with Stenberg that shows the author severing ties with the actor.

Adeyemi shared only her final message to Stenberg, which reads, “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me.” That exchange is followed by a notification that she blocked Stenberg, who plays Princess Amari in the upcoming fantasy flick.

The message from Stenberg that preceded Adeyemi’s reply is not shown in full.

Stenberg, who played Rue in “Hunger Games,” Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give” and, recently, Verosha “Osha” Aniseya and Mae-ho “Mae” Aniseya in Disney’s “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” had been getting flack from readers of the series, who claimed colorism was an issue while casting the movie.

In February 2025, Stenberg posted a since-deleted nine-minute TikTok addressing the controversy and told followers that Adeyemi had given the actor her blessing when cast as the series’ princess.

“I am four months into training for ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ and I am getting my ass whooped,” Stenberg joked in the video, per BET.

“This year was mostly defined for me, honestly, by contending with what it felt like to receive racist death threats just for existing in the ‘Star Wars’ universe, and that was a really difficult thing for me to move through,” she continued. “But honestly, it feels so much more painful for me to feel like I’m at odds with my own community.”

Stenberg said that she considers her skin tone when navigating her career choices and would “never go after a role” she didn’t feel well suited for. “I know that colorism is an insidious system that relentlessly impacts every facet of entertainment.”

The actor continued that it was actually a meeting with the “Children of Blood and Bone” author that gave her the confidence to pursue the role.

“I had the opportunity to meet Tomi, the novelist, for the first time. … And she goes, ‘Amandla, I want you to know that when you were a little girl and you were cast as Rue in “The Hunger Games,” and people said that Rue’s death wouldn’t be as sad because you’re a Black girl — that inspired me to write this series so that Black girls like you and Black girls of all shades could have a story written about them,’” Stenberg said in the video. “We started crying, and I said to myself, ‘God wants me here.’”

Representatives for Stenberg, Adeyemi and Prince-Bythewood did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Mothers and daughters are often caught in a double bind: biologically kindred yet divided by competing claims on identity and selfhood. In Cay Kim’s debut novel “The Future Perfect”, that bond is tangled by cultural discontinuity.

The novel’s mother has been reared in a South Korean household that places a high value on academic rigor and head-down discipline. She devotes all of her energy to grinding that work ethic into her daughter (Kim’s characters are unnamed), who is shuttled between her native Seoul and Minnesota, and grapples with finding the one true way for her to navigate the world.

I spoke with Kay, a native of Seoul who relocated to the States, about mothers, daughters and the unstoppable power of language.

✍️ Author Chat

Author Cay Kim

(Margaryta Bushkin)

This is your first novel. Did you start writing it in college?

This actually originated from a long poem that I wrote. I didn’t know I was going to turn it into a novel at the time. I just had the idea, the summer before my MFA, to expand each stanza into a chapter. That made the writing process relatively easier for me because it was such a straightforward process. I already had the frame of it.

Even though the novel is grounded in a very specific milieu — that of a child who is ensnared between Korean and American cultures — it’s very much a universal story, of a mother who feels the burden of raising a perfect daughter and is resentful when the daughter rebels against her ministrations.

It’s something that occupies so much of my head space. I wanted the mother to be portrayed as a victim of her society. The way that people choose to parent isn’t something that they learn in a vacuum. She has deep-seated beliefs about suffering and self-abnegation. But there’s a point at which an act of service risks inverting into a selfish act.

A big concept for the mother is endurance.

Exactly. It’s a generational trauma the mother is dealing with. She has had such ingrained beliefs passed down to her, and she’s unable to recognize when her methods result in her own mental and physical splintering, as well as her daughter’s.

Is it a function of the mother’s ego, or some kind of twisted narcissism?

She is putting herself through so much suffering because she believes she is doing the right thing. And there’s an extent to how much you can excuse that self-unawareness.

Yet despite this, the daughter feels tied to her mother, even when they are at loggerheads and she is living thousands of miles away.

The mother is such an integral part of the daughter’s consciousness that severance is impossible. They have a shared history and the daughter wants to share things with her mother, even when they are fighting. When she feels lonely at Stanford, the daughter verbalizes the fact that she has learned loneliness from her mother.

There are a lot of scenes in the novel tied to meals prepared by either the mother or the grandmother.

I do a lot of thinking about how cooking plays a role in our everyday lives. It’s something that people can spend hours preparing, only to have it disappear. It’s her mother’s domain. It is so opposed to the way the father thinks, which is very much tied to capital, to amassing and saving money.

The daughter really comes into herself when she is exposed to American culture.

Minnesota is where she acquires language for the first time. Language is so important to this character. Then she is shuffled back to Korea, and this disjunction is the thing that propels her narrative development. But as the story goes on, the daughter reaches a point where she has such mastery of expression and that is a power she acquires.

“The Future Perfect” is written in a very precise and concise way. What fiction writers do you admire, or who may have served as models?

I love writers whose use of language jolts the mind. My favorite writer of all time is Marguerite Duras. “The Lover” reads so easy but when you pay attention to the language, it’s very precisely engineered. I also love Clarice Lispector, for the way she expresses human spirituality.

Is this book drawn from your life? I ask that only because your protagonist winds up attending Stanford, as you did.

When I first started learning how to write, my teacher always used to say that writing shouldn’t necessarily contain the factual truth, but it should have emotional truth. And I feel like that has been the core of my writing practice throughout my life, and that even for those that don’t think consciously about it, that’s often the case.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Country music performer Kenny Chesney sat down with Holly Gleason, the co-author of his new memoir, to talk about writing the book.

(Jill Trunnell)

The state of Ohio is celebrating America’ssemiquincentennial by offering a statewide reading project that features Toni Morrison’s fictional oeuvre, thus providing a vivid alternative history of the country. “Not only does her work re-center African Americans in the story of our country, it also tackles major events from our founding, through slavery, to the impact of Jim Crow, to the great migration and beyond,” Literary Cleveland Executive Director Matt Weinkam tells Leigh Haber.

Chef-Podcaster-Author etc. Eddie Huang has written his first novel, a lightly autobiographical twirl through the foodie-verse called “Come Undone.“ “This book was very much about breaking up with your family to start your own,” he tells Mariella Rudi.

At a time when teen literacy is declining, Rudi polled five high school teachers to find out what books students should be reading now.

Gabrielle Korn’s novel “Long Island Girls” is a Millennial coming-of-age story that drips with Y2K nostalgia and the ways in which youthful optimism and hope can drift into middle-aged cynicism. “One thing I wanted to capture about early adulthood is the constant humiliation,” Korn tells Emily St. Martin. “The thing about being young is that people are so resentful of your youth, but you don’t understand that it’s resentment, you just think everybody hates you.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

The Loved Ones bookshop

(James Alan Duran)

J.C. Gabel, the owner of local book imprint Hat and Beard, has opened a new bookshop called The Loved One, and it already feels like an essential anchor for Historic Filipinotown’s burgeoning cultural scene. The store, which is also a gallery and events space, is expansive (5,000 square feet) and inviting, with patinated hardwood floors and a wall of picture windows that bathes the interior in natural light. I spoke with Gabel about his future plans for his new space.

What is the mission statement of The Loved One?

The Loved One reflects our ongoing commitment to independent publishing, original exhibitions, and the belief that books (and ideas within them) are best experienced in conversation with one another, in-person, whenever possible. In our post-post digital age, the serendipitous nature of organically curating physical objects is, in a sense, the point of the entire operation. We envision The Loved One as a space where everyone can exchange ideas, free from data-mining tech overlords, AI slop and click-bait tomfoolery.

What kind of books are you selling?

We’re going to focus mostly on new books about the visual arts, but we’ll also have several curated tables of fiction and nonfiction organized by subject and publisher, to highlight and promote the work of publishers we admire. Moreover, our genre-based book clubs and live author events — which will run weekly by August — will also influence the titles carried in the shop, too. Lastly, we’re bringing back Big Table, our books and conversation podcast — which we started with Dub Lab during COVID — now that we have a physical space to host and record these conversations.

It’s a very large space. What are your plans for it?

We are really keeping the space as modular as possible so we can change the interior of both storefronts to exhibit art and photography, as well as host author events, artist talks, live music, comedy, book clubs, etc.

You’re also a publisher, with Hat and Beard. How will that tie into The Loved One?

At least half of the arts programming I bring to the table will tie back to Hat and Beard’s original publications; the other half will be curated by Aubrie Wienholt and her team, working in tandem with myself and the H&B family. H&B will, of course, continue to program events all over the city regularly, but it will be nice to have a storefront again for the publishing house. We also intend to sell our rare and limited edition bundles of our books at TLO. There will finally be a physical space where one can come see this work in person before purchasing.

What about Historic Filipinotown? The Loved One is such a cool addition to what is becoming a vital cultural hub for L.A.

We are honored and thrilled to be working out of Historic Filipinotown. So much has opened in and around this neighborhood since COVID. It is a really vibrant community. There is a great camaraderie among all the small businesses in and around our cluster off Temple Street and Glendale Boulevard. Our immediate neighbors, Couplet Coffee and the bar 1642, are both actively involved in our programming monthly: Couplet has sent over a pop-up barista to serve coffee and tea at our literary events, and most of our after-parties are now held at 1642, two doors down.

Jazz star Jamie Cullum is one of the guest mentors on the new series of Channel 4’s The Piano

Jamie Cullum has been in the spotlight for decades.

The jazz star was just 20 when he reportedly produced his first album, Heard It All Before, in 1999 with just £480 and only 500 copies made.

Since then he’s enjoyed huge success as a singer and musician, releasing more albums, performing all over the world and amassing awards. The 46-year-old, who was born in Essex and grew up in Wiltshire, is also renowned for fronting The Jazz Show With Jamie Cullum on BBC Radio 2.

Fans will be able to catch Jamie on the new series of Channel 4’s The Piano, which returns on Sunday, July 12 for its fourth run. Hosted by Claudia Winkleman and Mika, the programmke searches for the UK’s best amateur piano players and Jamie will be one of the guest mentors along with Jools Holland and Hiromi.

Ahead of the show, we take a look at Jamie’s life away from the cameras, including his model wife, famous reation and his real height.

Supermodel wife and children

Jamie has been married to supermodel Sophie Dahl since 2010 and they have two daughters.

Sophie started her career as a teenage fashion model and was famously discovered by British Vogue. She was renowned for her curves and was sought after by the top designers.

She’s gone on to have a successful career as an author, journalist and TV presenter.

Speaking to Red in 2020, Jamie opened up about meeting his wife.

He said: “We just really hit it off. I thought, ‘Man, that is a cool woman,’ but I didn’t really entertain anything else. We were both in relationships and she wasn’t living in the UK, so we were just friends at first.

“Then, a couple of years later, she moved back here and that’s when our friendship became something else.

“We had a very immediate connection. While we both worked in a public way, our lives were purposefully quite private.”

Links to famous author

Sophie is the granddaughter of the late great author Roald Dahl who is renowned for children’s classics like Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox and Matilda. Sophie was said to be the inspiration behind his work, The BFG.

He was born in Cardiff to Norwegian parents and served in the Royal Air Force. His first children’s book was The Gremlins, published in 1943, about mischievous little creatures that were part of Royal Air Force folklore

As well as his children’s books, he also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, which often blended humour and innocence with surprising plot twists.

Roald died in 1990, long before his granddaughter met and married Jamie.

Height

Seven years ago, Jamie released the album Taller, which some people saw as rather ironic as Jamie, himself, has described himself as “short”.

When chatting to The Mirror at the time, the star, who stands at around 5ft 4in, spoke about being “short” and how people seemed to notice it more after he tied the knot with the 6ft tall Sophie.

He said: “It is something I’ve been gently teased about my whole life, particularly when I married a taller woman.

“But I’ve taken something that could be my vulnerable spot and used it to say something.”

The Piano returns to Channel 4 on Sunday, July 12 at 9pm

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — He’s a prize-winning presidential historian who wrote an entire biography of Thomas Jefferson. But even Jon Meacham needs to think for a moment before defining what it means to be a “Jeffersonian.”

“Well for a long time, before the civil rights movement, it meant to be more inclined toward states’ rights and limited government,” says Meacham, the National Constitution Center’s Semiquincentennial Scholar. He then pauses, and asks to start over, recalling how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt evoked Jefferson as an “apostle of liberty” who would have supported the U.S. fighting the Nazis in World War II.

You could define it in so many ways. Historians may argue over the “greatness” of individual founders, but as the country’s 250th anniversary approaches many agree that no one’s life and work resonates like Jefferson’s. He embodied the “very best and the very worst” of the United States, Meacham says.

And a great deal in between.

America’s birth is rooted in his most profound contradiction — the man who proclaimed that “all men are created equal” while being a slaveholder to the end of his life. But Jefferson advanced and explored both sides of so many issues and world views that have defined the country’s path: agrarian self-sufficiency and worldly innovation, pluralism and separatism, limited government and dreams of an “empire of liberty.”

“There is no more malleable figure in early America than Jefferson,” says Andrew Burstein, a professor of history at Louisiana State University who has summed up Jefferson’s legacy in a book he published a decade ago: “Democracy’s Muse: How Thomas Jefferson became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead.”

“There have been times in American history when just about everyone would have considered themselves ‘Jeffersonian,’” says historian Peter S. Onuf, author of numerous works on Jefferson. “Yet even at those moments, he was a controversial figure.”

It’s an argument without end

Jefferson’s legacy is debated even in settings that owe their existence to him.

On the campus of the University of Virginia, the college he founded and regarded as a signature achievement, stands a memorial to thousands of enslaved people who lived and worked there.

At Monticello, the mountaintop estate and plantation outside of Charlottesville where Jefferson lived when not in public office, a banner near the entrance features the Declaration and the caption, “After all, our guy wrote it.” But once on the grounds, reminders of his enslavement of hundreds are found throughout, from its “Burial Ground for Enslaved People” that includes dozens of graves to an exhibit dedicated to Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson is widely believed to have had six children.

Monticello’s director of historic interpretation and audience engagement, Brandon Dillard, cites the staff’s mission “to tell unflinching stories of America’s complex origins and fitful progress toward the ideals Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Jefferson regarded Monticello as a refuge from the times, but the times inevitably find their way here. A guide on the gardens and grounds tour points out that a foldable plant Jefferson tried and failed to grow — the “Mimosa Pudica,” or “sensitive plant” — now thrives because of climate change. The visitors’ center is LEED Gold-certified for green energy, Dillard says, and geothermal systems have been installed in other buildings for temperature control.

Monticello raises questions old and new about race. Virtually all of the guides are white, an issue Dillard notes is prevalent nationwide. A recent survey released by the American Association for State and Local History found that around just 10% of workers at museums, historic sites and historical societies were nonwhite and that many “Latino/a/x, and multiracial respondents reported higher rates of discrimination and harassment.” (Dillard declined to answer in detail the experience of guides of color at Monticello.)

There is a Jefferson for every occasion

Jefferson’s contradictions date back through much of American history; he was claimed by both sides of the Civil War and both sides of the civil rights movement.

Nineteenth-century Confederates and 20th-century segregationists cited his defense of states’ rights, while Abraham Lincoln and civil rights leaders emphasized Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. In the space of a few months in 1963, he would be invoked in the inaugural speech of Alabama Gov. George Wallace as he vowed defiance of federal efforts to integrate the state’s schools and by the Rev. Martin Luther King as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.

Roosevelt enlisted Jefferson as an ideological ally for the New Deal (the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., began as a New Deal project) and a former New Dealer-turned conservative, President Reagan, held up Jefferson decades later as a foe of wasteful spending. Jefferson has been cited often by free-speech advocates for his crucial support for the Bill of Rights, while President Trump has quoted Jefferson’s 1807 lament that “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper” as an implicit endorsement of his modern war against “fake news.”

Jefferson has also been placed on either side of today’s divide over immigration. Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” cites his well-documented belief in colonization for Black people as inspiration for contemporary scapegoating and xenophobia. Meanwhile, at a time when the Trump administration is aggressively trying to restrict immigration and even denaturalize some citizens, Monticello continues its decades-old July 4 naturalization ceremonies, with Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger scheduled as this year’s keynote speaker.

“As new citizens share their personal stories every Fourth of July,” Dillard says, “we are reminded that the values uplifted in that Declaration are values toward which people from all backgrounds aspire.”

Many Monticello visitors, many reasons to visit

Monticello attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. They come for many reasons.

Erin Porter is a Virginia native in her 40s who until recently had never been to Monticello and wanted to cross it off her bucket list, while Nathan Jaycox of Connecticut is a former nuclear engineer now seeking to absorb history for a class he hopes to teach. Duane Cromwell, a longtime resident of Vancouver, was here on a very personal mission.

Cromwell, 70, grew up in Greenville, S.C., where she was taught that slavery was “an economic necessity” and learned nothing about Jefferson’s history of enslavement. In town last month for a family reunion, she arrived at Monticello anxious to get past the “whitewashed Southern version” and the myths of evil “yankees” and the victimized rebels who defied them.

“Did you (ever) notice kudzu growing up over trees and buildings while in the South? It is an invasive plant brought to the region to control erosion. Well, it is like racism. It is pervasive, part of the horizon, always there but soon you don’t notice it,” she says.

“Having said that, I do think that people do go along better, there is more interactions, relationships than when I was growing up. Everyone needs each other and in the South, there is a great sense of humor and friendliness that help people navigate the awkward moments.”

For Cromwell, Monticello was a chance to educate herself, to become a better person — and, like countless others before her, using Thomas Jefferson as a prism.

“Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

The 1970s were thick with New Age spiritual fads and movements, from the benign (crystals) to the unspeakably toxic and cultic (Jonestown). Somewhere in the middle of that woo-woo spectrum lies the work of Carlos Castaneda. A UCLA anthropology grad student turned self-appointed guru, Castaneda became a counterculture icon with the publication of his first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, purporting to find enlightenment via psychedelic mushrooms, peyote and the cryptic musings of Don Juan, an Indigenous spirit guide.

That book, and the stream of his that followed, seduced millions of readers, plenty of them no doubt hoping that with the proper dosage they, like Castaneda, might also transform into a crow and soar across the purple skies of the dusty Southwest. That Castaneda’s books were largely flimflam isn’t in dispute. But Ru Marshall’s hefty biography, “American Trickster,” reveals the depth of his deception — and, just as potently, how easily people can be taken in by it.

“He didn’t lie out of convenience or opportunism,” Marshall writes. “He lied because he loved to. Lying was, for him, an art, and he did it exceptionally well.” This is a 1970s story, but anybody in the present can relate.

Born in Peru (not Brazil, as he often claimed) in 1925 (not a decade later, as he often claimed), Castaneda demonstrated no particular intellectual promise. But in the mid-1950s, first at L.A. City College and later at UCLA, he developed an affection for writing, philosophy and history. While pursuing a graduate degree in anthropology in the ’60s, he grew enchanted with Buddhism, Theosophy, existentialism and Native American spirituality — all key elements of the spiritualist goulash he would eventually cook up for his books. His timing was impeccable: From Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments to transcendental meditation, non-Christian religion and drugs fueled the zeitgeist. And Castaneda’s manuscript of “The Teachings” spoke effervescently about both.

Author Ru Marshall

(Allen Frame)

It hardly seemed to matter that the book also demonstrated his ignorance of both: He had little understanding of psychoactive drugs (you don’t smoke shrooms, dude), and there was nothing meaningfully Yaqui about Don Juan. Still, the book — and their follow-ups “A Separate Reality” and “Journey to Ixtlan” — were massive bestsellers. Castaneda made it to the cover of Time magazine. His work provided George Lucas with more than a little inspiration for his master-and-student space opera, “Star Wars.” And he became a target for parodists, the surest sign of fame. Donald Barthelme satirized him in his story “The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge.”

That the ’70s American psyche, brutalized by Watergate and Vietnam, found solace in Castaneda’s sophistry isn’t surprising. More shocking is that the academic establishment tolerated it too: UCLA awarded him a PhD in anthropology with “Ixtlan” serving as his dissertation. Castaneda, Marshall writes, made an end run around the department’s Yaqui expert, with the other committee members overly impressed by his au courant melange of fieldwork and gauzy ruminations, despite the fact that his timelines and grasp of mycology didn’t make sense. “If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so,” Don Juan mused. Perversely, Castaneda’s success proved him right.

“American Trickster,” at more than 600 pages, is at once more information about Castaneda than any reader needs, and not nearly enough. Marshall (who in 2006 published a novel, “A Separate Reality,” inspired by Castaneda), has gone to ground on every element of his subject’s life, from his upbringing in Peru to his celebrity (he’d find his way into the orbits of former Gov. Jerry Brown, Federico Fellini and Oliver Stone at various points), to the years before his death of liver cancer in 1998. By that point he’d focused his attention on Tensegrity, a modified martial arts practice demonstrated at pricey workshops, and gathered a host of followers, mostly women, who he played against each other and psychologically abused in various ways.

But who did this guy think he was? How did he come to invent such a strange spiritual system, and develop the nerve to sell it both to mainstream publishers and the academic establishment? Why did he keep a box of knives under his bed? “Carlos acted in the zone where the trickery of the cult leader and that of the literary hoaxer (and the anthropological hoaxer) overlap,” Marshall writes. But all the biographical detail brings us no closer to what made him such a successful triple threat of eyewash.

Perhaps a book that couched Castaneda’s story more deeply in the context of the ’70s counterculture and the nature of cults past and present would make his story clearer. But perhaps not — his tale is inevitably something to wonder at, evidence of humans’ capacity to spin a yarn that flatters our egos and urge to understand our spiritual selves, and to buy into what’s spun.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that one of the first people to publicly sound the alarm about Castaneda was a novelist. In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review questioning a credulous review of Castaneda’s books. (The New York Times had spiked a more skeptical one, Marshall reports.) “It is quite possible that Don Juan represents a ‘non-ordinary’ reality so strange to me that I cannot accept it, and must try to reason my way out of believing,” she wrote. “But I don’t think so… I’d be very interested in whether other readers share my bewilderment.” No doubt others did. But what if bewilderment was exactly what they were seeking?

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

For 45 years, in his novels, short stories and essays, James Ellroy has been creating the definitive under-history of his Los Angeles hometown, mapping in his work the subterranean currents of power, corruption, sex and lies that have shaped the polity of the city. Ellroy’s latest is another compelling entry in his ongoing project.

“Red Sheet” is a multilayered American epic that blurs fact and fiction, a deep dive into anti-Communist paranoia, from the corridors of City Hall to the dank precincts of the LAPD. The novel also marks the return of Fred Otash, a real-life Hollywood fixer whom the author has featured in previous novels, including his last book, “The Enchanters.” I recently talked to Ellroy about Otash, L.A. in the ‘60s and L.A. today.

✍️ Author Chat

Freddie Otash has been something of a twisted muse for you. In “Red Sheet,” Otash is an LAPD detective trying to smoke out Communist sleeper cells in Kennedy-era L.A. He was, in fact, a real person, a notorious Hollywood fixer. How did you first become aware of him?

I had seen a documentary about his specious role in the cover-up caper surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s death. I’d been hearing about him for years, and then I created the Jack Vincennes character who worked for scandal magazines in my book “L.A. Confidential,” played by the scurrilous Kevin Spacey in the vastly overrated movie of the same name.

Did you ever meet him?

Years ago I met a producer named James B. Harris, who produced all the old Stanley Kubrick movies and had optioned one of my early books called “Blood on the Moon.” I asked him if he knew Freddie Otash, and he said everyone in Hollywood knew Freddie Otash. I was planning my novel “American Tabloid” and so I arranged to meet him. He was unpleasant and charmless and way past his prime. I spent some time with him in Miami, where he was living in a place called the Jockey Club, and I had to listen to him talk about his many conquests of the world’s most beautiful and desirable women. I didn’t believe a word of it.

But he did have useful stories, I’m assuming.

Otash I used for the character Pete Bondurant in “American Tabloid.” We entered into a deal whereby I would pay him 10% of what Knopf was paying me in exchange for him keeping his mouth shut. He has become that valuable literary artifact: the great detective.

“Red Sheet: A Novel” by James Ellroy

(Knopf)

Your book deals with a piece of legislation called the Rumford Act that would tear down the city’s racist racial housing covenants in 1963, but the act in ’62 had enemies in high places, namely Mayor Sam Yorty and his power base. You were 14 in L.A. in 1962. Did you feel this racial tension?

I remember vividly how the world was changing. I knew there was de facto segregation in housing. I remember Nixon’s pathetic campaign for governor in 1962. But I remember racial barriers breaking down, particularly in school. Just talking with Black kids in school, because why wouldn’t you? And I had been this dumb, bigoted kid.

What’s interesting about the characters in your book is that their ideological alliances are quite fluid, depending on the circumstances. Communists are married to John Birchers, who may be, in fact, red-diaper babies, and so on.

People are endlessly complex. Going back to Freddie Otash again. He knew Tom Bradley in the ‘40s, when Bradley was a cop. And Freddie becomes a bag man for the civil rights movement, and the Rumford Act in particular. He’s about the most unlikely guy you would expect to support civil rights. I wanted to show [how] complex human beings and their beliefs can be, and this book is a primer on that.

You are so closely associated with Los Angeles, and you lived here for most of your life. Why do you live in Denver now?

Helen Knode is my all-time life partner, who is also my second ex-wife. Ten years ago, we decided to get back together, but she was living in Colorado. She came up with the idea of me getting a loft in her building, and we would have the keys to each other’s places, and that’s why I did it. I like it in Denver, though it’s quite hot at the moment.

Do you miss L.A? What are you feeling about the city now?

I was just there on my book tour. I feel like it’s a complete dump. It’s just totally run-down. When I got off the airplane, I noticed a smog layer, so smog is back. I saw many young, odd-looking, overly adorned young people. I don’t know. … It’s a kid’s town now, to a certain extent.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Country music performer Kenny Chesney sat down with Holly Gleason, the co-author of his new memoir, to talk about writing the book.

(Jill Trunnell)

Greg Sarris is the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Sonoma County. He’s also an acclaimed novelist whose his first book in 28 years, “The Last Human Bear,” is loosely based on the life and teachings of Pomo spiritual leader Mabel McKay, a constant lodestar for Sarris. “An American Indian woman is as richly complicated as anybody else. I wanted to show this rich and complicated character who’s negotiated a history that she’s showing you,” Sarris tells Maddie Connors.

In “Daughters of the Sun and Moon,” author Lisa See excavates the events surrounding the Chinese Massacre of 1871. In doing so, she also digs into her own Chinese heritage in L.A. “My great-grandfather’s fourth wife was 16 when he brought her here, and she was never let out,” See tells Emily St. Martin. “My mom used to say these women would all get together, and she used to describe it as birds twittering together, because they actually had this opportunity to be with each other, but on really very rare occasions.”

Fear not, literary Cassandras: Authors can still generate online heat, thanks to BookTok and other social media outlets. So much so that more books are being adapted into streaming content than ever before. “With the advent of BookTok, it allows you to have so much social chatter around these authors,” producer Bryan Unkeless tells Gary Goldstein. “They’re becoming new rock stars, in a way.”

Finally, Kenny Chesney sat down with Holly Gleason to discuss their collaboration on “Heart Life Music,” Chesney’s new memoir. “I didn’t know if there was a story there,” the country megastar tells Gleason. “Over time you wore me down, to make me pause and … reflect.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

The interior of Counterpoint Records & Books.

(David Jones)

In a city that has so often seen its old-school retail businesses turned into nail salons and real estate offices, Counterpoint Records & Books remains an outlier. Originally established in 1979 by John and Susan Polifronio, the store on Franklin Avenue has remained, even as many of its nearby store-mates have shuttered, offering a well-curated selection of secondhand books and records from every conceivable genre. I chatted with David Jones, who is one of the owners of the Franklin Avenue store, about Counterpoint’s enduring success.

Counterpoint is an Eastside institution, but businesses along your strip on Franklin have gone under while you have survived. What is the secret to your longevity?

Firstly, we are lucky enough to own the building we do business in, which has given us a lot of freedom to be able to pursue doing business our way. That didn’t happen until we were in business for almost 20 years, but now in our 47th year we feel lucky to be able to continue to provide a physical, in-person shopping experience. I think our success is tied to this. People are looking for an experience away from their screens, and I think we provide that without being anachronistic or nostalgic by keeping up with and stocking contemporary music, digital media and all types of books.

Is your clientele mostly local? I’m guessing it’s a multigenerational clientele, given the store’s long history.

We definitely have a younger demographic these days, but we have a very intergenerational staff, and I think that attracts an all ages clientele. We meet folks daily from all over the world as a destination that people return to and tell their friends about. I think word-of-mouth is our greatest form of outreach. People say we feel special to them, as if they’ve stumbled onto a secret by shopping here. It’s something I love and am very proud of.

How have books maintained their staying power despite the countless distractions of daily life?

I think of it as one of life’s greatest luxuries. To be honest, I never thought too much about the staying power of books until the pandemic. During that time, people would come in and thank us for being open and a place they could come to escape what was happening. It was a real turning point for me. I started to think more about the importance of what we do and how much of an effect it has on people. I never took what we do for granted, but it gave me a sense of urgency that I didn’t quite have before.

Counterpoint Records & Books is at 5911 Franklin Ave. in Hollywood.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

At the beginning of Mary H.K. Choi’s wildly entertaining presentation for her new novel “Pool House’” at Skylight Books, she reveals she won’t be reading.

“Readings are boring,” she says, tapping her Prada loafers. “It’s like you’re watching someone else play video games.”

Instead, she and Yasi Salek, host of the hit podcast “Bandsplain,” spend the evening riffing on literature, coolness, autism diagnoses and a literary perennial: unrelenting pain.

“How is your mother wound?” Salek asks in her signature vocal fry most often heard ad-libbing about the band Weezer. Salek reveals she is in Jungian therapy, adding, “What Carl says, goes.”

Throughout the discussion, Choi describes her novel as a challenging read — calling it a “gross, decaying meat soup.” She jokes that her career as an author feels like a “Make-A-Wish Foundation wish,” bewildered by any attention her work has garnered. Yet dozens of eager readers have packed into the independent bookstore, spilling into the aisles with copies of the novel balanced on their laps.

“Publishing is so slow, it’s like giving birth to a lawn chair,” Choi remarks. Later, she professes tedium with the resurgence of an alt-lit scene.

“Don’t you find that everyone has to be cool right now? Why is everyone so cool?” Choi asks Salek.

Let’s be clear: Salek and Choi are very cool. Salek sits cross-legged, dressed in all black, with a heart tattoo on her forearm that reads “books.” Before “Pool House,” Choi authored three New York Times bestselling novels. Salek recounts dropping out of her MFA program at Bennington College in 2020 to start what would become a cult-classic podcast.

Book-themed sugar cookies sold at a past Little Literary Fair at Hauser & Wirth.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

“I love that you started a podcast instead of getting an MFA,” Choi replies.

Like Skylight Books, independent bookstores across Los Angeles have become gathering places for readers and writers alike. Authors ranging from household names to debut novelists regularly draw enthusiastic crowds. Increasingly, bookstores are functioning not only as retail spaces but as community hubs.

A few blocks from Echo Park Lake, local favorite A Good Used Book has transformed Sunday mornings into one of the neighborhood’s liveliest recurring gatherings. Visitors browse used books while enjoying charcoal portraits, handmade jewelry and Hawaiian shaved ice. Buy a book and you might even end up on the store’s coveted Instagram Story — the hottest plug in town.

“It feels like in a city as big as Los Angeles, books are still underrepresented. So there’s a lot of room to grow, and that’s exciting,” says Chris Capizzi, who founded the bookstore in 2017.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Review of Books hosted its annual Little Literary Fair at SCI-Arc, drawing hundreds to literary panels and workshops on zine-making, publishing and finding an agent. Vendors from across California filled the space, representing independent presses, bookstores and literary magazines.

“I find writers based [in the L.A. area] to be socially incisive in equal measure as being experimental, innovative and just fun,” says Emily VanKoughnett, the events director at the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I love the L.A. lit scene because it invites people to explore pockets of the city and connect over writing.”

This summer, literary events across Los Angeles are continuing to draw readers into bookstores, community spaces and alternative venues alike. The city’s literary scene remains as weird, profane and sentimental as ever.

There’s a good reason why David Sedaris is the most beloved humorist in America. He has an unerring ability to tap into the absurdity and petty annoyances of American culture more cogently than any other writer of his generation. He is also funny as hell.

Sedaris’ latest collection, “The Land and Its People,” finds the author grappling with the seductions and consolations of technology, creeping mortality, unwanted sexual advances and feral dogs, for starters. I recently chatted with Sedaris about books, nannies and iPhones.

✍️ Author Chat

Your first book was a collection of short stories. Was it always the intent to move into writing essays, or did you have designs on being a novelist?

It never occurred to me that I would write essays about my life. I started off writing fiction, and then I started doing these readings in Chicago. Then I was to read at this variety show at this place called Park West. I was limited to about five minutes, and so I just plucked something from my diary. And it worked. I would walk onstage wearing a tie with a stack of diaries in my hand. Then I started doing these radio shows, and I thought I could read my fiction, but it had to be nonfiction. So a lot of the earliest pieces that I ever read were just things plucked from my diary.

What actually happened was that after this piece I wrote called “The Santaland Diaries” had been on the radio, I had this other book that I had already written, and I was just kind of waiting for someone to call and ask if they could publish it. But it couldn’t be published unless “Santaland” was included.

That book was “Barrel Fever” in 1994 which was a big hit. Now you were that rare creature: a bestselling essayist.

With essays, there’s a kind of shorthand to it. If you’re writing fiction, you have to world-build with every story, whereas with an essay I can just get up on stage and say “my sister and I went shipping” and people know who my sister is, and I can just get right into it. My fiction is always way, way over the top. I can’t write any story where people are reasonable.

What makes you unique is that you are onstage in front of an audience more often than 99% of authors. You can workshop material to see if it lands, much like a comic.

Yes, and I don’t ever want to waste an opportunity to do that. The frustrating thing about being on a book tour is that I can no longer make any changes to the book. So I’ve been bringing out some little, short things I’ve been working on to get it on its feet.

Much of your writing is observational. Do you find, given your public profile, that it becomes harder to do that?

It depends on where I am. If I’m hanging out in places where people don’t read, or in another country, then it doesn’t make any difference. The bigger problem is that when you’re spying on the world now, the world is just looking at their phones.

“The Land and Its People” is the new collection of essays by David Sedaris.

(Little, Brown and Company)

I know you aren’t big on the phone, or at least taking pictures with your phone. In one of your essays in the new book, you are on a Kenyan safari with your partner Hugh and you adamantly refuse to snap a single photo.

If you’re at a book signing, you meet someone and then stand up and someone takes a picture with their phone. I’d rather talk to that person, you know? The picture thing, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t mean anything. I was invited to the Academy Awards because I wrote something about a movie, which was crazy. But it never for one moment occurred to me to go up to anybody to take a selfie. All that means is that I bothered this person. By the way, I have never once asked Hugh to send me his safari pictures.

What books make you laugh out loud?

I’m always happy to find a funny book, but they are hard to find. Did you read “Rejection” by Tony Tulathimutte?

It’s on my nightstand.

Oh my God, I laughed out loud so many times at that book. And he’s not a humorist. I’m not even sure if he thinks the book is funny. There’s a short story in there, about a guy who’s just a complete a— and his girlfriend moves in with him and he makes her put all of her stuff in the oven.

I like things that are funny that aren’t supposed to be funny. Somebody said to me a few weeks ago, “How can we laugh with the world in such terrible shape?” I said, it’s easy. Just get rid of any sense of empathy or compassion! If you’re writing satire, you have to go big. You can’t tone it down. Then it’s not satire anymore, it’s just cereal milk.

You do write in the new book about this kind of language policing that is prevalent now.

I hate it. I mean, the New Yorker is pretty good to me. I can’t complain. But I turned something in to them, and they told me I couldn’t use the word “nanny” in the piece. I mean, a nanny is a real profession, like a pharmacist. I told them I wouldn’t cut it. It just makes me think about young people who are starting out, who can’t say no because they need the money.

(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Illustration by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; Photo via Getty Images)

Leigh Haber is blown away by Anne Patchett’s 10th novel, “Whistler.” “This exquisite writer has once again delivered an incandescent work of fiction — sweet, but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love,” Haber writes.

Songwriter and Sheryl Crow collaborator David Baerwald has written a novel called “The Fire Agent,” about his grandfather Ernest, a musician and a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp during World War I. “One of my characters tells Ernst that he has ‘yuyo,’ which might best be described as grace,” Baerwald tells Bethanne Patrick. “Its Japanese meaning is closer to the state of a river rock that has been washed over and tumbled thousands of times, so that it’s both distinct, and a meaningful part of its environment.”

Rasheed Newson, a showrunner for “The Chi” and “Bel-Air,” has written “There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood,” a novel about an often-neglected chapter of Hollywood’s Golden Age. “I wanted to do a deep dive into Black queer history during the Golden Age of cinema,” Newson tells Meredith Maran. “The first thing that came to me was Xavier’s character. I decided to make him the 10-years-younger, queer rival of Sidney Poitier, to highlight the acceptable versus unacceptable — meaning, straight versus gay — 1950s Black movie star.”

Finally, Adam Messinger, a staffer at West Hollywood’s Book Soup, attempts to answer the question: Why are books shrinking? One possible culprit may be social media. “Holding the book up to take a photo of it is easier,” writer and social media influencer Caroline Mason tells Messinger. “Although I do sometimes still drop it.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Lost Books in Montrose looks and feels unlike any other bookstore in L.A. — a verdant terrarium filled with new and used books and vinyl. Created by Last Bookstore co-owners Jenna and Josh Spencer, Lost Books also sells plants. Moss has colonized the ceiling, and tall trees keep sentry over the store’s diverse and eclectic inventory. I asked Josh Spencer about how Lost came about.

What was the thinking behind opening Lost?

It was spontaneous. My wife and I were eating dinner in the very charming neighborhood of Montrose, and saw a very cool vacant storefront. It also happened to be on Honolulu Avenue, and with both of us being from Hawaii, we took it as a sign. We did not want to franchise the Last Bookstore at the time, and wanted the new store to have its own name and unique vibe.

You also sell plants. Where did that idea come from?

My wife grew up in a rain forest on Maui. She loves plants, and we thought that a pairing of nature with literature was exciting and not done before.

Who are your customers?

Mostly locals in Montrose, La Cañada, La Crescenta, Glendale. But we get a fair number of tourists and also people from other parts of L.A. People who love beauty, nature and books. And vinyl!

Are you seeing that big vinyl resurgence we’ve been hearing about?

Absolutely! Our vinyl does very well for us.

What genres or types of books do well for you there?

Classics, kids books, mysteries, graphic novels, art, self-help, memoirs, cookbooks and gardening of course!

Lost Books is located at 2233 Honolulu Ave., Montrose.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

In many ways, the most ambitious World Cup in history — which kicked off Thursday in Mexico City — has inspired more angst than anticipation, more fear than fervor.

The competition, returning to North America for the first time in more than three decades, has expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches, to be played over 39 days in 16 cities in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The complex planning was eight years in the making.

Yet even before the competition opened with Mexico facing South Africa at the iconic Estadio Azteca, it has been marred by a number of controversies that threaten to overshadow the soccer and cloud the tournament’s legacy.

“I view this World Cup as the most politically combustible World Cup in recent history. And that’s saying something,” said Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at the University of Portland and author of eight books on the politics of international sport.

“We’re in uncharted territory in many ways.”

Relations between the host countries, once strong, have been strained by the Trump administration’s tariff policies and disagreements over border security. Travel bans have barred potential World Cup visitors — and even support staff and match officials — from entering the U.S. and others are fearful of making the trip, worried about ICE raids and immigration roundups.

The U.S. is at war with a tournament qualifier, Iran. And Iran has fired missiles and drones on Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, nations that also are World Cup participants.

The International Sports Press Assn. said Iranian and African journalists have been denied visas to cover games in the U.S., and Iran protested after more than a dozen members of its support staff had their requests to enter the U.S. rejected. The Iranians, who were forced to move their training base from Tucson to Tijuana, will spend limited time in the U.S. during group-play games that will take place in Inglewood and Seattle.

Players and journalists from Senegal, Uzbekistan and Iraq have been detained at U.S. airports for up to seven hours by immigration officials. Then on Monday, Omar Artan, a decorated referee and the first Somali official selected to work a World Cup, was turned away at Miami International Airport.

In addition, ticket prices have been so high and the lottery process for obtaining them so opaque, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have begun formal investigations into FIFA practices. Other states, including California, hosting tournament matches have begun asking questions as well.

All that has conspired to produce a World Cup that is struggling to catch on with the public. According to a recent poll by Yougov.com, a majority of Americans — 54% — say they are not at all interested in the tournament and nearly six in 10 say they will not watch any matches.

“People are just in a bad mood,” Boykoff said. “It’s a tough time.”

FIFA president Gianni Infantino remains optimistic, promising this will be “the biggest, the most inclusive, the greatest FIFA World Cup ever.” He made the same claim about the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and the 2018 tournament in Russia.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino speaks during a news conference on Wednesday before the start of the World Cup.

(Carl Recine / Getty Images)

“The World Cup should be understood as both a global sporting celebration and a major commercial enterprise, with these two dimensions being mutually enforcing rather than contradictory,” said Steve Georgakis, a lecturer on sports studies at the University of Sydney and a frequent author on soccer.

This year’s tournament is projected to swell FIFA’s coffers by nearly $9 billion and the TV ratings, it says, will be massive.

“Its universal appeal combined with the participation of 48 nations ensures that it remains a genuinely global sporting event,” Georgakis said.

Boykoff has his doubts.

“In this particular political moment, with the Trump administration being erratic and impulsive and needing a win from this tournament and the fact there’s so many moving parts geopolitically, I don’t have confidence that it’s just going to end up being a soccer-focused next five weeks,” he said.

This is not the first World Cup to kick off under some kind of black cloud.

The 1974 tournament in West Germany was tarred by the geopolitical fallout of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Four years later Argentina’s military dictatorship used the World Cup to sportswash a “Dirty War” in which as many as 30,000 people were tortured, murdered and disappeared.

The 2010 and 2014 World Cups were troubled by cost overruns and delays in the construction of stadiums and other infrastructure and the threat of labor unrest while global outrage over human rights violations and discrimination against women and LGBTQ people hung over the last two tournaments.

Those issues never fully disappeared but were overshadowed by the brilliance of the soccer. Jonathan Wilson, a columnist with the Guardian and author of “The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup,” expects the same this summer.

“The other stuff will still be there in the background,” he said, “but fundamentally the football will, for the vast majority of people, take over. It’s just sort of a natural cycle.”

Argentina star Lionel Messi controls the ball during an international friendly against Iceland on Tuesday.

(Butch Dill / Associated Press)

And as with every World Cup, there undoubtedly will be unforgettable moments.

Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, the top scorers in soccer history, will be playing in their sixth and final World Cups — Messi chasing a second straight title and Ronaldo pursuing the only prize that has eluded him.

Kylian Mbabbe will be trying to take France to a third consecutive final while young superstars like Erling Haaland of Norway and Lamine Yamal of Spain will be looking to put their mark on their first World Cups.

Four teams — Jordan, Curacao, Cape Verde and Uzbekistan — have qualified for the tournament for the first time.

And there will be other storylines no one saw coming, all of which will contribute to the narrative of this World Cup.

“Major sporting events have a way of capturing public attention and shifting the conversation toward what is happening on the field rather than off it,” Georgakis said.

How much the actions of the Trump administration affect that calculation remains to be seen.

There are travel restrictions in place that fully or partially bar citizens from 39 countries — including a number of World Cup participants — from entering the U.S. And the administration has said ICE and Homeland Security personnel will have a visible presence at World Cup venues, including SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where the American team will begin play Friday.

“There will be federal agents,” confirmed L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna, who added that he could not guarantee immigration sweeps would not take place. “ They told us that specifically would not be occurring,” he said. “Any of that’s subject to change.”

Mexico fans celebrate during a watch party at Plaza Mexico in Lynwood on Thursday.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The difficulty in obtaining visas and the fear of being rounded up by immigration agents are being blamed, in part, for less-than-expected tourist traffic. Hotel operators in all 11 World Cup host cities say bookings for the tournament are well below projections. Several countries have issued warnings about travel to the U.S.

Then there are the own goals from FIFA over tickets and parking prices as high as $900 at some stadiums, weather issues and a short-lived ban on water bottles.

FIFA has defended its policies on ticket prices by arguing that premiums are necessary to maximize revenue, which it will invest in global soccer development. Variable, market-based pricing, it said, simply reflects standard entertainment practices in North America. The organization did, however, reverse its ban on fans bringing bottles into games. Spectators are now allowed to enter stadiums with one soft, plastic 20-ounce water bottle.

And despite a warning from climate scientists that one in four World Cup games could be played in dangerously hot conditions, FIFA will start 40 of them at 3 p.m. or earlier local time, the warmest time of day, to accommodate European TV viewers.

Georgakis said the play on the field will have to overcome all those issues if this World Cup is to earn a favorable place in history.

“Ultimately the success of the World Cup will be judged by what happens on the field,” he said. “If the football is compelling, dramatic and memorable, the tournament will likely be remembered as a great World Cup. If the play falls short, then the off-field issues such as ticket prices, extreme heat, ICE enforcement activities, the Trump administration will receive great attention and could shape perceptions of the event.”

PARIS — Acclaimed Iranian-French cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, a prominent advocate for women’s rights, has died at 56, the French presidency said Thursday.

“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure of French culture and an artist devoted to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the French presidency said in a statement.

President Emmanuel Macron and his wife “pay tribute to a remarkable artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable,” the statement said.

News broadcaster BFM TV and other French media reported Satrapi has “died of sadness” a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish film producer and actor Mattias Ripa, according to a statement from people close to the artist.

The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which she was a member, expressed its deep sadness in a social media statement, paying tribute to “a passionate advocate for cinema and film education” who earlier this year created a foundation to help international students come to Paris to study film.

Satrapi is best-known for her monochrome autobiographical comic book and film “Persepolis,” a coming-of-age tale set against the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran.

“Persepolis” won the Film Critics Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival in 2007 and the César Award for adapted screenplay in 2008, in addition to being nominated for animated feature at the 2008 Oscars.

The film, which details her life in Tehran as the willful daughter of intellectual Marxists, is a reminder that Iranians are just like everyone else, Satrapi told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview in Cannes.

“What we wanted to say is, if these people scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories,” she said.

Iranian authorities at the time protested the movie’s inclusion at Cannes, sending a letter to the French Embassy in Tehran.

Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, but her parents sent her to Vienna, Austria, in 1983 to finish her studies because of the extremism in their country following the 1979 Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

But Satrapi, who found Austria hostile and who desperately missed her parents, returned to Iran in 1989 to attend Tehran University, where she earned a degree in visual communications.

By the time she graduated, Satrapi decided she finally was ready to leave Iran and accept the opportunities her parents had been so desperate to give her a decade before. In 1994 she moved to France. She studied in Strasbourg and later moved to Paris.

Her graphic novels also include “Broderies” (“Embroideries”) and “Poulet aux prunes” (“Chicken with plums”), which also was adapted into a film. As a filmmaker, she has directed several works including “La Bande des Jotas” (“The Gang of Jotas”) and “Radioactive” (“Madame Curie”), a biography about the Polish physicist Marie Curie.

Satrapi in 2023 coordinated the book “Femme, vie, liberté” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) together with a group of artists and academics to illustrate the revolts that occurred in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of the so-called “morality police.” The work denounces the repression and lack of human rights that Iranian society, especially women, suffers at the hands of the Iranian regime, the foundation said.

Satrapi was elected member of the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2024. She also was offered France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, that same year but declined it, arguing France was not doing enough to support Iranian people fighting for democracy.

“Supporting the women’s revolution in Iran cannot be reduced to photos or speeches,” she wrote in a January 2025 letter to French authorities. “When people are fighting for democracy, we should support them.”

In 2024, Satrapi won the Princess of Asturias Foundation award in Spain for communication and humanities. The organization said she was “an essential voice in the defense of human rights and freedom.” The judges described her as “a symbol of civic engagement led by women.”

Satrapi’s husband, Ripa, died in April 2025 at 53. On her Instagram page, only one message was left in a series of posts: “Because I have lost the love of my life.”

In Deborah Levy’s new novel “My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,” the celebrated British author turns her keen observational and critical eye toward Stein, a writer that Levy feels has been criminally redacted from the canon of modernist masters that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. “My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,” however, is anything but a dry-as-dust revisionist treatise.

Levy couches her thoughts on Stein’s life and work within the story of three women in contemporary Paris, including Levy’s fictive avatar as the narrator, grappling with her own notions of identity as she writes about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. I spoke with Levy about Stein, Toklas and Picasso.

✍️ Author Chat

Have you always had an abiding interest in Gertrude Stein?

She has always been lurking there for a number of reasons. When I was studying modernist literature, I was pointed to all the usual suspects — T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Beckett, Joyce. But no one ever pointed to Gertrude Stein. She was absent in Britain, anyway. I’m not sure it’s the same in America.

I feel like in America she certainly is not frequently cited among that pantheon of modernist writers that you just mentioned.

I thought her most commercial work, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” was quite enchanting. But when you start to dig into her other writing, you find this mixture of very obtuse, very violent work, and some brilliant work.

You write in the book that you sometimes don’t understand Stein, but this doesn’t diminish your enjoyment of her work.

The thing about avant-garde writers is that they either crash or they triumph. For readers, it’s either someone popping a vein at the new and strange, or someone over-praising the work. And I thought, well I’m allowed to have mixed emotions about Stein’s writing. Sometimes she is totally brilliant, and sometimes less so.

Author Deborah Levy

(Sheila Burnett)

You also celebrate Stein and Toklas’ fierce individuality, which runs counter to the usual narratives about female authors during this time.

Well, female writers are supposed to suffer or commit suicide. And the glorious thing about Stein and Alice is that the art of living was very important to them. Travel, conversation, or driving around. This really appeals to me. You know, Stein would have a roast chicken leg in one hand and one hand on the steering wheel, with the dogs in the back.

I feel like Stein’s legacy as a writer has been occluded by her renown as a collector of the greatest modern art of the century, most notably Picasso before he became Picasso. She is remembered more for collecting others’ art than for her own art.

If you’re going to collect this bold, daring art of your own time, and you’re buying it cheap, because it’s being mocked, you have to know how to defend it. Stein wasn’t an art historian. She studied psychology with William James and then studied medicine at Johns Hopkins. Through her conversations with Picasso and others, she really began to acquire the apparatus to defend the work, and that fascinated me.

You write that Stein wanted to kill the 19th century with her work by dismantling and then reassembling language.

She was going to write through continuous present tense. She got rid of commas so she could hurtle through time and make her thoughts move forward. No question marks, because it was self-evident to her when someone was asking a question in her writing. She really was a pioneer.

Her prose reads like Beckett’s, decades before his novels were published.

The critic Roland Barthes wrote that all writing has some kind of behavior. A lot of avant-garde writing behaves like Stein, but she wasn’t imitating any other thing. She made something new for her century.

(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Book jacket for “Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe” by Gail Crowther

(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Galley Books)

Marilyn Monroe was an avid reader who traveled with her treasured library of books wherever she lived. Yet, the stubborn image of Monroe as a literary dilettante remains. Now Gail Crowther has written “Marilyn and Her Books” which sets out to debunk that misconception of the screen legend. Crowther’s sharp account is both the story of Monroe’s library and “what we’ve projected upon Monroe when we’re asked to consider that she had one,” writes Mark Athitakis.

As Cuba struggles with a faltering economy and President Trump’s saber-rattling overtures, Ada Ferrer’s timely new memoir “Keeper of My Kin” “argues that the grand narratives of exile and revolution are, at their core, made up of private reckonings with irretrievable consequences,” writes Mariella Rudi.

When Eagle Rock’s Read Books was threatened with a massive rent hike from its landlord, co-owners Jeremy and Debbie Kaplan rallied the community around the fight for tenant’s rights and started an activist organization called Save North East Los Angeles Shops. “Commercial landlords [have] unbelievably unrealistic expectations of rent, and a small business can only sell a T-shirt or a hamburger or a service for what the market will bear,” neighborhood preservationist Aaron Peskin told Emily St. Martin.

Finally, Swan Huntley found a novel way to put off writing her next book: She hiked to every Erewhon store in Los Angeles.

📖 Bookstore Faves

A Good Used Book’s beautiful interior

(A Good Used Book)

Jenny Yang and Chris Capizzi started A Good Used Book in 2017 by selling secondhand titles at local flea markets and the Grand Central Market downtown. Seven years later, after a brief COVID blowback, the pair opened their own storefront in Historic Filipinotown. Now, A Good Used Book has blossomed into a vital community space featuring a vast selection of previously loved books across all genres. The store also hosts pop-up markets on the weekends, with more events scheduled in the coming year. I spoke with Capizzi about his store.

Who are your customers?

Our customer base is pretty broad. We’re selective about the books we carry, but we want anyone to be able to find themselves somewhere in the shop, whether you’re just getting back into reading or you’re the kind of person who already has strong opinions about translations. And we try not to take ourselves too seriously, so even though we may have critical theory, we also have “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

How do you pick inventory? Is there any emphasis on any particular genres that might be popular?

We definitely do the work to find books, but honestly a lot of the time the books seem to find us. In terms of what we carry, we focus mostly on classic, modern and contemporary fiction, but we love genre fiction too, like sci-fi, crime and horror. And a big part of what makes the store feel like us are our nonfiction and culture sections — humanities, sciences, film, music, fashion and design. Anything for that curious person who just wants to go a little deeper.

I know the store is about much more than books. Can you tell me about some of the other community events you guys organize?

During the week we’re all about the books. Every Sunday we host the Every Sunday Funday Market that features two food pop-ups out front, one savory and one sweet, and four or five local vendors and artists inside. We rotate vendors selling and making ceramics, jewelry, Japanese retro radios, soaps and candles, zines and prints, and even Persian perfumes. And we always have drinks going out of our vintage Coleman cooler, too. It’s a lot of things happening at once, but it adds up to a pretty easy, fun Sunday afternoon.

A Good Used Book is located at 307 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

Barnes & Noble was turning a page on the chain’s history of declining sales, but recent comments have stirred bad blood for the bookseller.

James Daunt, the chief executive credited with breathing new life into the retailer, is clarifying the store’s stance on stocking its shelves with AI-written books.

The controversy stems from Daunt’s Monday appearance on “Today” with Jenna Bush Hager. In a viral clip from the interview, Daunt said, “I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t. So, as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book, then we will stock them.”

By Wednesday, thousands of calls to boycott the bookseller had flooded social media.

Kathlin Finn, a writer and former employee of the chain, posted on social media, writing, “Hey Barnes & Not Noble, I worked for you and have supported you, but your latest AI decision is extremely disappointing. I will not be shopping or promoting B&N unless you change your AI policy.”

Author Cristin Bishara wrote, “As an author this [is] the most depressing news. I’ve been saying for a long time that this was coming. People told me I was overreacting. And I had a feeling it would start with a cute round table at the front of a B&N.”

Another social media user added, “The Barnes & Noble CEO saying they’ll stock AI generated books as long as they’re labeled and aren’t ‘ripping off somebody else’ is wild considering all generative AI is ripping off someone else.”

Daunt told The Times that the wave of backlash is based on misinterpretations of what he said, and that only a “highly edited version” of what the bookseller “actually said” had been aired.

In an emailed statement, he said the bookseller does not sell AI books, “as far as we are aware.” Barnes & Noble “demand[s] that publishers label any books that are AI generated,” and the chain takes “active measures to exclude all AI generated books.”

Daunt further stated that Barnes & Noble “will sell AI generated books if there is clear demand” and not “ban reputable books published by reputable publishers, even if AI generated, should these be published, labeled and there be clear evidence of customer demand.”

He also said that the retailer thinks it’s “very unlikely” that there will be customer demand for AI-generated books or that reputable publishers will publish them.

“The argument is nuanced, and perhaps over nuanced, but there are important principles that have to be balanced and I believe we do so as sensibly and thoughtfully as is possible,” he said. “Book banning is a clear and present danger, so we are very careful with demands to ban any books” while also remaining vigilant “not to sell AI generated books that masquerade to be by real authors.”

Last year, Daunt spoke with BBC on the issue of AI in publishing and bookselling and said that there’s a huge proliferation of AI-generated content, and “most of it is not books that we should be selling.” He told the broadcaster that, as a bookseller, the company sells what publishers publish and that he’d be surprised by efforts to put forth an “AI-generated piece of nonsense” but that, ultimately, the decision on reading material would lie with the reader.

“We don’t dictate, and we don’t dictate around politics or any other particular issues around books,” he said. “We leave it up to the reader to decide.”

In June 2025, more than 70 authors issued a call to action to big-five publishers Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan, asking the companies to pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines. Authors Lauren Groff, R.F. Kuang, Emma Straub and Emily Henry were among the petitioners.

“At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand,” the letter read.

“We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs — our records of the human experience — are ‘written’ by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love. …

“Every time a prompt is entered into AI, the language that bot uses to respond was created in part through the synthesis of art that we, the undersigned, have spent our careers crafting. Taken without our consent, without payment, without even the courtesy of acknowledgment.”

In March, Hachette pulled “Shy Girl” from publication after widespread allegations that the horror novel appeared to be AI-generated and was swiftly scrubbed from Amazon and the Hachette website. The book’s author, Mia Ballard, denied that she had relied on AI to pen the book but said an acquaintance she had hired to edit the novel used AI.

“Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,” a Hachette spokeswoman said, per the New York Times.

Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died. He was 65.

Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.

“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote. “Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts. The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements. The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.

Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.”

Lindstrom was born Feb. 12, 1961. The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore. — which he and his family still called home.

He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center. There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.

It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored dignity to his subjects. His grandpa was a binge-drinker, and on day three of the trip, he woke up with a hangover and was missing his dentures. Lindstrom, only 5 at the time, noticed the way other passengers treated him and his grandpa differently.

“I think what my films are about is that search for my grandfather’s dentures, the humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between us and them and arrives at we,” he said.

Lindstrom said he returned to Portland after film school and “did several projects with the Northwest Film Center that had me putting a camera in the hands of kids on probation, homeless teens, newly recovering addicts, hard-hit people who had hard-hitting stories to share.”

“Those projects taught me so much about the transformative power of art, and they gave me permission I felt in my personal films to ask people if I might follow them, so that an audience could better understand what they were going through, and by extension, better understand themselves,” he said.

Lindstrom’s 2007 award-winning cinéma-vérité-style film, “Finding Normal,” followed long-term drug addicts as they left prison or detox and tried to rebuild their lives with the help of a recovery mentor.

“What I’m most proud about is that ‘Finding Normal’ is the only film to ever be shown to inmates in solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary, and not, I might add, as a punishment,” Lindstrom said.

In 2013, he released “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a documentary that illuminated the life of a man who grappled with schizophrenia and examined his death, which happened in police custody. Discussing the film with LA Progressive in 2018, Lindstrom said that he doesn’t make films for audiences.

“I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them,” he told the outlet. “That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.”

Lindstrom’s work aimed to inspire empathy and humanize those suffering in the margins of society, but it also catalyzed policy change. His acclaimed 2015 documentary, “Mothering Inside,” followed participants in the Family Preservation Project (FPP), an initiative helping incarnated moms establish and maintain bonds with their children.

Midway through filming the documentary, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced it planned to nix funding for the FPP. Lindstrom hosted early screenings of the film, which inspired grassroots advocacy that reached then-Gov. Kate Brown, who subsequently signed legislation that restored funding. The film’s release also helped make Oregon the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents.

Partnering with Strayed, Lindstrom made the documentary short, “I Am Not Untouchable. I Just Have My Period,” for the New York Times in 2019. The film highlighted the experience of teen girls in Surkhet, Nepal, and the menstrual stigma they faced. Most recently, the filmmaker released, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” which examined the folk-rock singer’s life from her traumatic childhood and drug-addled adolescence through her rise in the Laurel Canyon music scene and untimely death.

Lindstrom, discussing “Judee Sill” and his style as a filmmaker, told Oregon ArtsWatch, “It’s the chance to kind of focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? The person that the film is about, what can they teach us, what can we learn from them? What can they learn from themselves?”

In 2017, Lindstrom received the Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon for his work advancing civil rights and liberties. That same year, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College.

In Strayed’s post announcing Lindstrom’s death, she described their more than 30-year partnership as a stroke of “tremendous luck.”

“We loved each other and our kids with deep devotion and true delight. He was a stellar husband. He was the most magnificent dad. He was a man whose every word and deed was driven by kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she wrote. “He saw the goodness in everyone. He believed that we are all sacred and redeemable.

“His work as a documentary filmmaker was dedicated to telling stories of people who, as he put it, ‘society puts an X through.’ He erased that X with his camera and his astonishing heart.”

Strayed’s memoir — which followed her as she hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of her mother’s death, a battle with drug addiction and divorce from her first husband — concludes with a happy ending. She finished the months-long hike and sat on a white bench near the Bridge of the Gods, a stone’s throw from the spot where, she writes, she’d marry Lindstrom four years later.

“His greatest legacy is Carver and Bobbi, who embody everything good and true about their father. Their extraordinary grace, courage, and fortitude during this harrowing time was unfaltering and grounded in the undying love Brian poured into them every day of their lives,” she wrote. “We do not know how we will live without him. We’re utterly bereft. We can only walk this dark path and search for the beauty Brian knew was there. It will be his eternal light that guides us.”

For more than 40 years, Barry Walters has been closely watching the dance floors of New York and San Francisco, chronicling the ways in which LGBTQ+ culture has influenced mainstream culture. As a writer for the Village Voice, the Advocate and Spin, among others, Walters became one of music journalism’s most eloquent and crucial voices, championing artists like the Pet Shop Boys and Madonna during their formative years.

Walters’ new book, “Mighty Real,” draws on his deep firsthand knowledge, offering a comprehensive history of LGBTQ+ music from 1969 to 2000. I recently spoke with Walters about Babs, Madge and Bowie.

✍️ Author Chat

In the book, you make a distinction between pre-Stonewall LGBTQ music and post-Stonewall LGBTQ music.

Gay culture before Stonewall really had to be hidden, or at least secretive. I think of Barbra Streisand as a quintessential pre-Stonewall figure. Judy Garland, as well. These women are tough, and even though they sing songs written by men, it’s not in a submissive way. They are singing like they are the champions, even when they are suffering through what men do to women through the torch songs they perform.

What can you say about the encoded nature of certain songs that spoke to gay culture in a way that flew under the radar of hetero listeners in the pre-Stonewall era?

The music that spoke to gay culture, by necessity, had to be encoded. “Secret Love” by Doris Day is a good example. It’s about struggling to have something that’s otherwise forbidden. Sinead O’Connor covered that song. There was a song I loved as a young child called “Have I The Right?” by the Honeycombs, which was written by two British gay men at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England. You know, have I the right to be with whomever I want to be with?

What, in your view, was the big bang of post-Stonewall LGBTQ music?

David Bowie to a large degree. Right around the time that “Hunky Dory” was being released in 1971, he told the Evening Standard newspaper that he was gay, flat out just said it. And it was such a strange thing to say that many people doubted his sincerity.

Barry Walters, a writer for the Village Voice, the Advocate and Spin, among others, wrote a new book about the history of LGBTQ+ music.

(Kelly Lawrence for Walters)

I remember seeing Bowie wearing that dress on the cover of “The Man Who Sold The World,” thinking that was the most transgressive act any rock star had ever committed.

And then he performed “Starman” on Top of the Pops in 1972 and he put his arm around his guitarist Mick Ronson, who also looked gorgeous. They were displaying a familiarity men aren’t supposed to have.

I thought I knew everything about pop music, but you have uncovered so many fascinating stories. Tell me about Olivia Records.

Olivia Records was an independent record label in the Bay Area owned and controlled by lesbians for female artists. This is years before punk or indie rock, when so many small labels cropped up. They pioneered so much. They would recruit fans in different cities to man the merchandise and to help get their records in stores. The idea of a merch table was something new at the time. They also created the forerunner of Burning Man. They would go find a farm somewhere and create an impromptu village, with food, sanitation and the rest.

You have given the most space in your book to Madonna, whom you have written about extensively over the years. Why is Madonna such a huge figure in the history of LGBTQ music?

Her art is so queer. I feel like she is one of us. She’s very much like Grace Jones, in that her sensibility is so aligned with gay culture. I related to Madonna on multiple levels. In the early ‘80s, I would see her around town, dancing at the same New York clubs I was frequenting, like Danceteria. She was steeped in gay culture, and then she brought all of this into the mainstream, and that was profound. I also feel like she was misunderstood in many ways. When straight men called her a slut, things like that. That is so far from the truth. She is such a complex artist. If you are making that claim, you don’t know anything about her.

(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Javier Pérez / For The Times)

Pulitzer prize winner Elizabeth Strout has a new novel called “The Things We Never Say,” and Julia M. Klein approves. “[Strout] reprises her familiar themes: the mysteries of human personality, the perils of solitude, the occasional possibility of grace … in deceptively simple, occasionally mannered prose that draws readers in and immerses them in her fictional worlds,” Klein writes.

They’re on a boat! Paula L. Woods climbed aboard a 130-foot yacht in Marina del Rey to soak in the vibes of the Yacht Girls Book Club. “I wanted conversations with like-minded women that were intellectual but fun,” club founder Aloni Ford told Woods. “And talking about books seemed to be the ideal way to achieve that.”

“PEN15” co-creator Anna Konkle has written a memoir called “The Sane One,” and Rachel Brodsky talked to her about it. “In some ways, ‘PEN15’ was a reaction to loving memoirs,” she tells Brodsky. “Raw memory has always been very exciting to me.”

Finally, our Times critics take the measure of this summer’s hottest beach reads.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Kinokuniya bookstores sell Japanese manga, stationery and literature.

(Courtesy of Kinokuniya)

When Kinokuniya opened its first L.A. shop in 1977, it was primarily to provide Japanese expats with imported books and magazines to read in their native tongue. Forty years later, the store has become a locus of Japanese printed matter for Angelenos eager to scoop up Japanese literature and manga in Japanese and English, as well an expansive selection of imported stationery products that, in L.A., can only be found in Kinokuniya’s three stores. I spoke with Sakura Yamaguchi, who manages two of Kinokuniya’s stores downtown (the third is in Mar Vista) about its many-splendored pleasures.

How did the store travel from Japan to Los Angeles?

Books Kinokuniya was founded by Moichi Tanabe in 1927. Located in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo in a two-story wooden building, the first Kinokuniya started with five employees, including Mr. Tanabe himself. In 1969, Kinokuniya opened its first overseas bookstore in San Francisco. The first Los Angeles store opened in 1977.

Who are your customers?

We first started as a store for Japanese customers, so we imported Japanese books and magazines and sold them, mainly. But in the past 10 years, Japanese manga/anime, stationery and literature has been quite popular in the U.S. Therefore our customers are a mix of Japanese-speaking customers and non-Japanese speakers who are interested in Japanese culture.

What percentage of your clientele buys Japanese–language products?

Forty percent Japanese-language products versus 60% English books.

What specific titles are selling for you right now?

“Witch Hat Atelier Grimoire Edition, Volume 1,” “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Purple Smoke Distortion” and the “Strange Houses” series.

Are you seeing more young people turning to printed matter? It seems like there is an analog revival at the moment.

We have been trying to make exclusive editions that come with freebies to make the printed manga more attractive, but without that our English manga sales have been increasing and our main target for the manga is young people. There are many titles that are published exclusively in e-book format, but we frequently hear from customers asking when they will be released in print form. Also, recently there has been a growing number of cases where titles that were originally available only in digital format have later been published as physical books.

Kinokuniya at the Bloc in Los Angeles is located at 700 W 7th St.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

We are living in an era of dissent, but what does that mean in 2026? According to writer Gal Beckerman, to be a dissident is as much a way of being as it is an act of resistance. In his new book “How to Be a Dissident,” Beckerman, a staff writer for the Atlantic, unpacks dissent as a kind of rough art. His book is both an instruction guide and a primer.

In nine short, potent chapters, Beckerman lays out the essential traits of an effective dissident — loyalty, recklessness and watchfulness, among them — to illustrate how communities of resistance are built from the ground up. I recently chatted with Beckerman about playwright and former president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel, President Trump and AI.

✍️ Author Chat

You have written three books that deal with dissent — political, cultural and societal. It’s clearly a big issue with you.

I don’t think of myself as an activist; I don’t approach these topics with an activist’s fervor. I’m genuinely curious about how change happens in society. All four of my grandparents survived the Holocaust, and I think the notion of a society that can change that quickly and turn on you was always very shocking and interesting to me.

In reading your book, it’s really inspiring and extraordinary to read about individuals putting their lives on the line to make change happen.

They genuinely fascinate me as these bizarre human beings who are able to act in ways that I find really mysterious. There’s a mystery as to how people’s minds actually change, and how society can change.

You write about making moral choices, and doing something bold because of some strongly held belief. This is not the same thing as joining the crowd, which can be the path of least resistance.

I had this feeling during the first few months of the current Trump term (and I share this sentiment with a lot of people) that we were just bowled over by the degree to which people in elite places were acquiescing to the exercise of executive power and being willing to bend the knee in ways that felt shocking to me. This prompted me to wonder, what would I do in that situation? Would I say “no” and not succumb to the will of executive power? Would any of us do so? It’s a question we all have to ask ourselves.

You cite Iris Murdoch’s notion of “radical humanism” as a key trait of effective dissent.

Radical humanists are attuned to the messy and wonderful ways that beings just are. They are defending those conditions for human beings to have a normal life, whether that means being able to listen to whatever music you like, or to wear your hair in a certain way, or to take care of a neighbor that is being ill-treated. Václav Havel called it the “pre-political” way of thinking and acting. And we saw this recently in Minnesota, with people standing up to ICE, regardless of what their political affiliations might be. Something pre-political was going on.

Another important factor you cite is civic mindedness, which feels like a difficult goal given how our communities have been dissolved by our screen addictions.

The communication tools that we use are dehumanizing in many ways because they don’t allow us to really see each other. Instead we preconceive each other and just scream a lot. And we know this at a gut level even as we continue to use them. That’s why I do think it takes an almost dissident sort of energy to insist on thinking in a different way and scrambling the assumptions that our modes of communication have foisted upon us.

What about AI? It feels as if there is a lot of resistance to accepting AI into our lives just because technology companies are investing billions of dollars to make it so. You are seeing communities protesting against the construction of data farms in their neighborhoods, for example.

The money behind the ideology pushing AI is about letting us feel that the only way to have an efficient life is through AI. And I feel like the 20th century taught us that there are lots of ideologies that come around to promise this sort of thing. And so we need to learn from that. I think there are a lot of overwhelming powers that try to flatten us. But we have to take that wonderful human element, that radical humanism, to say no, maybe there’s a way to do it better.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Monica Lewinsky as a saint offering solace to the lovelorn and abandoned? Julia Langbein’s wild conceit works beautifully in her novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” according to Julia M. Klein, who calls the book “smart, poignant and involving.”

Among the casualties of the Vietnam War were the Appalachian communities whose male populations were decimated on the frontlines. This is the subject of Pamela Steele’s “taut, lyrical” novel “In the Fields of Fatherless Children,” a book that delves into the “poverty, racism, environmental degradation and despair suffered in the Appalachian ‘holler’ during the Vietnam era,” writes Meredith Maran.

The Times’ Deputy Entertainment and Arts Editor Nate Jackson sat down with the rapper, actor and K-Town native Jonnie Park to discuss his memoir, “Spit: A Life in Battles.”

Finally, Maddie Connors answers the question, “why are novels getting shorter?” Welcome to the age of the Adderall novel.

📖 Bookstore Faves

The inside of Mystery Pier Books

(Mystery Pier Books)

Established in 1998, Mystery Pier Books is L.A.’s prime destination for rare books and signed editions across a wide range of genres and forms, including Shakespeare folios and vintage sci-fi paperbacks. Located right alongside its Sunset Strip neighbor Book Soup, Mystery Pier was established by character actor Harvey Jason and his son Louis, who continue to run the store together. I chatted with Harvey about the treasures to be found in his store.

What is the market like for rare books right now?

Very strong, in fact. We just sold a beautiful edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to a private collector for $55,000. And that is actually a reasonable price for those books. We have a long list of serious collectors all over the world that contact us for books, customers that have been coming to us for years. We also sold a first edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” for $17,500.

Why should one own a rare book?

It’s a good investment. People who collect rare books are book lovers, first and foremost. And they are smart enough to know that the books they love can increase in value year by year. First editions never depreciate. They always become more valuable over time.

I’m interested in journalism books. Do you have any Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson in your store?

Hunter Thompson came in here years ago and signed all of his books, so, yes, we have his books signed by him.

Do you see young people looking to get into collecting books?

Yes. A lot of recent college graduates are building collections. It’s very heartening to see that. You can come into our store and find nice editions for $100. The front room of our store contains the first editions but our other rooms will have landmark titles for far less money. This is really a pursuit for everybody, not just wealthy collectors.