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In Megha Majumdar’s new novel “A Guardian and a Thief,” a cataclysmic climate event in the Bengali city of Kolkata has wiped out shelter and food supplies, leaving its citizens desperate and scrambling for survival. Among the families beset by the tragedy are Ma, her young daughter Mishti and Ma’s father Dadu. They are some of the fortunate ones, with approved passports to travel to the U.S., where Ma’s husband awaits them in Ann Arbor, Mich. But a brazen theft threatens their very existence.

“A Guardian and a Thief” is Majumdar’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed bestselling debut “A Burning.” We chatted with the author about white lies, the pleasures of anthropology and teaching as a form of learning.

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

✍️ Author Chat

“A Guardian and a Thief” by Megha Majumdar

(Knopf)

Your novel takes place in Kolkata, which is your hometown. Why?

It’s one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. I was reading about all of these grim predictions. Kolkata has grown significantly hotter and is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades. Reading all of that was really sad, and it was really alarming. The book really grew out of these predictions about the future of the city.

Your character Boomba makes life very difficult for your family, yet he is really a victim of circumstance, right? Calamities can make good people do bad things.

This is the kind of question that got me into this book, which is, are there good people and monsters or do we contain elements of both in us? And is this revealed in a circumstance of scarcity and crisis? That’s the kind of question that I was very interested in. Boomba came to me initially as the thief of the title, but as I started writing more about him, I realized that it wouldn’t be truthful or interesting to simply make him the thief. He was more complex and I needed to write him with all of his complicated motivations and wishes and worries and regrets.

Everyone in the novel lies to some extent, whether it’s for self-preservation, or to protect their loved ones from being hurt.

I think it’s coming from love, actually, the loving function of lies and falsehoods. Anybody who has lived far away from home might find that this resonates with them: This feeling that when you are really far away from your loved ones, you need to assure them that you are OK, that things are all right. It’s a kind of love that you can offer them, because they cannot do anything to help you from so far away. So offering them falsehoods about how your circumstances are fine and they have nothing to worry about is an expression of love for them.

You studied anthropology in college. How did you move into fiction?

Anthropology is about the effort to understand [other people] while acknowledging that you can never fully know, that there are limits to how much any of us can understand another person’s life. That training, in listening for complexity in somebody else’s life story, and honoring the contradictions and intricacies of their life, and maintaining the humility to acknowledge that there are things about other people which will always remain mysterious to us — that space is so rich for a fiction writer.

You teach writing in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. How does that feed into your work?

It’s what I loved about working as a book editor. Teaching feels beautifully related to editorial work, because, once again, I am close to other writers. I’m close to their text, I am thinking with them through the questions of what this text is accomplishing. And I love having the opportunity to think through failures of prose with other incredibly smart and creative and ambitious writers. When I say failure, there’s nothing bad or stressful about it. I fail in my writing all the time. Failure is part of the process. Being able to look at those failures and ask, what is happening here is very useful.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Twenty-five years after “Almost Famous” put his origin story on movie screens, Cameron Crowe (left, with Robert Plant) reflects on his roots as a teenage music journalist.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Valorie Castellanos Clark writes that “The Radical Fund,” John Fabian Witt’s book about a Jazz Age millionaire who gave his money away is a “meticulous” story of “the ways a modest fund endowed by a reluctant heir managed to reshape American civil rights in less than 20 years.”

Nine years after “Go Set a Watchman” published, Robert Allen Papinchak reviews Harper Lee’s latest, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” a collection of stories and essays from the late author, calling it “a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.”

Leigh Haber is entranced with Gish Jen’s new novel “Bad Bad Girl,” about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, calling the book “suffused with love and a desire to finally understand.”

Finally, Mikael Wood chatted with filmmaker Cameron Crowe about his new memoir, “The Uncool.” Says Crowe of his journalism days, “I did an interview with Bob Dylan for Los Angeles magazine, and I got it so wrong that they didn’t publish it.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Vroman’s Bookstore is on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Nine months after the Eaton fire, Vroman’s Bookstore continues to be a cherished haven for local residents. The store still vibrates with bookish energy as it continues its ambitious fundraising outreach campaigns for fire victims. We chatted with the store’s chief executive, Julia Cowlishaw, about how things are going at the beloved Pasadena institution.

Nine months after the fire, how is business?

Business has been steady this year and we’re pleased with that, given all the variables in the world.

What books are selling right now?

The new releases this fall are fabulous, and we are seeing a broad range of interests. In nonfiction there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand current events from historical perspectives and Jill Lepore’s “We the People” is one example on our bestseller list. Since it is fall, the list of cookbooks is amazing and Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook “Good Things” along with her older book “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” make great gifts. In fiction, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, Thomas Pynchon and Lily King’s new novels are popular, so literary fiction is alive and well.

How important has the store been for the community in such a challenging year?

Bookstores, including Vroman’s, have long been recognized as a third place in their communities. A third place gives people a space to come together with friends and family over a shared interest and a fine sense of community. That sense of community became even more important after the fires, and it was so important for us to be more than a bookstore and give back to our community in every way we could. Our community really responded by helping us raise money for several community foundations, and collect books and supplies for people impacted by the fires.

Vroman’s Bookstore is at 695 E. Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena.

When it was first published in 1975, “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” was immediately recognized as something new. In six taut, probing, far-ranging essays about certain popular or otherwise forgotten musicians, author Greil Marcus cracked open a world of sojourners, tricksters, killers and confidence men — the lost subterranean underlife of America as inflected in the music itself.

“Mystery Train” was a landmark in cultural criticism that took on Rock ‘n’ Roll as a subject of intellectual inquiry. In 2011, Time magazine named “Mystery Train” one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of all time. For the book’s 50th anniversary, a new edition has been published, with a wealth of new writing from Marcus that brings his book up to date.

On a recent Zoom call, I chatted with him on the 50th anniversary of his book about its lasting impact, the anxiety of influence and the staying power of criticism.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Book jacket of “Mystery Train” by Greil Marcus.

(Penguin Random House)

Congrats on 50 years of “Mystery Train.” Could you have possibly imagined that it would still have a life in 2025 when you wrote it in 1975?

For this book to have this kind of a life, you can’t predict it. I had a miserable time writing it. I’d never written a book before. I rented a room at a house near our little apartment, and just stayed there all day, trying to write or not trying to write, as the case may be. I didn’t have any hopes or ambitions for it. I just wanted it to look good.

This is the thickest edition of “Mystery Train” yet. Your “Notes and Discographies” section, where you update the reader on new books and recordings about the artists, among other things, is longer than the original text of the book.

That’s what’s kept the book alive. I mean, I still think the original chapters read well. I’m glad they came out the way they did, but for me, they opened up a continuing story, and that has sort of kept me on the beat so that I obsessively would follow every permutation that I could and write them in the notes section.

“Mystery Train” changed the way popular music was written about. Who were your literary antecedents?

Edmund Wilson, Pauline Kael, D.H. Lawrence’s critical studies. Hemingway’s short stories, just as a way to learn how to try to write. There was another book that was important to me, Michael Gray’s “Song and Dance Man,” which was a rigorous examination of Bob Dylan’s music. It was totally intimidating. His knowledge of blues, novels, poetry — I thought there’s no way I can write something as good as this. So I started doing a lot more reading, and listening more widely.

For many readers of the book, it was the first time they came across artists like Robert Johnson or Harmonica Frank. How did you discover these artists?

I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine in 1969 when the Altamont disaster happened, when people were killed at a free Rolling Stones concert. It was an evil, awful day. I was drained and disgusted with what rock ‘n’ roll had become, and I didn’t want to listen to that music anymore. I found myself in this little record store in Berkeley, and I saw an album by Robert Johnson that had a song called “Four Until Late” that Eric Clapton’s band Cream had covered, so I took it home and played it, and that was just a revelation to me. It led me into another world. It became the bedrock of “Mystery Train.”

Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger signs autographs at Altamont Speedway. Later, on Dec. 6, the Stones gave a concert where one fan was stabbed to death by a Hell’s Angel.

(Associated Press)

Your book explores how certain myths transfer across vastly disparate cultures. Had you read the great mythologist Joseph Campbell prior to writing the book?

I read a lot of Joseph Campbell in graduate school. Probably a half-dozen of his books. In some ways they cover the same territory as “Mystery Train.” Campbell makes the argument that myths persist, they don’t even need to be cultivated. They cultivate us, and they are passed on in almost invisible ways. That really struck a chord with me when reading Campbell’s work.

You’re very good at explaining what music sounds like. Are you influenced by fiction at all?

I’d say fiction is part of my work. One of the books that hovered over me when I was writing “Mystery Train” was “The Great Gatsby.” Certain lines, they sang out.

What is the purpose of criticism?

My next book is about Bryan Ferry, the leader of the band Roxy Music. Now, you listen to a song like Roxy Music’s “More Than This” and you say, what makes this so great? How did that happen? What is going on here? That’s what criticism is, just wrestling with your response to something. That thing where someone has captured a moment so completely that you sort of fall back in awe. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life as a writer. There is this urge to, not exactly take possession of something, but to become a part of it to some small degree.

Your book plumbs the murky depths, exploring the mysterious dream life of America as transmuted through certain music. Are there any mysteries left for you?

Oh, yes, absolutely. I remember when I met Bob Dylan in 1997. He was getting an award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and I was to give a talk. We met and he asked what I was working on. I had just published a book called “Invisible Republic,” about his “Basement Tapes.” He said, “You should write a sequel to that. You only just scratched the surface.” Now, I’m not saying I did a bad job. He said that to me because certain music has infinite depth. So, yes, there are certainly more mysteries to think about.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Valerie Castallanos Clark loves Jade Chang’s new novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” calling it “equal parts love letter to Los Angeles, narrative about being a first-generation Asian American, exploration of grief and love and a found-family novel featuring an adoptee that doesn’t put reunion as the emotional climax.”

With “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon has delivered a late-career gem, according to David Kipen: “Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, ‘Shadow Ticket’ capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.”

Finally, Cerys Davies chats with Mychal Threets about his new gig as host of the long-running TV show “Reading Rainbow.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Stories Books & Cafe is on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.

(Claudia Colodro)

Ever since it opened its doors in 2008, Stories Books & Cafe has been a community cornerstone. A snug yet carefully curated store, with loads of obscurantist art books and choice indie press titles, Stories also has a cafe tucked in the back that is always bustling. Owner Claudia Colodro runs the store as a creative cooperative with her five co-workers. I talked to the team about the shop on Sunset.

What’s selling right now?

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy, “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar, and Thomas Pynchon’s “Shadow Ticket” are a few of our recent big sellers.

Stories is small, yet I always see titles in there I don’t see anywhere else.

Stories prides itself on its painstaking curation, influenced by every employee’s area of expertise. Much like the community we have garnered, Stories leans toward the eclectic, esoteric and even fringe. Over our 17 years in existence, Stories has been a bookstore that loves our local authors and independent publishers, and encourages readers to come in with an open mind more than a predetermined list.

Remarkably, you have endured in a neighborhood that has seen a lot of store closures, post-COVID.

In a world predominantly automatized and authoritative, we like our people and books to be a countermeasure to the mainstream creature comforts — in hopes to push people out of the path of least resistance and into the unseen abundance.

Stories Books & Cafe is at 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.

The world is a confusing and scary place right now. Many of us are anxious wanderers in the wilderness, looking for answers. Is it any wonder that the wellness industry is booming? Into this strange new world comes Jade Chang’s funny and poignant novel “What a Time to Be Alive,” whose protagonist Lola is broke and aimless — until a leaked video transforms her into an instant self-help guru.

Chang, whose first novel, “The Wangs vs. The World,” was a sharp satire on class and ambition, has now turned her gaze to the promise and peril of self-actualization through social media. I sat down with Chang to discuss spiritualism for profit, tech bros and trucker hats.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Book jacket of “What a Time to Be Alive” by Jade Chang

(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Ecco)

This book almost didn’t make it, as you physically lost it.

I started it years ago. I was writing in longhand in a notebook, entire chapters of the book. I lost the notebook and I was devastated. Then I moved on and wrote “The Wangs vs. The World.” It took a long time to get back into writing this new book. By the time I circled back to it, the world had changed so much. I think I have become more generous about things, and the story benefited from it.

Lola, your protagonist, unwittingly becomes an online self-help guru on the basis of a leaked video that is posted on social media. She becomes a sort of accidental wellness expert.

As someone who didn’t grow up with religion, I have always been really fascinated by belief. Why do we want to believe, and how are we compelled to certain beliefs? And it was just kind of fascinating and amazing that people could find so much life in religious stories. As I was developing the story of this novel, I realized that everyone in the digital world takes a page from this book as well, using stories to convert listeners into believers. I think Lola starts out sort of thinking she is in above her head, but by the end, her sincerity shines through. She wants to believe what she is telling others to believe.

Do you think the internet breeds cynicism and has turned us all into an angry mob?

I don’t. The digital world doesn’t make us any different from who we are, but it can throw a lens on certain aspects of our behavior. I think the internet allows us to be our best and worst selves. Think about all those strangers who might contribute to a GoFundMe campaign because someone has had a serious injury and needs to pay their medical bills, which can yield tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. That’s the mob functioning at its best.

But isn’t it a little too easy to pull a con job online?

Yes, it’s easy to be inauthentic online, but it’s important to remember that online performance is a tiny percentage of someone’s life. That’s why I was so interested in writing about the rise of this self-help guru, because usually when these stories are told you only see it from the acolyte’s point of view or the skeptic’s point of view. But we all have to make money, and we all are pulling a little something over on someone at some point — it’s part of surviving in the world.

Lola cauterizes the pain in her personal life by offering panaceas to pain for strangers online, but she affects a false persona to do so.

It’s easy to assume that anything we do, whether it’s on social media or elsewhere online, is performative or fraudulent in some way. RuPaul has a great quote where he says gender is drag. Everything is drag, a performance. Every choice we make is often not reflective of our essential self. You can’t codify identity in clothes or that trucker hat you’re wearing; anything you’re going to choose is going to be influenced by the times in which you live and who you surround yourself with. I can only speak from experience, but I think it’s almost impossible to suppress your true self.

You mentioned how self-help gurus and tech bros have a similar public worldview.

As research for the book, I attended one of Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays at Royce Hall. Every single person that spoke had the same arc: “I was down in the dumps, and then I looked up from that hole and I saw a glimmer in the form of CrossFit,” or drumming, or whatever it was that pulled them up from the brink. Then I went to a TED talk, and these tech gurus are saying the exact same thing. It’s the narrative of our time. I saw that crossover, and I knew I had something to say. I was interested in this internal push and pull of, how much do you give in to this tactic, and how much do you not.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Hamilton Cain has mixed feelings about Patricia Lockwood’s autofictional account of the COVID-19 lockdown, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” praising Lockwood’s “rich and kinetic” prose but bemoaning her “self-indulgent and repetitious” narrative.

Steve Henson has a chat with tennis legend Björn Borg about his new memoir, “Heartbeats,” which delves into his heavy cocaine and alcohol use that began shortly after he walked away from the sport at age 26.

Karen Palmer’s harrowing memoir, “She’s Under Here,” “details forgery, a child’s kidnapping, a mental breakdown, struggles to stay afloat — and joy,” writes Bethanne Patrick.

And David A. Keeps reports on the fiscal inequities of the booming audiobook industry: “Many actors are vying for audiobook roles at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

The Book Jewel, located in the city of Westchester, is just minutes from LAX.

(The Book Jewel)

The Book Jewel is a welcome addition to the neighborhood of Westchester, an expansive bookstore with an excellent selection of fiction and nonfiction titles for locals, or those who might stop by there before catching their flight at nearby LAX. We talked with general manager Joseph Paulsen about the store.

Your store is serving a community that hasn’t had a general interest bookstore in quite some time.

The Book Jewel opened smack-dab in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic in August of 2020. Our Westchester community has supported us from Day 1, and we recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. We are the only bookstore in Westchester, and we are locally owned and independent. I live here in Westchester and have raised both of my sons here.

What’s selling right now?

Right now we’re selling tons of children’s literature and graphic novels (“InvestiGators,” Dav Pilkey, etc.). Of course, the ABA Independent Bestsellers. Lots of romantasy.

You are pretty close to LAX. Do you sell a lot of books to travelers?

The travelers give themselves away with their roller bags, and we catch ’em heading out of Los Angeles on the reg! They like long books for long flights. Lots of souvenirs too! We have some unique, local non-book items as well and offer a better vibe than the international terminal.

The Book Jewel is located at 6259 W. 87th St, Los Angeles, CA.

Like all great crime writers, Lou Berney knows that a ripping story is only as good as the characters that make it rip. With his new novel “Crooks,” Berney has created a family saga about a small-time operator named Buddy Mercurio, his pickpocket wife Lillian and their five children.

As Buddy’s brood leave the nest and stake their claim in the world, his patriarchal shadow looms large, and the sins of the father are hard to kick. I chatted with Berney about his sixth novel, crime and why smartphones are his worst enemy.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Lou Berney, author of “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family.”

(Lou Berney)

How did you come to crime novels?

The writers I love tend to be crime writers. I really got turned on my freshman year of college to Flannery O’Connor
and that just kind of blew my mind. To me, she’s the greatest crime writer ever. “Wise Blood,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Every one of her books has elements of a crime novel in them that she does really interesting things with. 


But you started as a more traditional literary writer.

My first story was in “The New Yorker” when I was in grad school. I was writing straight literary fiction. Then I started writing screenplays and learning more about plot and storytelling. I just kind of settled into this idea of crime, which to me is the one genre where you can do almost anything you want. It’s such a big tent. And so it was a great way for me to embrace the limitless, essentially.

What about traditional crime writers? Who moves you?

A big influence was Elmore Leonard. Also Jim Thompson, who was a fellow Oklahoma writer. Those are two guys that really, really affected me. But the current state of crime fiction is just awesome. I love so many contemporary crime writers right now. Sara Gran,
Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbott, S.A. Cosby. This is a golden age in some ways for weird, interesting crime fiction that takes you to different places. 
Everybody’s kind of doing their own thing, which I really love.

Are you a Walter Mosley fan?

A huge fan. I got to work with Walter this year. I wrote for a TV show called “The Lowdown” which was created by Sterlin Harjo, who created “Reservation Dogs.” Walter and I were the two novelists in the writers room, six hours a day for 20 weeks, and I just got to hear Walter Mosley talk. The guy is a genius. His thoughts on writing are just mind-blowingly good. So I got paid for an education.

I love the Mercurios. I feel like part of the appeal of a family like this is that they are everything most of us are not: They are bold risk–takers who dive into things without fear.

In writing about the Mercurios, I was getting to vicariously live these lives that were enormously appealing to me. You know, I don’t want to be a criminal and I would probably make a bad criminal, but it’s sure fun to sort of live without rules and live without fear and be reckless and do whatever you want.

“Crooks” is set in the pre-camera phone era, when life had an entirely different texture, and information traveled slowly.

I was walking through the airport yesterday, and it was so demoralizing to see every single person on their phone, with literally no exceptions. Everyone walking, sitting and standing were on their phones, and I thought, “Man, I’m glad I’m old enough to remember when none of that existed,” because that was way, way more interesting to me as a writer.

I love the chapters that are set in ’80s Los Angeles. How did you conjure all of that up?

I read a lot of old magazines. Los Angeles magazine was great. I got all the old issues on EBay. And I have a friend who grew up in the ‘80s in L.A., so I ran some stuff by him. I just love research. I wasn’t into homework as a kid at all, but now I’ve discovered that if it’s homework I need to do for a book, I’m all about it.

The novel is divided into six parts, and every section is so deftly plotted. How difficult is the plot for you?

I do extensive outlining so I can get a sense of plot. But I end up probably changing 75% of it as I go. With this book, the Jeremy chapter worked perfectly, whereas Alice took me like three times as long as any of the other chapters, because I had to keep figuring out how she was going to outsmart this guy, and nothing was working or wasn’t fitting right. It really depends on the particular kind of plotline.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Julia M. Klein thinks Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda does a fine job of probing the inner artist, a “joyous, charismatic, well-meaning, occasionally imperfect man.”

Samantha Fink sat down with Elizabeth Gilbert to discuss her new memoir “All The Way to The River.”

With Oasis and Pulp on the road, Dave Rowntree makes sure his group Blur gets a hand in the Britpop Revival with a book of band photographs.

And finally, our reviewers pick 30 Fall books that everyone must read.

📖 Bookstore Faves

A book-loving cat wanders through the aisles of Small World Books located on the Venice Boardwalk.

(Adam Lipman)

Small World Books is the grandaddy of indie book stores in L.A. Established in 1969 on the Venice Boardwalk, the store has always been well-curated and loaded with a diverse array of titles. We spoke with manager Adam Lipman about what customers are snatching up.

What’s selling right now?

The new RF Kuang, “Katabasis,” is selling really well, as is the new Taylor Jenkins Reid, “Atmosphere,” and it’s been hard to keep in stock “Daughter Mother Grandmother and Whore” by Gabriela Leite.

What are some popular genres that your customers like?

Romantasy, horror and architecture are getting snatched up right quick these days.

And those that love poetry are always impressed with our poetry section. But we are selling all types of books right now! From bestsellers to books about lo-fi cassette culture, sextrology, and Charles Oakley. Anything important or interesting to us we try to get in store and keep in stock.

Why are books still necessary in a wired world?

Susan Orleans wrote in “The Orchid Thief”: “There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”

Part of why we are called Small World Books is because we believe books are an excellent way to “whittle the world down to a more manageable size,” small enough to not seem so overwhelmingly exhausting, and hopefully, then making it easier to expand our circle of empathy.

For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues. The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic. Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping co-dependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.

I spoke with Anderson about his book, and the long tail of missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Author Scott Anderson.

(Nanette Burstein)

The overall feeling I get reading the book is fecklessness and foot–dragging on the part of the American government in the service of protecting our oil sales and military contracts with Iran. There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of, well, just about everything.

Even after the revolution when Khomeini had come in — that nine month period before the hostages were taken — the Americans pretty much replicated the mistakes they’d made with the shah. There’s this whole idea of like, well, they’re going through this revolutionary anti-American fervor right now, but they need us. They’re going to come back around because our economies are so intertwined. All their weapons are American, so they’re going to need us to service them. So there’s just this manner that everything was going to work out and, of course, that became institutionalized.

With a few exceptions, none of the U.S. officials in Iran even spoke Farsi. You talk about how they had all those cassettes of Khomeini’s speeches in the drawers at the CIA and no one bothered to translate them.

So Khomeini comes back from exile on Feb. 1, 1979, with 4 million people greeting him. He goes to the cemetery to give his inaugural speech and the Americans don’t even send an embassy worker. They don’t even send a local out to the cemetery to hear the speech. They didn’t know whether it is a pro- or anti-American speech. It was just astonishing.

Do you feel like 1972 is the turning point? This is the year that President Nixon lifted all restrictions for arms sales to Iran.

I really do. And for what I think is a pretty interesting reason. The shah was a congenitally insecure man. He could never be affirmed enough. And it doesn’t matter how many presidents said, “You’re our man,” he always needed to hear more and more. So what happened in ’72 was the shah’s dream came true. He had knelt at the feet of FDR in 1943. Kennedy was dismissive of him. He had always been trying to push in the door with the Americans. He’d been humiliated again and again. And now he’s got carte blanche from Nixon and Kissinger. This is when you saw the huge escalation in arms purchases and the catapulting of the Iranian military into the first tier of militaries around the world.

Do you think the revolution could have been prevented?

I spent a lot of time studying the revolution as it unfolded, and what struck me was how mysterious the whole thing was, how it came to be. There were so many moments where the outcome might have been different. If the shah’s confidante Asadollah Alam hadn’t died in the early days of the revolution, for example, because he was decisive and the shah was not. There were so many odd quirks that took things down a certain path.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Justin Currie, lead singer of Scottish rock band Del Amitri, chronicles his struggle with Parkinson’s in the book “The Tremolo Diaries.”

(Colin Constance)

“Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way,” Ilana Masad writes about the author’s new novel, “A New New Me.” “Such whimsy … could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer … that you know you are in good hands.”

R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “Katabasis,” is “a dark academic fantasy” that is “more mature and less showy” than the author’s earlier works, according to Valorie Castellanos Clark.

David Baron has written a book called “The Martians” about the frenzy over extraterrestrial life that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century, and Chris Vognar approves. Baron “approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive,” he writes.

Finally, Stuart Miller talked with Justin Currie of the band Del Amitri about his new book, “The Tremolo Diaries,” about Currie’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Malibu Village Books is the only general interest bookstore in Malibu. We spoke to owner Michelle Pierce about the beachside literary hub.

(Malibu Village Books)

Malibu Village Books is the first new bookstore to arrive in the beach city in 15 years. A small yet inviting space with a well curated selection of books, the store has had its share of challenges over the past year. I spoke to the store’s owner, Michelle Pierce, about it.

This is the first new bookstore to open in Malibu in quite some time. How did you come to open it?

I also own Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, and the owners of the Malibu Village Mall came by and liked what I was doing there, so they asked me if I wanted to open a store in their mall.

What is selling right now?

“My Friends” by Fredrik Backman, “The River’s Daughter” by Bridget Crocker and a big preorder for “By Invitation Only” by Alexandra Brown Chang.

How have the fires affected business?

The fires have affected us enormously. With the Franklin fire, we lost so much of our holiday book sales, and then the Palisades fire shut down PCH for six months. So our sales are definitely down, and the summer tourism traffic has not been what it should be, so yes, we are definitely in a challenging period.

What about the locals? Are they shopping in your store?

Local residents are really excited that we’re here. We have a lot of active book clubs, and we’re working with the library on a lecture series at the Soho House, where we will bring in authors to speak. We’re still fighting, and the community is definitely supporting us. It’s true what they say — bookstores are all about community.

Malibu Village Books is located at 23359 Pacific Coast Highway #23359, Malibu, 90265.

This week, we are chatting with Ada Tseng and Jon Healey about their new book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.” We also take a look at what our critics read, and visit a bookstore that has become a social beehive in Culver City.

The entertainment industry is experiencing a massive transformation, as traditional jobs are vanishing and artificial intelligence increasingly upends the way media is created. Thankfully, former L.A. Times editors Ada Tseng and Jon Healey are here to help. The duo, with extensive experience covering show business, have written a new book for anyone who’s ever dreamed of working in Hollywood. Tseng and Healey interviewed hundreds of insiders who work in front of and behind the camera to provide a thorough look at how to break in, and what it’s like when you do find that dream job.

I sat down with authors to discuss “Breaking Into New Hollywood.”

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

✍️ Author Chat

Tseng and Healey are here to help you pursue your Hollywood dreams with their book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.”

(Ricardo DeAratanha; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

This is the most comprehensive how-to guide for Hollywood careers I’ve ever read. Where did the impetus for the book come from?

Ada: The book started as a Hollywood careers series at the Los Angeles Times, when Jon and I were editors on a team that specialized in writing guides and explainers. As we were thinking about how to be useful to L.A. Times readers, I pitched a project to help people who were interested in getting a job in Hollywood. A lot of people come to L.A. starry-eyed with big dreams, but the film and TV industry can be pretty brutal.

As journalists, we’re Hollywood outsiders, but we had access to hundreds of professionals who were generous enough to share what they wished they knew when they were starting out. We see it like this: On behalf of the people who don’t have connections in the industry, we cold-emailed people, asked for informational interviews, picked their brains, listened to stories of what they did to build a career — and did our best to consolidate their most practical pieces of advice into an actionable guide.

Jon: A lot of folks I interviewed had similar origin stories in this respect: They knew that they wanted to work in the industry in some capacity, but they didn’t know what exactly they could do. So it made sense to do a book for that sort of person — a guide that would show an array of possible career paths to people who didn’t know what role they wanted to fill.

I feel like “How to Break into the Business” books in the past have tended to focus on positive outcomes rather than the struggle. Did you want to temper expectations, or at least make sure people think things through very thoroughly before jumping in?

Ada: We just wanted to be honest. The glamorous fantasy of Hollywood is so intoxicating. But if you’re going to work in the industry, you need to navigate the day-to-day reality of it. I don’t think we were trying to encourage or discourage anyone. I’d hope that some people would read the chapters and think, “This seems doable, and now I can make a plan,” while others would read it and think, “If I’m honest with myself, I’m someone who needs more stability in my life.” Because it’s not just a career choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.

Jon: Right, this was about expectation-setting and reality-checking. The very first interviews I did in this project were of Foley artists. An expert I interviewed said there were 40 to 50 established Foley practitioners in the U.S., and 100 to 200 folks trying to get into the field. That’s a very tough nut to crack. Then there are the Hollywood unions, which present a catch-22 to anyone trying to join their ranks — they have to do a certain number of hours in jobs covered by union contracts, but union members get first crack at all those gigs.

Your book also covers jobs above and below the line. I think many people don’t even realize how many different career opportunities exist.

Ada: There are two things we heard over and over again. People would say, “It’s incredibly important to understand what all the different departments do.” And they’d also say, “So many people — even our own colleagues in the industry — don’t understand what we do.” So we wanted to encourage newcomers to learn about all different types of jobs in Hollywood and how they work together.

Jon: Talking about the emotional components is about setting expectations too. The vast majority of people who work in Hollywood, from A-list actors to entry-level grips, are freelancers. That’s a tough life of highs and lows, and you have to prepare for that mentally as well as financially. People have to hustle for years to establish themselves, and that takes an enormous capacity for rejection. On top of that is the physical toll the work can extract, especially on the folks involved in setting up and tearing down sets. Part of the point of the book is to tell people with Hollywood dreams that they’ll need to gird themselves emotionally and physically for the work.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Karin Slaughter’s new book series, which launches with “We Are All Guilty Here,” is not for the squeamish.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Mark Athatakis finds much to like in “Ready for My Close-Up,” David M. Lubin’s book about the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard.” “Though the book has its shortcomings,” he writes, “[Lubin] rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself.”

Robet Allen Papinchak weighs in on Phoebe Greenwood’s Middle East satire “Vulture,” finding it “a darkly comic, searing satire grounded in historic politics.”

Emma Sloley’s novel “The Island of Last Things” envisions a future where animal life, and then entire ecosystems, are wiped out, but Ilana Masad writes that Sloley also highlights “the small moments of beauty, joy and care that emerge even during … horrible times.”

And Paula L. Woods has a chat with master thriller novelist Karin Slaughter about her new book, “We Are All Guilty Here,” and TV series.

📖 Bookstore Faves

“Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives,” says the owner of Culver City’s Village Well bookstore.

(Jennifer Caspar)

Four years after it opened its doors to the public, Village Well Books & Coffee has become a community locus in its Culver City neighborhood. Owner Jennifer Caspar has created a vibrant space with a full-service cafe, allowing her customers to linger for as long as they please while perusing Caspar’s ample and well-curated selection of new books. I chatted with Caspar about her store and what’s selling right now.

Why did you open the store?

I wanted a place where people can facilitate connections with others, because I think that’s what people need. Everyone is so overwhelmed by their phones and technology, and we tend to take the easy path, which is to not get out and see people.

What’s selling right now?

“Atmosphere,” Taylor Jenkins Reid; “Martyr,” Kaveh Akbar; “The Emperor of Gladness,” Ocean Vuong; “All Fours,” Miranda July. There’s been a real increase in books about activism and the Middle East situation. We’re launching an activism book club here, starting with “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)” by Dean Spade. It will be interesting to see who comes out for that.

Why books now? Why not the Substack, social media, etc.?

Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives. People need to connect offline, and books give us a chance to settle down and focus. Studies show that what we learn from books stays with us longer. You can read a Kindle, and I do, but there is something about sitting down with words on paper. For me, it’s great physical therapy for my emotional state.

Village Well is located at 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City.

Emily Hunt Kivel’s book is unlike any novel you will read this year, a story about millennial angst that is also a bewitching fable. Evie Cavallo, Kivel’s protagonist, is a 20-something mid-level graphic designer at a New York ad agency who loses her rented apartment and finds herself cast adrift. Landing in a fictional backwater town in rural Texas called Gulluck, Evie discovers a hidden gift for shoemaking and finds herself welcomed into an eccentric community of fellow cobblers. “Dwelling” is social commentary wrapped into a delightful allegory about identity, work, ritual and tradecraft.

I chatted with Kivel about her debut novel, and how, despite its fantastical elements, “Dwelling” nails our present cultural moment.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Emily Hunt Kivel’s “Dwelling” is “unlike any novel you will read this year,” writes Marc Weingarten.

(Julia Hole)

I started reading your book thinking, “Ugh, a polemic about the housing crisis,” and by the end of the book I was deeply moved by Evie’s journey.

That’s what I wanted. I wanted readers to think they were reading one thing and to end up at the end thinking, “Where the f— was I?” I wanted to write a book that changed shape and form while in the reader’s hands.

Was that the original intention going in?

I don’t know if I started out with the intention of writing the book I did, but I certainly didn’t want to write a maudlin dystopian commentary on the housing crisis. I did want to touch on this feeling of complete instability that millennials in particular are feeling, but also I think everyone is feeling it to some extent — this incredible lack of stability, and alienation.

Evie, maybe, kind of wants to be a creative, but instead she blossoms by learning a craft that involves using her hands and her head, not a computer.

I think there’s a parallel between finding a craft and coming into your own, and in that way, I think it’s a fairly earnest description of what it feels like to discover yourself through something that you’re passionate about. Evie goes from being an insular character who’s living a self-absorbed life, because that’s what society wants us to do, to living a life that’s actually very generous.

The book takes on the contours of a fable. Did you read fables in preparation?

I read a lot of fables just to keep myself motivated and interested during the writing process. One of the primary texts that I found very helpful was Italo Calvino’s translation of Italian folk tales. It brought me back to this kind of irreverent but weirdly earnest and enchanted quality that I wanted to create in the book.

Unmoored from her prior life, Evie finds her identity in Texas. I think this is something a lot of people are struggling with, not just Millennials. We are asking: Who are we? What is our purpose in life?

I think we’re meant to feel relatively valueless in our society right now. The economy wants us to feel that way, and so I think what Evie is doing is finding value in herself and giving the middle finger to the version of society that she was living in.

The key element of Evie’s new life is this robust community that welcomes her.

I wanted another world to open up to Evie, a world that’s oriented towards life rather than the self. The book is really the story of how to find a home, and what makes a home. Community is the only actual way to resist the forces that we have in our society that are alienating us from our work, friends and family.

In the acknowledgments, you thank the UCLA Writing Extension program. What was that experience like for you?

One of the most formative experiences of my life was the UCLA Extension. I went to UC Santa Barbara and was absolutely miserable. and so I graduated early and moved to L.A. I was finding community and portals into another world at the Extension, which is available to everyone. I was writing alongside such a diverse array of people. I finally started to feel like a writer there. I took classes with Lou Matthews, who I think is the heart of the program in many ways.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

“Jeopardy!” host and “The Complete Kennections” author Ken Jennings says he was “a sponge for weird information” as a kid.

(Faith Jennings)

Nathan Smith thinks “There’s No Going Back: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme,” Davd M. Stewart’s biography of the late film director Jonathan Demme, contains “inconsistent, often abridged, treatments of Demme’s films and what messages to glean from a long view of the director.”

Hamilton Cain weighs in on Ed Park’s new collection of stories “An Oral History of Atlantis,” submitting that “We’re complicit in his fiction … the act of reading a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all directions like a spray of bullets.”

Chuck Hogan’s “The Carpool Detectives,” about four moms who solved a murder, is a “true crime mystery that reads like a novel,” according to Diane Garrett.

And finally, Stuart Miller has a chat with “Jeopardy” host Ken Jennings about his new book, “The Complete Kennections.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

“Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape,” says Jeff Resnik, general manager of Pages, A Bookstore in Manhattan Beach.

(Pages, A Bookstore)

Located just steps away from the ocean, Manhattan Beach literary mainstay Pages, A Bookstore is one of L.A.’s best indie shops. We chatted with general manager Jeff Resnik about what his customers are buying right now.

What’s flying off the shelves at the moment?

Some of our recent top sellers include “The Ghostwriter” by Julie Clark, “Run for the Hills” by Kevin Wilson, “The Names” by Florence Knapp, “It’s Only Drowning” by David Litt and “Tilt” by Emma Pattee.

Do you find that, because you are near the ocean, people tend to look for beach reads during this time of year?

Definitely. Being so close to the ocean, we get a steady stream of readers looking for something light and enjoyable to bring to the beach. Whether it’s a breezy romance, fast-paced thriller, or witty novel, “beach reads” are in high demand during the summer, and we make a point to stay well-stocked on them.

Given the infinite text we can find on the internet, why are books still important?

There’s a tactile, immersive experience to reading a physical book — turning pages, marking favorite passages, setting it down on a nightstand. There’s a different kind of focus and connection that comes with holding a book. In our fast-paced, distraction-heavy world, reading invites us to slow down. Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape. One of the best parts of my job is helping people reconnect with that experience, or discover it for the first time.

Pages, A Bookstore is at 904 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, 90266.

Adam Aleksic has somehow managed to make linguistics cool. His rapid-fire videos have attracted an audience of millions across the social media universe.

In them, the Etymology Nerd explores linguistics topics like the semiotics of dating websites, the social science of emoji usage and how we are naming our children after influencers.

A Harvard graduate with a linguistics degree, he has now published a book called “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” which explores in depth some of his more fanciful and fascinating theories. We chatted with Aleksic about edutainment, brainrot and President Trump as influencer in chief.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Author Adam Aleksic

(Adam Aleksic)

Did you get into linguistics because you wanted to explore online language?

I don’t think you can actually hope to fully be caught up with online language itself, as it’s mutating by the minute. The book is more of a road map of the general patterns we’re seeing. I personally got interested in etymology in ninth grade. I didn’t know I would be going into internet linguistics.

How do algorithms shape and change language on the web?

You can’t avoid talking about algorithms if you’re talking about modern language change. I’m looking at my own videos thinking, “Wow, I can’t say this specific word because of the algorithm. I have to say it another way.”

I use the example of the word “unalive” as a replacement for “kill.” That developed in English-language mental health spaces to circumvent platform community guidelines that were enforced by an algorithm used by Chinese government, which was then retooled for TikTok. Suddenly, “unalive” was all over the internet. Algorithms are creating new words.

In the book, you talk about context collapse, the notion that effective videos are designed to appear as if they are addressed directly to the user, even though they are, in fact, bringing in disparate users to a single focal point.

When you’re looking at a video on your For You page, you really think it’s for you. But it never is.

As a creator, I never think about individual people. I think about what’s going to go viral, but also, what do I want to make? I make the video first for myself, then I make it for the algorithm. Never do I consider the actual people that end up seeing the video.

Your phone is an extension of yourself. You perceive a message coming from your algorithmic version of yourself. The algorithm doesn’t actually align who my intended audience might be with who the actual audience is. It just sends my video to whatever makes the most money.

What about brainrot — the notion that the internet is damaging young people’s ability to think and reason. Does this apply to online language?

I think there’s no such thing as “brainrot” with words. They’ve done neurological studies. No word is worse for your brain than other words. Now, the other stuff, culturally, is another conversation. It probably is bad that these platforms are monopolizing our attention to sell us things. So I can say, linguistically, we’re fine.

Do you think the internet makes us smarter?

It’s an interesting question. What is “smarter”? I know that’s a hard thing to define. I think like with any tool, it can be true. Every tool has good and bad, right?

You talk about rage-baiting and hyperbole, or hype, as a tool to gain virality online. Our president is quite proficient at this tactic.

I think Trump’s language uniquely lends itself to virality. He has these phrasal templates, like “Make X Y Again,” or “This has been the greatest X in the history of Y.” People use his sentence structures as these skeletons, which they can remix. He coined “sad” as an interjection, which I regularly see my friends using. I don’t know how much of it is intentional. Maybe he just stumbled into it. But the fact of the matter is, I think we have Trump in office because he is uniquely suited to the internet.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Anna Wintour, longtime Vogue editor and chair of the Met Gala, recently announced that she would be stepping back from some of her duties at the iconic Condé Nast magazine.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

Chris Vognar chats with Michael M. Grynbaum about his book “Empire of the Elite,” a history of Condé Nast during its ’90s heyday.

Hamilton Cain calls “The Aviator and the Showman,” Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s joint biography of Amelia Earhart and her husband, “a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife’s career may have cost her life.”

According to Ilana Massad, Kashana Cauley’s novel “The Payback,” a satire about student loans, of all things, is a “terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.”

Valorie Castellanos Clark thinks fan fiction writer turned novelist Brigette Knightley’s debut novel “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy” is “proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Hennessy + Ingalls bookstore serves those with a taste for the visual.

(Hennessy + Ingalls)

Today we are chatting with Carlos Chavez, a bookseller at Hennessey + Ingalls, a sprawling space in downtown L.A. that specializes in books about art, architecture, graphic design and all things visual.

What’s selling right now?

Because we are a speciality bookstore, sales are really across the board. Everyday it can be something different. Someone came in yesterday and bought a bunch of books featuring art from the painter and sculptor Claes Odenberg, for example. We also sell a lot of books on industrial design, and fashion designers have been buying books about shoes. The other day a prop designer came in and purchased books with red covers. It’s a mixed bag.

Art books can be very expensive. Why do you think there is still a market for them, despite the plenitude of images online?

There are still plenty of book lovers who want to hold a book, and they want to see it before they buy it. For many of our customers, books are a great source of artistic inspiration of the kind you just can’t find online. This is the kind of store where customers are free to linger for hours if they want to.

There has been a lot of social unrest downtown this year. How is the store coping?

Business has been up and down. Some days are better than others. I think people were scared to come out, but yesterday was a good day, for example.

Helen Schulman is not afraid to make you squirm. Across her long and distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer, she has fearlessly explored the awkward collisions between our private and public selves, between what we present to the world and what we conceal from even our closest companions. Her 2011 best-selling novel “This Beautiful Life” dared to plunge headfirst into the shark-infested waters of the internet while most of us were still basking in the glow of the web’s shiny benevolence. “Fools For Love,” her latest collection of stories, finds Schulman’s characters weighing the past against the present, looking for redemption in the wrong places and occasionally coming up roses.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Helen Schulman’s new story collection, “Fools For Love,” hits bookshelves this July.

(Knopf)

When it comes to ideas, what becomes a short story and what becomes a novel?

A lot of my ideas spring forward from something Henry James called the “germ” — the bit of overheated gossip, the newspaper article, an eavesdropped conversation on a public bus, a story told by other parents when you are both pushing toddlers on the swings in a playground, which injects itself into the writerly imagination and grows — often over large swaths of time. Sometimes these obsessions entangle, too. That’s what happened in [my story] “The Revisionist.” My husband had a college buddy over for dinner who told us this story about a friend of his who was walking home from work when a strange man ran into his own house and slammed the door in his face. Why? What? Who? The reality was somewhat pedestrian — the intruder was a drunken next-door neighbor, who I guess had overshot. But the anecdote stuck with me.

For some of your characters, the past is ever-present — they are fated to live with the sum of their choices, and it engenders a lot of regret. Can you speak to that?

My all-time favorite writer is William Faulkner. You must be familiar with his quote from the novel “Requiem for a Nun”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I sometimes feel this way about existence in general, like each and every moment in a lifetime is somehow equal, and that as one ages the moments accrue and tag along wherever one goes. Certainly in my own life I don’t sweat my big choices; I’m happy about them. I think a person does the best they can with what they know at the time. But I’m infinitely curious about what could have happened instead.

There is a lot of status anxiety in your work — not just financial status, but marriage, career — the things you think will align pleasingly in middle age but often don’t.

My husband and I are both working writers. The marriage works; the financial status has gone in and out. I’m not sure I always looked to middle age as a time of “pleasing alignment,” but I also didn’t think the world would be as effed up as it is now. Some of my characters get older and wiser; some are just more wrinkled, taller kids. But there is a lot of endurance over time in these stories — love, friendship, workplace passions. I would venture to say that most of my characters have real lives, and some very real satisfactions within the stresses that inevitably go along with them.

There are also secrets in your stories. Are we as sick as our secrets, or are they simply unavoidable?

Everyone has secrets. In “The Revisionist,” the protagonist even keeps secrets from himself. One of my closest friends, after the death of her parents, found out that one was married before and that the other had two other children with someone else. Now everyone is dead, and so we don’t even know if the spouses knew this about each other. There is nothing pedestrian about “ordinary lives.” We all roil and we all excite. I feel like one of my jobs as a fiction writer is to dive down beneath the surface.

In the story “My Best Friend,” there is a shocking act of violence. Why did you take it in that direction?

That story is about two men, one an up-and-coming-actor and the other a want-to-be novelist, who fall into a deep brotherhood while sleeping with the same woman. In fact, they each marry her — sequentially, of course. At some point, the friendship goes south; the protagonist, Jake, and Jeannie, the woman, have kids together and his career dries up. The first husband, Phil, becomes a very successful TV showrunner and producer. Out of pity, he hires Jake to be a character in one of his nighttime soaps. Jake starts to become an audience favorite, and Phil tortures the character on the series. All their pent up homoerotic attachments and jealousies explode in a “manly” brawl, which I see as tragicomedic, at the end of the story. The love story is theirs, after all.

Kurt Vonnegut has a quote about, when one reaches advanced middle age, life becomes an epilogue. That is a hard thing to carry. Do you feel that this is the case? I guess I’m thinking about your story “In a Better Place,” which revisits the characters from the book’s titular story in old age.

No, honestly I don’t. That story is really about the celebration of long love between the couple at the heart of the story, its healing powers and sustaining comforts. What may make this all feel epilogue-y to you (not a word, I know) is because these two people feel happy and fulfilled by their marriage. … My own artistic hope is to go as long as I can. I live to write!

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Charlie English spotlights the CIA’s use of literature to fight communism during the Cold War in his latest book.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Valerie Castellanos Clark weighs in on Charlie English’s “The CIA Book Club,” about how Polish citizens fought Russian communism with books. “As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win … but how English gets us there is exciting,” Clark writes.

Melina Sempill Watts calls Josh Jackson’s book, “The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands” a timely book for a state that is in danger of losing its most precious public resource: “Jackson’s assertion that we are all landowners is a clarion call amid a GOP-led push to sell off public land.”

Leigh Haber raves on Amy Bloom’s latest novel “I’ll Be Right Here.” “As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career,” writes Haber, “she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime.”

Jim Ruland calls Megan Abbott’s latest thriller, “El Dorado Drive,” a novel for our present age of anxiety, propelled by Abbott’s masterful narrative drive and her skill at “rendering the hot, messy inner lives of young people.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Ken Concepcion, owner of Now Serving, tells us what’s been flying off the shelves at his Chinatown bookstore that specializes in cookbooks.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

This week we are perusing the shelves at Now Serving, a cozy bookshop devoted to the culinary arts and located on the ground floor of Chinatown’s Far East Plaza. Co-owner Ken Concepcion gives us the scoop on the hot goods.

What books are selling right now?

“Umma,” “By Heart,” “Fat + Flour,” “Salsa Daddy” and “The Choi of Cooking.”

What food trend are customers excited about right now?

Being that we are in L.A., there has always been a demand for vegetarian and vegan titles. The interest in plant-based cookbooks that delve into specific cuisines such as Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican and Japanese has definitely grown over the years, and the diversity of voices has been wonderful to see. There needs to be better representation for Ecuadorian, Guatemalan and other Central and South American cuisines as well — there is a real demand for it.

Why do you think cookbooks are still important, despite the ubiquity of recipes online?

As with anything that you can find online, recipes are no different. There are thousands upon thousands available. Most of them are copycat recipes. We think cookbooks are still unparalleled in that they can deliver a narrative, historical context and incredible imagery and stunning design in a world that is more reliant on technology than ever. Cookbooks at best are functional objects of art that can be then passed down from generation to generation. They can often become keepsakes, time capsules and family heirlooms.

In this week’s newsletter, we have a chat with Susan Gubar, whose new book, “Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists,” profiles seven creators who found a second wind in their advancing years. We also look at recent releases reviewed in The Times. And a local bookseller tells us what’s selling right now.

Seventeen years ago, Susan Gubar was handed a death sentence. A distinguished professor emerita of English and women’s studies at Indiana University and the co-author (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of 1979’s “The Madwoman in the Attic,” a groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gubar in 2008 was staring down a terminal cancer diagnosis. A clinical trial involving an experimental drug prolonged her life and gave her the impetus to tackle a new project about seven artists — George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Lou Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks and Katherine Dunham — who entered a new phase of creative ferment and productivity as they grew older.

I talked to Gubar about her new book, the myth of old age and the persistent stereotypes attached to female artists who may be perceived as having outlived their usefulness as creators.

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

✍️ Author Chat

“Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists” by Susan Gubar

(W. W. Norton)

Can you talk about how the book came about?

In 2008, I was told that I had 3-5 years to live with late-stage ovarian cancer. The standard treatment was ineffectual. But then in 2012, my oncologist encouraged me to enroll in a clinical trial that was experimenting with a new drug. After nine years in the trial, she then urged me to take “a drug holiday” since long-term use of the medication could cause leukemia. I am still on that holiday. An unanticipated old age made me appreciate the wonderful gifts longevity can bestow.

In researching your subjects, what do they all share in common?

All of my subjects are artists who experienced the losses of aging. They needed canes and wheelchairs and helpers while they suffered the pains of various diseases and regimens. One coped with blindness, another with deafness and still others with the loss of intimates. Yet in the face of such deficits, they used their art to exhibit their audacity, mojo, chutzpah, bravado. They’re exemplars of Geezer Machismo.

All of your subjects are women, who have a much tougher time in terms of earning respect and attention as they age. Can you speak to the obstacles they had to overcome as they reinvented themselves as artists in their advanced years?

The stereotypical old lady is invisible or risible, but we know that many elderly women thrive. My old ladies did not approach their life stories as prime-and-decline narratives. Instead they reinvented themselves. In part, they managed to do this by changing their objectives as artists. They moved from the stage to the page or from elite to popular forms. Some of them underwent religious or political conversions that energized their last years. They fully understood the losses of old age, but they did not settle for less. Instead, they made much of less.

What’s interesting about these artists is that — contrary, I must admit, to what I thought would have been the case — these women were supported by men who became their benefactors, and helped them to negotiate their careers.

Quite a few of the women that I write about were helped by much younger men in their lives, who became facilitators. This is true for George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeoise, Mary Lou Williams and others. Williams, the great jazz pianist, was helped by a Jesuit named Father O’Brien, who helped her get control of her copyrights. Georgia O’Keeffe, in contrast, has been championed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but she had to leave him in her midlife to establish her autonomy late in life. He was very controlling, even though he definitely established her reputation. She was aided in her later years by a man young enough to be her grandson.

You are an octogenarian, and writing a book isn’t easy, as you know. Where do you find the inspiration and the strength to keep going as a creator?

What keeps me going is what kept my subjects flourishing in their seventies, eighties or nineties. Any sort of creative activity involves expression, which is a great antidote to depression. It may take the form of sculpting, painting, playing an instrument, teaching a dance routine, making a quilt or a garden, establishing a park or a prize, you name it. Without my two current writing projects, I’d be lost. Even (or maybe especially) in our dismal political climate, ongoing creative projects make each day an adventure.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Paula L. Woods writes about five crime novels to read this summer and their authors reveal the writers who inspire them.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Heather Scott Partington reviews “Fox,” Joyce Carol Oates’ mystery novel about a murdered pedophile. “Fox has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author’s elegant structure and syntax,” writes Partington .

Leigh Haber weighs in on Jess Walter’s book “So Far Gone,” calling the author a “slyly adept social critic [who has] clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken.”

Daniel Felsenthal thinks Geoff Dyer’s memoir “Homework” is somewhat meandering, yet “bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state.”

And Paula L. Woods talked to five mystery writers about the inspirations for their new books.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Chevalier’s Books in the neighborhood of Larchmont in Los Angeles, April 10, 2024.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

This week, we’re talking about hot books with Nat Eastman, the manager of Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont Boulevard in Hollywood, the oldest independent bookstore in Los Angeles.

What books are selling in the store right now?

We’ve been moving Percival Everett’s “James” and Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness” hand over fist. Thanks to BookTok, Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter” has become a mainstay on our bestseller list. We also had the honor of hosting Bryan Byrdlong for a reading from his debut poetry collection “Strange Flowers,” and we’ve been handselling it right and left ever since.

What are your perennial sellers?

Kaya Doi’s series of picture books, “Chirri and Chirra,” is a smash hit around here. Joan Didion and bell hooks are reliable customer favorites as well. As an indie shop, though, we love the deeper cuts too — whether that’s “Água Viva,” literally any Yoko Ogawa work or something from our zine collection.

Are you seeing more young people buying books?

Despite all the reports about declining literacy rates among young folk, our children’s section makes up a quarter of our sales. We really try to carve out a space for the next generation of readers with programs like storytime, a middle-grade book club and summer-reading punch cards. To us, messy shelves are annoying everywhere except the kids’ section!

This week, we are jumping into the fire with Kelly Ramsey. Her new book, “Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and The Burning American West,” chronicles her time fighting some of the state’s most dangerous conflagrations alongside an all-male crew of Hotshots. The elite wildland firefighters are tasked with applying their tactical knowledge to tamp down the biggest fires in the state. We also look at recent releases reviewed by Times critics. And a local bookseller tells us what our next great read should be.

In 2017, Ramsey found herself in a holding pattern. Living in Austin, with an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh under her belt, she didn’t know what or where she wanted to be. So she took a nanny job. “I was spending all my time outdoors with these kids,” she told me. “I thought, is there a job that would allow me to be outside all the time?”

Ramsey landed a volunteer summer gig working on a fire trail crew in Happy Camp, Northern California, on the Klamath River. While Ramsey was learning the delicate art of building firebreaks, a large fire broke out just outside the town. “My introduction to California that summer was filled with smoke,” says the author. “This is when I got the bug, when I started to become interested in fighting fires.”

Ramsey became a qualified firefighter in 2019, joining an entirely male crew of fellow Hotshots. Ramsey’s book “Wildfire Days” is the story of that fraught and exciting time. We talked to Ramsey about the “bro culture” of fire crews, the adrenaline surge of danger and the economic hardships endured by these frontline heroes.

Below, read our interview with Ramsey, who you can see at Vroman’s on June 23. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

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

✍️ Author Chat

Ramsey details how she became a qualified firefighter in 2019, when she joined an entirely male wildland fire crew, in her new book.

(Lindsey Shea; Scribner)

What was it like when you confronted a big fire for the first time?

It was the Bush fire in Arizona. I was so incredulous, just marveling at what was happening. “Look at that smoke,” and “that helicopter is making a water drop.” It was kind of a rookie move, because all the other crew members had seen it thousands of times. To see a helicopter up close making a drop, it looks like this gorgeous waterfall. I had to get acclimated to the epic nature of fires. And that wasn’t even a big fire, really.

In the book, you talk about entering into a pretty macho culture. How difficult was it for you to gain acceptance into this cloistered male world of the fire crew?

It was definitely shocking at first, to be in an entirely male space. The Forest Service had some sexual harassment scandals in 2017, so everyone was on their best behavior at first. It took me some time before I was accepted into the group. I had to perform over-the-top, irrefutably great, just to prove to them that I was OK. It’s an unfair standard, but that’s the way it was. I wanted to shift the way they saw women, or have better conversations about gender and fire.

You write about the pride and stoicism of the fire crew members, the ethos of actions rather than words. No one brags or whines, you just get on with it. Why?

When my editor was going through the book, he insisted that I mention the 75 pounds of gear I was always carrying on my back, and I resisted, because you don’t complain about that kind of thing when you’re out there. But I realized that readers would want to know these details, so I put them in. I was inclined to leave them out.

You also write about the difficulties of re-entering civilian life.

I don’t know of any firefighters who don’t struggle with the idea of living a normal, quiet life. It’s just a massive letdown after the adrenaline rush of the fire season.

What was shocking to me reading “Wildfire Days” is that fire crews are essentially paid minimum wage to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the state.

It was $16.33 an hour when I was in the crew. And most firefighters that I worked with didn’t have other jobs. They would take unemployment until the next fire season rolled around. You would just scrape by. During the first month of the season, everyone would be flat broke, eating cans of tuna. The joke is that you get paid in sunsets. But we all love being out there. The camaraderie is so intense and so beautiful.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

In this vintage photo, a man walks in front of the Italian Hall, constructed in 1908; all the structures on the block behind him have been demolished. A new book looks at Los Angeles in this time period.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Hamilton Cain reviews National Book Award winner Susan Choi’s new novel, “Flashlight,” a mystery wrapped inside a fraught family drama. “With Franzen-esque fastidiousness,” Cain writes, “Choi unpacks each character’s backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Emile Zola.”

Jessica Ferri chats with Melissa Febos about her new memoir, “The Dry Season,” about the year she went celibate and discovered herself anew. Febos wonders aloud why more women aren’t more upfront with their partners about opting out of sex: “This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that’s love: enthusiastic consent.”

Carole V. Bell reviews Maria Reva’s “startling metafictional” novel, “Endling,” calling it “a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.”

Nick Owchar interviews Nathan Marsak about the reissue (from local publisher Angel City Press) of “Los Angeles Before The Freeways: Images of an Era, 1850-1950,” a book of vintage photos snapped by Swedish émigré Arnold Hylen and curated by Marsak. Owchar calls the book “an engrossing collection of black-and-white images of a city in which old adobe structures sit between Italianate office buildings or peek out from behind old signs, elegant homes teeter on the edge of steep hillsides, and routes long used by locals would soon be demolished to make room for freeways.”

And sad news for book lovers everywhere, as groundbreaking gay author Edmund White died this week at 85.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Diesel, A Bookstore manager Kelsey Bomba tells us what’s flying off the shelves at the Westside bookseller.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

This week, we paid a visit to the Westside’s great indie bookstore Diesel, which has been a locus for the community in the wake of January’s Palisades fire. The store’s manager, Kelsey Bomba, tells us what’s flying off the store’s shelves.

What books are popular right now:

Right now, Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness” is selling a ton, as [well as] Miranda July’s “All Fours” and Barry Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew.”

What future releases are you excited about:

Because I loved V.E. Schwab’s “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue,” I’m excited to read her new book, “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.” “The Great Mann,” by Kyra Davis Lurie — we are doing an event with her on June 11.

What are the hardy perennials, the books that you sell almost all the time:

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and the Elena Ferrante books, especially “My Brilliant Friend.”

Diesel, A Bookstore is located at 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica CA 90402.

My favorite books fall into one of two categories: novels that immerse me in another world, or nonfiction works that transform how I see our world.

When I read the latter, I share what I learned from the book with my partner for months afterward. She jokes that these books become my personality, but it’s not really a joke. In grad school, a professor asked us to each share a fun fact about ourselves, and I shared that my favorite book is about parking minimums. (I was studying business, not urban planning, so no one else seemed to find this very “fun.”)

When given the chance to write this newsletter, I knew I had to convince subscribers to check out “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar. True to the title, it will change how you see the world — it did for me, at least.

Today, I talk to Grabar about why he became fascinated with parking policy, whether L.A. can pull off a car-free Summer Olympics in 2028 and how the current White House administration is affecting the future of American transportation. I also share some of my other favorite books about transportation and urban planning before checking out the latest news in the book world.

✍️ Author Chat

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

You cover various urban issues for Slate. Was there a book that inspired your interest in these topics?

The first thing I read about city planning that made me feel like this was a real subject of inquiry and study was Jane Jacobs’ famous book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She even has a passage about parking lots as “border vacuums” and the way that they kind of suck the life out of the surrounding streets. I read that when I was probably 17.

My direct inspiration for “Paved Paradise” came more out of my reporting for Slate. It just seemed that beneath every single subject, there was a story about parking. Then I learned that many people in the field had already devoted their careers to studying parking. But that just meant there was a lot of interesting material there and a big gap between what professionals understood about the importance of parking and what the general public saw as its role.

‘Paved Paradise,’ by Henry Grabar

(Penguin Press)

You mentioned Jane Jacobs’ book. What are some of your lesser-known favorite books about transportation and urban planning?

“Family Properties” by Beryl Satter is a great book about race and housing in Chicago.

“Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” by Lizabeth Cullen is a biography, but it’s also an urban renewal history that offers an interesting and nuanced perspective on the aims of the urban renewers.

“The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York” by Suleiman Osman holds many interesting lessons for our cities today.

As a famously sprawling city, L.A. features prominently in Paved Paradise. Since the book came out, city leaders have promoted the idea of a car-free Olympics. Do you think that’s feasible?

That would be great. I hope they stick to that aim. It’s going to be challenging, of course, but at the same time, if there’s one thing we know about mega-events, it’s just very, very difficult on a spatial level to get everybody where they’re going if everyone arrives in a single-family vehicle.

I was at the Olympics in Paris last year, where I met [L.A. Mayor] Karen Bass very briefly. She seemed inspired by what was happening there. But it’s hard to make a point-by-point comparison between Paris and Los Angeles because they’re such different cities. At the same time, I do think planners in L.A. grasp this will be a much more fun event if it can summon some of that public-spiritedness that was on display in Paris, where the venues and the fans zones were all connected, rather than these isolated sites that are only accessed by car.

Henry Grabar’s ‘Paved Paradise’ diagnoses the blight of parking.

(Lisa Larson-Walker)

Since you published your book, Donald Trump has returned to the White House. To what degree does the federal government affect how much, at a city level, we are able to chip away at our parking-dependent infrastructure?

The federal government is a huge player in the way our cities and streets look. There are a lot of city and county transportation departments wondering what will happen with these projects where money was allocated by Washington or they were expecting it to be allocated later.

If there’s any silver lining to it, to accomplish their transportation goals, cities are going to have to do more with less and rethink some of the policy decisions they’ve taken for granted that are in their control, like parking policy.

Is there another topic in this realm that you hope to turn into a book someday?

I’m working on another book that follows the construction of a series of multifamily buildings from start to finish. By embedding with these projects as they make their way through the acquisition of the land, the design of the building, the zoning, the permitting, the financing and finally the construction, I’ll be able to identify and illuminate some of the barriers to having enough housing that go beyond whether it is permitted by zoning, which I know is a hot topic in California.

I’m trying to look across the country because this is increasingly a national problem, and there are variations from place to place in the issues that come into play.

📚 Book Recs

Now for some other books that have, to varying degrees, become my personality…

“Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet” explains how highways affect wildlife in ways both obvious (roadkill) and obscure (traffic noise pushing birds away from their habitats). Author Ben Goldfarb also highlights the creative solutions road ecologists are coming up with to help animals navigate our car-centric world.

If you’ve had an address your whole life, you’ve probably never thought much about it. “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power” changed that for me. Author Deirdre Mask digs into the consequences of not having an address, the dark reasoning behind why we began numbering homes and so much more.

In “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation,” author Paris Marx pokes holes in many of the silver-bullet transportation solutions we have today, from autonomous vehicles to electric scooters, arguing these efforts often overlook the most vulnerable in our society and sometimes create more problems than they solve.

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

President Biden at a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C..

(Matt Kelley / Associated Press)

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s buzzy book about Joe Biden’s diminished capacities and the associated cover-up is “reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids,” Leigh Haber writes in her review of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Times television and media business reporter Stephen Battaglio spoke with Tapper about the book. “I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,” the CNN anchor said. “I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.”

Media mogul Barry Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew,” hit shelves this week. Here are the four biggest revelations.

In his new book, “Is a River Alive?,” Robert Macfarlane questions the way we treat nature by visiting three threatened rivers in different parts of the world.

With his 40th novel, “Nightshade,” out this week, author and former Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Connelly shared what keeps him writing at 68 years old.

In his new book, “Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight,” David A. Kessler argues Big Food has purposefully engineered ultraprocessed foods to be addictive. The Times spoke with Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, about healthy long-term weight-loss strategies, guidelines for using GLP-1s safely, the body-positivity movement and improving lifespan.

If you haven’t gotten enough book recs by this point in the newsletter, The Times has also compiled 30 must-read books for summer.