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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.