fiction

Our present podcast era has bred a new generation of interlocutors from the public sphere, veteran interviewees turned journalists. Harper Simon is among the many pro musicians who have taken on the role of insatiably curious interrogator. The singer-songwriter, who is the son of Paul Simon, has made four solo albums and toured the country both as a solo artist and sideman, but it wasn’t until he was tapped by music manager Michael Lustig in 2016 to host an internet series called “Talk Show” that Simon found his new avocation.

The cream of Simon’s interviews have now been collected in “Thinking Out Loud,” which is published by L..A. imprint Hat & Beard Press. I chatted with Simon about the art of the interview, Pink Floyd and Ed Snowden.

✍️ Author Chat

I have found that people who have been interviewed a lot are good at interviewing others. They know how to avoid the banal and obvious questions.

I’m not a trained journalist, so the conversations were closer to what Andy Warhol’s “Interview” magazine used to be. More of a casual back-and-forth, rather than me trying to ask questions or having someone promote their product. So the book is really a combination of folks that I’ve known my whole life and others that I just asked to interview.

Interviewing public figures can be a very stilted experience. And then you wind up not getting much of anything.

Interviews with journalists are a funny thing. There is always this weird, uncomfortable hierarchical relationship, where the journalist might feel superior, or the subject feels that way. It creates this strange imbalance. The journalist might feel the need to wrest some hot information from the subject, or find some aha moment and then the subject gets their guard up. I feel like the interviews in my book are very relaxed. You’re going to get some truth, even if it’s a modest truth. There were some interviews I left out of the book because the subjects seemed too media trained or too guarded.

Some of your interviewees, like Eric Idle and Buck Henry, are people you’ve known your entire life, having grown up with your dad in that kind of very stimulating artistic milieu. Does that help or hurt?

I think I might get better material from folks like that. There’s a warmth there, but I’m also a huge fan of their work, so I want to hear about Eric Idle’s work with Monty Python, or Buck Henry hosting “Saturday Night Live.” There are still plenty of stories that I’ve never heard.

Harper Simon, the artist and son of Paul Simon, has released three solo albums and toured the country. His latest project is a collection of interviews.

(Demme)

Someone like Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour has been interviewed hundreds of times in his career. What is there left to ask?

It’s kind of like my father, where the legacy is so familiar and well-known, what is there left to be said? What is there left to say about “Dark Side of The Moon”? But it turned out to be a really good interview. He had some great things to say about [Pink Floyd founder] Syd Barrett, how Gilmour felt like the other members had behaved callously towards him at times. He also speaks with great warmth about his own family.

Harry Dean Stanton is in the book, and I have to empathize. He was by far the most difficult interview subject I’ve ever had to deal with. A man of few words.

It’s funny, because I wound up doing some projects with Harry Dean, like this big tribute event to help raise money for Vidiots in Eagle Rock, but even after all of that, we didn’t get any closer. He was a very hard person to know.

You interviewed James Woolsey, and you guys were definitely not on the same page, but the tone remains civil. Don’t you think it’s important to have a reasoned discourse with someone you don’t agree with politically?

Absolutely, but that was one that definitely became contentious at times. James Woolsey had been the former head of the CIA under Clinton. So I came into the interview feeling very outgunned. I’m not a trained political journalist. But somehow I had gotten it in my head that I was Abbie Hoffman and he was J. Edgar Hoover or something. This was 10 years ago, and Edward Snowden was the big story in the news. So I led with that, and Jim Woolsey, being a good CIA man with very strong convictions, felt that Snowden was a traitor. But then he said he would like to see him hung by his neck, which felt aggressive. Then things really went off the rails when we somehow got locked into a discussion about Israel and Palestine. I remember him saying to me, “You’re just parroting the talking points of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Now I found those words echoing in my thoughts when I listen to some people discuss the current situation. I respected him and enjoyed the conversation but it was intense. I thought I held my own reasonably well but he was a tough guy to get in the ring with.

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

“‘Second Skin’ is more sociological than sexy; more anthropological than animalistic,” writes Meredith Maran.

(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Catapult)

Meredith Maran thinks Anastasiia Fedorova’s book “Second Skin” does a great job of busting open the taboo of what is commonly regarded as deviant sexual desire. The book “advocates for a person’s right to like what they like and to get it consensually,” writes Maran.

Victoria Lancaster has a chat with Emily Nemens about her new novel “Clutch” and the challenges of writing about midlife among a clutch of close female friends. “I was cognizant of balance and understanding the lazy-Susan of it,” says Nemens. “Making sure I was spinning all the way around the table and touching each piece in each storyline.”

Two new novels about game-changing women in history — Janet Rich Edwards’ “Canticle” and Paula McLain’s “Skylark” — find favor with Bethanne Patrick. What these books “get right about their very different heroines and time periods is that change doesn’t happen overnight. … [But] change can and does happen, one determined woman at a time.”

Finally, on the occasion of the new screen adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” six authors weigh in on their love of Emily Brontë’s enduring romance novel.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Skylight Books on Vermont is a staple of the Los Feliz literati.

(Joel Barhamand/For the Times)

Let us praise Skylight Books, which for over 30 years has remained a pillar of its Los Feliz community, with the main shop and the arts annex just a few doors away from each other on Vermont Boulevard. Store manager Mary Wiliams tells us what her customers are sweeping off the shelves right now.

What is selling right now?

“Vigil” by George Saunders is our biggest seller right now. Aside from that, it seems like great recent fiction in paperback is dominating the bestseller list — “Rejection” by Tony Tulathimutte, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” by Haruki Murakami, “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar, and “All Fours” by Miranda July all are books that keep on selling really well for us, month after month.

Do you sell more fiction than nonfiction, or is it a tie?

We sell a good amount of both, but fiction is the bigger seller. Especially literary fiction, which is our bread and butter. On the nonfiction front, “Everything Now” by Rosecrans Baldwin is a perennial bestseller out of our Regional section — it’s a great collection of essays about Los Angeles. And everything Patti Smith touches turns to gold, so her book “Bread of Angels” is also a hit here.

Your arts annex is unlike anything else in L.A. I suppose there is still a market for cool periodicals and expensive art books that the internet hasn’t knocked out?

Our goal with the annex is for it to be a place of discoverability — where you can find the weird cool art book, comic or magazine you didn’t know you needed. We hope even our customers who are well-versed in art books find something new every visit. A fair amount of what we carry isn’t widely available online in the U.S., so when we put it on our website in our Annex Picks section and advertise it in our newsletter, we get orders from around the country.

Skylight Books in Los Angeles is located at 1818 North Vermont Ave.

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

The cause of death for Peter Greene, a character actor known for playing villains in movies including “Pulp Fiction” and “The Mask,” has been revealed by New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

Police found Greene, 60, dead in his apartment Dec. 12. They didn’t suspect foul play.

His death was ruled an accident, the M.E.’s office said via email. Greene died from a “gunshot wound of left axilla with injury of brachial artery,” the office said. In everyday English, that means he shot himself in his left underarm and injured a significant artery that starts in the shoulder and runs down to the elbow crease.

Police found the character actor in his Lower East Side apartment, Deadline reported, after neighbors heard Christmas music playing for days and one of them called authorities and the landlord for a wellness check.

Greene had a history of addiction, per the New York Post, and attempted suicide in the 1990s. He was scheduled to go in for a procedure to remove a benign tumor near his lung on the day he was found, the outlet said. His manager had talked to him two days before he was found.

“He sounded OK … It was just a totally normal conversation. He was a little nervous about the operation going in, but he said it wasn’t super serious,” manager Gregg Edwards told the Post in December. “He was talking about that and hoping that I was going to be OK and wishing me well as I was wishing him well. We’re good friends. I love the guy.”

Greene’s best-known role was the villain Zed, who was brought in to torture Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames’ characters in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic “Pulp Fiction.” In “The Mask,” also released in 1994, he played mobster Dorian Tyrell, antagonist to Jim Carrey’s Stanley Ipkiss, a.k.a. the Mask.

Those roles came only a couple of years into Greene’s career, which per IMDb included nearly 100 TV and film credits from 1990 to 2026. His TV credits included episodes of “Chicago P.D.,” “Hawaii Five-0,” “Law & Order,” “Justified” and more.

He started out with parts in a couple of TV shows in the early 1990s before landing the lead role in “Laws of Gravity.” In 1995, Times movie critic Kenneth Turan called the 1992 film “independent American filmmaking at its best” and described Jimmy (Greene) as “a small-time street outlaw who, though horrified at the thought of actual work, is stable by local standards” in Brooklyn’s then crime-ridden Greenpoint neighborhood.

The New Jersey native, born Oct. 8, 1965, studied Method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York City when he was in his 20s. He told Premiere magazine in 1996 that he ran away from home at age 15 and lived on the streets, using and dealing drugs and hiding from other dealers in theaters, where he got into acting. His drug use overlapped with his early success on screen.

After a 1996 suicide attempt, the actor said, he got treatment for addiction and sobered up.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

With his six-volume magnum opus “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard became one of Europe’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists.

At once epic and intimate in scope, the books used the raw material of Knausgaard’s life to answer questions about male identity, the obligations of fatherhood and marriage, and what it takes to become a serious artist. In his new novel, “The School of Night,” Knausgaard further explores the mysteries of artistic greatness, using as his template Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play “Doctor Faustus.” Knausgaard sets his story in mid-1980s London, where two aspiring photographers named Kristian and Hans try to find their footing in the art world.

I spoke to the Norwegian writer about the devil, photography and Radiohead.

✍️ Author Chat

Your novel’s plot and characters are based on Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play “Doctor Faustus,” which is about a scholar who sells his soul to the devil. Was this something you’ve been thinking about for a while?

I read Thomas Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus” when I was 19 and it made a big impression on me. It’s been with me ever since then. The devil theme has hovered over some novels I’ve written, so it remained, and then I wanted to set this novel in London, where I now live, and where Marlowe was murdered. I wanted all of this in the background, but I didn’t know how to use it. That came during the writing.

The two young artists in “The School of Night” are photographers, an art form that has long been associated with the occult and summoning the unseen world. One thinks of the spirit photography trend of the 19th century in England.

I wrote about the first photograph in the novel, shot by Daguerre in 1848. I have it on my wall in my office. It’s a Paris street, which I find very unsettling and spooky, because even though it’s daytime there are no people on the street because the exposure was too slow to capture them. There’s just this lone figure, in the center of the frame who looks like the devil. I find it intriguing that the devil might have been present when the first photograph was taken.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of Europe’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists, sets his newest novel, “The School of Night,” in mid-1980s London.

(Solve Sundsbo for D2)

I think one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of the Faust legend is, if given the chance, most people would sell their souls for success, especially artists.

I think you’re right. And it is also a way of explaining something that is really mysterious, how a kind of normal, maybe even mediocre person could achieve something great overnight. When I was 19, I could have cut off my left arm to just have a book published. And when I wrote “My Struggle,” I was so frustrated in my writing, I was willing to go to extremes, to just make something happen. And then I didn’t think much about that when I wrote “The School of Night.” But it’s all kind of obvious to me afterwards that I use that feeling of doing something I really shouldn’t, and I could have stopped, but I still did it.

To your point: Kristian, your protagonist, has an artistic breakthrough when he photographs a dead cat that he has boiled. I guess my question is: A boiled cat?

Oh, that’s just due to the way I write. I never know what’s going to happen in a book. He’s starting to think about inner structures that keep up life somehow. And then, he thinks, how could he take photos of that? Well, maybe a cat. And then you have to practically get a cat. And then it’s like 25 pages of me describing how to boil a cat. I never planned it, you know.

Do you not outline your novels beforehand?

No, never, I’ve never done that. I do really try to be present and see what happens there. And then there will always be consequences of the choices you make, and that will eventually be the novel. And in this case, the character is different from me, so his choices will be different, and that creates a different trajectory, really.

Your characters are music obsessives in ways that only men in their 20s can be: curating their record collections, and so on.

When I was young, music really meant almost everything to me. When I was 15, I went to a local newspaper and asked to review records for them. And I had my own radio show. I’m not obsessed anymore, but I did see Radiohead at the O2 Arena recently. They are the last band I really wanted to see, and it was absolutely fantastic. I had tears running down my cheeks.

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

George Saunders’ new novel might be the dark humor read you need right now, writes Robert Allen Papinchak.

(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; cover from Riverhead Books)

George Saunders has published a new novel called “Vigil,” and Robert Allen Papinchak is besotted by it, calling it a “virtuoso achievement, an immersive experience for the reader.”

Nathan Smith had a Zoom chat with author Martha Ackmann about her new Dolly Parton biography, “Ain’t Nobody’s Fool,” and got the lowdown on how Parton’s fixation with over-the-top wigs began. “Her promotions man happened to be dating an actress who had a big part in the television series ‘Mr. Ed,’ ” Ackmann tells Smith. “This actress took her around, showed her L.A. and they went to the Max Factor store and tried on wigs.”

In an excerpt from this new book, “Football,” Chuck Klosterman makes a case for America’s favorite sport as best viewed in the privacy of our living rooms. “It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television,” he writes. “Television is the only way you can see it at all.”

Finally, Bethanne Patrick gives us the lowdown on the must-read books of February.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Fear not, grown-ups: Our kids are not digital zombies just yet. In fact, children’s bookstores are thriving in Los Angeles. Children’s Book World is the largest independent bookstore of its kind in the city, with over 80,000 titles for sale. The store is a wonderland of printed matter for kids, with readings, book clubs and even musical performances. I spoke with the store’s manager Brien Lopez to get the lowdown on what our kids are reading.

What’s selling right now?

T.Z. Layton’s “The Academy” series, which is about a global soccer competition for tweens, is one of our best sellers. This series has lots of boys who were not avid readers becoming strong fiction readers because they are about a subject they love and they are really fun reads.

What kind of YA books are popular right now?

For our particular store we sell lots of sunshine romance particularly targeted to new teens like Lynn Painter’s books, as well as both mysteries and suspense thrillers like Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ “Inheritance Games” series. Dystopian sci fi is also popular, like Soyoung Park’s “Snowglobe” duology.

Who are the popular authors?

We just had a 2,000-person event with Dav Pilkey for his new “Dog Man” book and how he gets kids excited about books and reading just can’t be underestimated. We also had big events with beloved authors Katherine Applegate, Stuart Gibbs and Max Brallier. Middle grade fiction and graphic novels are very popular at our store.

Are kids still interested in books, despite all the distractions in their lives?

Kids definitely are interested in books if they are allowed to read about subjects they enjoy and books they love. The moment you tell a child there is a good book versus a bad book to read you have stopped that kid’s reading journey in its tracks. Let kids read the books they love and they will do it for a lifetime.

Children’s Book World in Los Angeles is located at 10580 1/2 W. Pico Blvd.

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

SACRAMENTO — The year opened with President Trump declaring that “the fraud investigation of California has begun,” a move that quickly set off a barrage of allegations from his administration and Republican allies questioning the integrity of state programs and the leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The accusations, amplified across social media and conservative outlets, have pushed California and its Democratic leadership to the center of a broader national political fight over waste, fraud and abuse.

Newsom has dismissed the claims as politically driven, arguing that the administration is singling out Democratic-led states while ignoring similar problems elsewhere. The governor also responded by highlighting fraud cases in Republican-led states and by criticizing Trump’s own record and business dealings.

Against that backdrop, it has become increasingly difficult to separate substantiated fraud from fabricated or recycled claims, to distinguish old findings from newly raised allegations and to determine who can credibly claim credit for uncovering wrongdoing — all amid a toxic and deeply polarized political climate.

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at USC and UC Berkeley, said allegations of malfeasance in California is a particularly ripe target for Republicans because Democrats have controlled the state Legislature and governor’s office for years.

Democrats hold a supermajority in both the Assembly and the Senate, meaning they hold at least two-thirds of seats in both houses, and not a single Republican has been elected to statewide office in California since 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner were reelected.

“There is no shared responsibility here for Republicans,” Schnur said. “If you had a state in which Republicans were actually competitive, they would bear some responsibility for these problems.”

Audits and prosecutions show that California has experienced its share of fraud, particularly in complex programs involving emergency aid, healthcare and unemployment insurance. The state paid out billions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the California State Auditor has issued repeated warnings about state agencies that are “at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.”

Along with recycling a barrage of years-old allegations of financial malfeasance in California and other Democratic states, the Trump administration elevated claims of child-care fraud in Minnesota last month, prompting Gov. Tim Walz to drop his reelection plans to focus on the growing political crisis in his state.

Fraud allegations are increasingly being deployed as a political weapon against Newsom, a leading Trump critic and a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender. Politicians have always railed against government waste, fraud and abuse, but now those issues are being “weaponized into a partisan issue,” Schnur said.

For the public, it can be hard to discern the truth. Here is a look at three of the central fraud allegations — and what the evidence shows.

Child-care funding

President Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to accuse California of widespread fraud last month, drawing a link between his administration’s investigation into child-care spending in Minnesota and programs in the Golden State, and announcing a major federal “fraud investigation” into the state’s actions.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible???” wrote Trump, using a disparaging nickname for the governor.

The Trump administration then moved to freeze $10 billion in federal funding for child care in five Democrat-led states — California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — over “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

In a trio of Jan. 6 letters addressed to Newsom, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it was concerned there had been “potential for extensive and systemic fraud” in child care and other social services programs that rely on federal funding, and had “reason to believe” that the state was “illicitly providing illegal aliens” with benefits.

The letters did not detail evidence to support the claims. The governor’s office dismissed the accusation as “deranged.”

A federal judge subsequently blocked the Trump administration temporarily from freezing those funds. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick said he didn’t understand why the government was making it harder for states to access child-care money before any wrongdoing had been discovered.

“It just seems like the cart before the horse,” he said.

Hospice funding

Days after Trump’s social media post about alleged corruption under Newsom’s watch, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, held a joint news conference on public benefits fraud, but offered few details about the scope of their investigation.

The officials accused “foreign actors” of draining billions from public healthcare programs in California, referencing bogus hospice providers first exposed by The Times in 2020 and later investigated by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

Essayli placed the blame for bad actors squarely on Newsom, calling him “the fraud king.”

Weeks later, Oz released a video of himself walking in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys as he questioned why dozens of alleged hospices were operating along four blocks. He blamed the “Russian Armenian Mafia” and made his remarks while pointing to an Armenian bakery, prompting accusations of racism from the Armenian community.

Newsom’s office last week hit back by highlighting state efforts to fight fraud, while pointing to a 2025 Axios story on the Trump administration’s decision to pause a federal program to crack down on bad hospice operators.

Bonta’s office said it has filed criminal charges against 109 individuals over hospice fraud-related offenses and launched dozens of civil investigations.

Newsom, speaking at a Bloomberg event Thursday in San Francisco, said the allegations have been recycled and misrepresented. Later that day, he filed a civil rights complaint against “baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California” made by Oz.

“Hospice, we’ve been after that for years and years before Oz was even on the scene,” Newsom said. “In 2021, we did a moratorium on new hospice programs, 280 we shuttered.”

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services said earlier this year that — in addition to California — Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Ohio and Georgia are being monitored following allegations of fraud and waste.

EDD fraud

The state’s Employment Development Department, known as EDD, reported in 2021 that approximately $20 billion was lost due to fraud, largely in the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program.

While unemployment fraud was rampant across country during the pandemic as governments rushed to provide support, California’s problems stood out.

The state itself admitted in 2021 that it failed to take precautions that had been implemented in other states, including using software to identify suspicious applications and cross-checking benefit claims against personal data on state prison inmates.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) said department mismanagement and fraud often overlap and cited EDD as a prime example.

“When there is a lack of internal controls, a lack of diligence of how funds are used, that makes it easier for those who want to take advantage of the system to profit,” Kiley said.

EDD’s own tracker said the state has recovered more than $6 billion in stolen funds and opened more than 2,300 unemployment fraud investigations since the pandemic began, leading to nearly 1,000 arrests and more than 670 convictions.

The department said it has expanded fraud enforcement through partnerships with law enforcement, new identity-verification technology and a dedicated fraud task force.

But, reports of mismanagement at EDD have continued. A recent audit also found EDD wasted $4.6 million by paying monthly service fees for more than 6,200 cellphones that went unused for at least four consecutive months between November 2020 and April 2025 — including some devices that were inactive for more than four years.

At the same time, “EDD continues to have high rates of improper [unemployed insured] payments, including fraudulent payments, and it needs to improve the customer service it provides to UI claimants,” another report found.

What’s next?

Newsom said there is a reason the Trump administration is not pointing to fraud in Republican-led states.

“This is about polarization, politicalization, weaponization,” Newsom said Thursday.

Asked what the Trump administration will discover in probing California for fraud, Newsom said investigators will find a state “taking that issue very, very seriously.”

“We absolutely are here to be a partner, to go after waste, fraud and abuse,” Newsom said.

State audits show vulnerabilities persist. The California State Auditor has repeatedly flagged Medi-Cal eligibility discrepancies that have exposed the state to billions of dollars in questionable payments, while also warning that weaknesses in information security across state agencies remain a high-risk issue.

Curtailing waste could be particularly important during the upcoming year as California and its state-funded programs head into a period of volatile fiscal uncertainty, driven largely by events in Washington and on Wall Street. Newsom’s own optimistic budget proposal projects a $3-billion state deficit for the next fiscal year despite no major new spending initiatives.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in November that California faces a nearly $18-billion budget shortfall.

It will also be a key issue in upcoming elections. A group of Republicans running for statewide offices, including California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, pegged that the state’s annual estimate of fraud, waste and abuse across state programs at $250 billion, an estimate that includes unverified public tips submitted to a campaign-run website.

The group cited the estimate as justification for creating their own “California Department of Government Efficiency,” or CAL DOGE, a nod to a similarly named federal initiative promoted by Elon Musk that generated headlines but has not produced documented savings or formal audit findings. CAL DOGE is not currently a state department, despite its name.

Who deserves credit when fraud is prosecuted has also become a point of contention. After a man was arrested last month for fleecing L.A.’s homeless services program for $23 million, critics of Newsom were quick to blame the governor. Newsom responded by saying the case was uncovered by local investigators working with law enforcement, which he added is “exactly the kind of accountability and oversight the state has pushed for.” (The Los Angeles district attorney’s office ran a parallel, independent investigation.)

Essayli responded on social media by saying no one made an arrest until Trump and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi “appointed me to investigate and charge fraud offenses in California.”

Kiley, the California Republican congressman, said despite the partisan fighting over fraud, the issue should rally both parties.

The “easiest” way to solve the state’s budget problems and improve government services for taxpayers is to “minimize and eventually eliminate fraud,” said Kiley.