fiction

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

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

Author Cay Kim

(Margaryta Bushkin)

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

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

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

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

A big concept for the mother is endurance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

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

(Jill Trunnell)

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

The Loved Ones bookshop

(James Alan Duran)

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

What is the mission statement of The Loved One?

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

What kind of books are you selling?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About six months after Toni Morrison died in the summer of 2019, Literary Cleveland began hosting annual community tribute parties on the Nobel Prize-winning author’s birthday, Feb. 18. Lorain, Ohio — a suburb of Cleveland — is where Morrison was born and raised, and where she set several of her novels. During these gatherings, participants were prompted to read aloud from their favorite Morrison works, and share why they savored those particular lines.

Over time, these meetings began to feel increasingly intimate, even “sacred,” according to Literary Cleveland’s Executive Director Matt Weinkam, which prompted him, in tandem with Ohio Humanities head Rebecca Asmo, to brainstorm how to take their program state-wide. “This is Toni Morrison, one of our greatest writers,” Weinkam recalls thinking. “We needed to do something bigger.”

At the time, Weinkam and Osmo were also trying to figure out how to commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. Weinkam was listening to Morrison’s entire oeuvre on audio and realized that when you organize the 11 novels in a certain order, “they tell the history of America.” So how, he thought, “could you use the literature of Toni Morrison to view our country through a different lens — through her lens?” He says they knew honoring Morrison as a consequential figure not just in literature but also in the context of American history would be central to Ohio’s celebration of the semiquincentennial.

“[But] only as the project was coming together did we strike on the fact that her novels trace American history from ‘A Mercy,’ set in 1690, through ‘God Help the Child,’ in the 2010s. Not only does her work re-center African Americans in the story of our country, it also tackles major events from our founding, through slavery, to the impact of Jim Crow, to the great migration and beyond.”

In the months leading up to the 250th anniversary, they decided to bring the Morrison salons they were curating in Cleveland to all 88 Ohio counties. For assistance they connected with Britt Lovett, a strategist, community leader and fellow Morrison acolyte.

“People say that reading Toni Morrison is challenging,” says Lovett. “[But] reading Toni Morrison is like my grandmother speaking to me.”

In February, on what would have been Morrison’s 95th birthday, they officially launched “Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison,” a yearlong homage including readings, workshops, lectures and a monthly book club that meets on Sunday evenings. They intentionally programmed the book club so that it would take readers through our U.S. history utilizing Morrison’s vision: Weinkam proposed reading Morrison’s novels in the order in which they are set rather than the order in which they were published. “That simple shift,” says Lovett, “changed everything.”

They began with “A Mercy,” one of Morrison’s later novels, published in 2008 — which is set in the late 17th century, before slavery took hold and the country became “racialized.” Next came “Beloved,” then “Sula” and “Jazz.” “Experiencing the novels this way reveals how Morrison traced generations of Black American life across centuries of our nation’s history,” Lovett says. “What may appear to be individual stories become part of a larger narrative about memory, freedom, family, belonging and the ongoing project of America itself.”

For Morrison, writing fiction was a form of “literary archaeology,” excavating history, and how the past hovers over the present. Her quest was what she termed “rememory.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a Princeton professor and author of “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries” who has studied Morrison. “She understood the ongoing national effort to disremember — this startling combination of dismembering and remembering — to protect the innocence of America,” Glaude says. “Instead, her novels relentlessly expose the horror and the magisterial efforts on the part of ordinary people to overcome them. In doing so, she takes us to the beating heart of this fragile experiment — something we desperately need to remember in this 250th year of the country.”

In 1973, as an editor at Random House, Morrison published and collaborated with collectors in compiling “The Black Book,” a seminal volume that tells the story of the African American experience in America in the form of an encyclopedic scrapbook that spans from 1619 through the 1940s. There is no narrator, and this is intentional. The visuals — newspaper clippings, slave auction notices, patent applications by Black inventors, photographs, sheet music, relate their own powerful story “Black life as lived” — great joy juxtaposed with the tragedy and legacy of slavery. From her work on that groundbreaking assemblage emerged the idea for “Beloved,” which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Nearly seven years after Morrison’s death at 88, we are living in a golden age of Morrisonia. Three extraordinary new books, published this year, shed light on the brilliance and complexity of Morrison’s life and work, and place her as an American eminence, a visionary who saw fiction as a means through which to recast her country’s story. “On Morrison” by Namwali Serpell; “Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship” by Dana Williams; and a posthumously published collection of Morrison essays entitled “Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon.” Serpell writes that “Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything.” Morrison herself said that she wrote to “think the unthinkable,” to write novels that were “relentlessly black,” giving no deference to the “white gaze.” Her refusal to sugarcoat the interior and exterior lives of her characters, whether enslaved or traumatized by the past — by events in American history — was purposeful.

“You’re confronted with horrific acts of violence,” Serpell says. “Not to present it in spectacular fashion, nor to feed any kind of voyeuristic or prurient interest on the part of the audience, but to use quiet language — beautiful language — in order to actually get us to step back and think about why this violence is happening and where it’s coming from.”

In that way, Morrison’s work was always a radical experiment — and is perhaps why, according to the American Library Assn., “The Bluest Eye” her 1970 debut — continues to be one of the most frequently “challenged” books in the U.S. “Beloved” runs a close second. But this also is among the reasons her books are considered must-reads in the classroom, and contemporary classics.

John Freeman is an executive editor at Knopf who oversees Morrison’s publishing program. “Her books persist today because they beckon us doubly: they invite us to look clearly at what America is, to come to grips with the fantasies and shadows developed to avoid this awful knowledge,” Freeman says. “They also tell us one phenomenal love story after another.”

Through her book club, cultural icon Oprah Winfrey introduced millions of readers to Morrison by featuring four of the author’s novels. “From ‘The Bluest Eye’ through ‘Beloved,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Home,’ ‘A Mercy’ and ‘Love,’ Morrison’s words have helped me become more of myself,” Winfrey says. “She understands the lives of Black women like no one else I’ve ever read. Reading her, I’ve often felt seen in places I didn’t know how to name.”

(HarperCollins; Penguin Random House)

In Morrison’s essays, lectures and other public comments — including as a professor at Princeton for nearly two decades — she occupied the role of public intellectual, always teaching us how to view America’s evolution as a country, and how it became “racialized.”

In a Granta interview conducted late in her life, she challenged the interviewer to consider that the concept of “whiteness” is peculiarly American: “Think about it, “ she prompted. “If you come to this country from Germany or Russia, or anywhere you got off the boat, got on the land, in order to become an American, you have to be white. That’s the quality that brings the country, its people together — having a non-white population. My concept is that if you were from Sweden, you were Swedish. You didn’t have to say, ‘I’m a white Swede.’ You know what I’m saying?”

As we prepare to celebrate America’s 250th, it’s useful to reflect on how Morrison viewed the intersection of fiction, history and memory, how the mission of her fiction was to uncover truths omitted by the standard historical records and history’s “sages.” In her 1987 essay, “The Site of Memory,” she utilized a river as a metaphor to discuss how imagination excavates forgotten histories and people. “All water,” she wrote, “has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

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

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

Did you ever meet him?

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

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

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

“Red Sheet: A Novel” by James Ellroy

(Knopf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

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

(Jill Trunnell)

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

The interior of Counterpoint Records & Books.

(David Jones)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Little, Brown and Company)

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

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

What books make you laugh out loud?

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

It’s on my nightstand.

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

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

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

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

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

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

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

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

What was the thinking behind opening Lost?

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

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

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

Who are your customers?

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

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

Absolutely! Our vinyl does very well for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

Have you always had an abiding interest in Gertrude Stein?

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

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

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

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

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

Author Deborah Levy

(Sheila Burnett)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

A Good Used Book’s beautiful interior

(A Good Used Book)

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

Who are your customers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The success of D-day, a pivotal moment in World War II, partially hinged on the weather forecast. The Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, was planned for months as the American and British forces held practice operations in England.

Enormous efforts were made to mislead the Germans about what was coming. The operation was originally scheduled for June 5 but the day before, James Stagg, a meteorologist and group captain in the Royal Air Force, advised the American commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to wait for better conditions.

This lesser-known decision is the premise of “Pressure,” a new movie from filmmaker Anthony Maras. It’s an adaptation of David Haig’s play of the same name, in which the playwright himself portrayed Stagg. Haig, who co-wrote the “Pressure” screenplay with Maras, compares it to “The Imitation Game.”

“Some of these heroes who affect history from the sidelines just stay in the sidelines until somebody does research, discovers them lurking and finds they are so quietly heroic that it’s irresistible as a story,” Haig says, speaking via Zoom from London.

Haig began writing a version of the script shortly after the play debuted at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in May 2014. It moved to the West End in 2018, and opened in North America at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in 2023. Maras came onboard after making his 2018 film “Hotel Mumbai,” also based on a true story.

“When I first read the play and the script, I was bowled over by how, with this one decision, so many lives were changed,” Maras says, on a video call from Los Angeles. “Not just the lives of the men on the beach but throughout the Allied world. When you think of a war story, you think of men and now women on the field, but there is so much more to it behind the scenes.”

The film expands Haig’s play and includes additional characters and sequences, including the actual D-day invasion. It stars Andrew Scott as Stagg, Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower, Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s secretary Kay Summersby, Chris Messina as U.S. Air Force meteorologist Irving P. Krick and Damian Lewis as senior British army officer Bernard Montgomery.

Both Haig and Maras strove to be as historically accurate as possible, even including archival footage from the war. “It is inevitably heightened, as any stage play or film is,” Haig says. “But it is very true.”

“It is absolutely as true as we could get it within the confines of a two-hour runtime,” Maras adds. “We took great lengths to try and be as accurate to the history but also to the deeper story as possible.”

Here’s what is true and what is dramatized in “Pressure.”

The importance of the weather

Brendan Fraser, left, and Andrew Scott in the movie “Pressure.”

(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)

D-day, secretly known as Operation Overlord, was timed based on several factors, including the weather, the tides and the moonlight. Because the assault was multipronged, with Allied forces coming by sea, land and air, they required good visibility at night and a high tide to ensure less distances between the boats and the defending Germans.

“There were hundreds of meters between low tide and high tide,” Maras says. “So depending on where the boats landed, you either had 50 meters until you made it to the dunes and then the bunkers, or you had to make it 300 meters if it was low tide.”

A clear forecast with low winds and no rain was essential.

“The landing craft were antiquated and flat-bottomed,” Haig says, “and if they had gone on May 5 with the storms that Stagg anticipated coming in with the jet stream, those landing craft would have capsized. The war wouldn’t have been lost, although we do posit that it might have been in the film. In reality, failure would have elongated [the war] and caused countless extra deaths.”

To shoot “Pressure,” the filmmakers used real charts and meteorological instruments. The production design team re-created the famous D-day map from the Allied headquarters in Southwark House. The real one was made in two pieces by separate manufacturers to ensure secrecy.

“When you see that map, it’s a little bit mismatched and our team re-created that,” Maras says. “We got the paper they used to draw the maps from the same mill they used for those maps 80 years ago. A lot of effort was put into the minutiae that adds to the accuracy.”

Exercise Tiger

The film opens with a depiction of an Allied training operation called Exercise Tiger, which took place over several months on England’s Slapton Sands. Because many of the soldiers were young and untested, the Allied leaders wanted to prepare them for the sights and sounds of battle.

“They did a whole series of exercises to try and get together a full-scale dress rehearsal of what D-day would be,” Maras says.

These rehearsals, still widely unknown and spanning from late 1943 through April 1944, involved dangerous friendly fire and suffered from serious coordination errors, resulting in the real-life deaths of at least 700 American and British soldiers.

“That was an absolute disaster and yet we remember D-day as one of the great military triumphs in history,” Haig says.

Maras wanted the film to begin with this moment to emphasize the headspace of the Allied leaders.

“How do you establish what the true consequences of failure are for a story like this?” Maras says. “When we’re in the war room with all of those commanders and officers, they know what the implications of their words mean because they’ve seen it. They’ve lived it. The image of the blood in the water and the young men in that water was to tattoo in the audience’s brain that if these commanders mess up, this could happen again.”

Eisenhower, in particular, felt the magnitude of D-day. “He wrote two letters on the eve of D-day: what happens in success and what happens in failure,” Maras says. “He was sleeping two hours a night. He was a nervous wreck.”

Stagg vs. Krick

In the film, Scott’s Stagg arrives at Southwark House from Dunstable four days before D-day is planned. He is confronted by the American meteorologist Krick, who disagrees with him about the potentially disastrous forecast. Krick believes sun and calm seas are on the horizon thanks to historical analogue charts, but Stagg, using more comprehensive prediction methods, thinks a major storm is coming.

“In actuality, Stagg came onboard in about November 1943 and got to Southwark House a few months earlier,” Maras says. “His transfer came a few months earlier, not a few days earlier. The contours of the relationships between Stagg and Krick and the others are accurate, but they took place in a more compressed timeline.”

Both Stagg and Krick have recounted their version of events in various books, both claiming they were right about the weather. Although Haig and Maras imagine their dialogue and how these conflicts may have played out, the conflicts were real.

“They both adhered to their own meteorological vision,” Haig says, explaining the differences in prediction models from continent to continent. “In the United States, Krick’s system of weather forecasting was viable. If you come to the U.K., you can’t rely on the weather for more than five minutes, so that method doesn’t apply.”

Adds Maras, “They thought, ‘The weather is going to be good. We should hold our nerve and go.’ There was a rhetorically violent disagreement between him and the others.”

In the film, Krick claims that he has never inaccurately predicted the weather ahead of a battle, using his successes in North Africa as evidence. This was technically true.

“He was very good at his job within the context of certain geographical landscapes,” Haig says. “He didn’t make a mistake in North Africa. When Eisenhower challenges Stagg, he says, ‘This man never got it wrong.’ And he didn’t. In the whole of the North African campaign, Krick was spot on.”

After Stagg convinces the leaders to postpone D-day, he is vindicated by a deluge of rain that arrives while everyone is attending church at Southwark House on June 5. There was a church on site, although this moment in the film was dramatized.

“Whether it began raining precisely at that moment I have my doubts,” Haig says. “But it has the framework of truth.”

Ike and Kay

Andrew Scott and Kerry Condon in the movie “Pressure.”

(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)

Kay Summersby had been an ambulance driver during the Blitz. The film hints at a less-than-professional relationship between Eisenhower and his personal secretary. She was certainly with Eisenhower at Southwark House, although there is less evidence that she had any kind of association with Stagg.

“The biggest fictional thing I did with both the play and the film was to join the third point of the triangle so you’ve got Stagg, Eisenhower and Kay,” Haig says. “The link between Stagg and Kay historically would be tenuous.”

There are differing opinions about Eisenhower and Kay’s relationship. “We know that they were extremely close and they shared a trustful bond,” Maras says. “There are many photos of them together. She was definitely a big force in Ike’s life at that time, and we wanted to pay respect to that.”

“Whatever one’s interpretation of the relationships that she inhabits within the story, her influence was substantial,” Haig adds.

After seeing Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War I documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Maras had the idea to use colorized archival footage in “Pressure.”

“In the D-day sequence at the end, there are various real-life shots of the soldiers landing on the beaches,” Maras says. “We were able to cut between the archival [material] and our footage to increase the scope. And it wasn’t just to get the scale. Yes, we have shots of massive flotillas and ships and trucks, but sometimes it was just for a glance of a soldier where you can see death in his eyes.”

The team ultimately acquired more than 50 hours of archival footage. They hired research editors to go through it and, after a few days, Maras asked if any of the editors could recommend additional crew to help.

Then a man named James Stagg showed up to work. “Stagg’s grandson, 80 years later, walked into our offices and helped edit the archival movie footage that we put in his grandfather’s film,” Maras says.

Stagg’s wife

Andrew Scott in the movie “Pressure.”

(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)

The play doesn’t include scenes with Stagg’s wife, Elizabeth, but Haig purposefully bookends the film with the couple together. “When he arrives at Southwark House as a terse, brusque, tricky man, you’ve already experienced his level of affection with his wife and that’s really important contextually,” Haig says. “You’re waiting for the end when he goes back to see her and the baby.”

At the time when Stagg went to Southwark House, his wife was pregnant. Stagg was not allowed to make phone calls to her because of the secrecy surrounding D-day. In reality, the hospital where she gave birth was not bombed, as it is in the movie.

“The bombing of the hospital was more reflective of the times that Stagg and his wife had gone through in the lead up to D-day,” Maras says. “That element is to encapsulate that Stagg was fearing for his wife. As he walks down this corridor, he is faced with: Is she alive? Is she dead?”

Truth to power

Ultimately, Stagg tells a room full of military leaders that they have to pause on D-day because of the weather — a truthful inclusion. It was important to Maras to emphasize how he stood up to power.

“Here’s a protagonist who’s not afraid to speak his mind and has the courage to get up in front of a room full of the most powerful military on Earth at that point and tell them something they don’t want to hear,” Maras says.

“When Eisenhower was passing on the baton of leadership at the inauguration for JFK, JFK asked, ‘What gave you the edge on D-day?’ Eisenhower said, ‘We had better meteorologists than the Germans.’ He had the wisdom to trust in the experts. It’s worth heeding that lesson from history.”

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Kelly Lawrence for Walters)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

(Javier Pérez / For The Times)

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

Kinokuniya bookstores sell Japanese manga, stationery and literature.

(Courtesy of Kinokuniya)

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

How did the store travel from Japan to Los Angeles?

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

Who are your customers?

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

What percentage of your clientele buys Japanese–language products?

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

What specific titles are selling for you right now?

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Lasso star Cristo Fernández has taken his role as a footballer on the small screen into real life after signing a contract with the US second-tier side El Paso Locomotive FC.

Ted Lasso star Cristo Fernández has taken his role as a footballer from fiction to reality after signing a professional contract with the US second-tier side El Paso Locomotive FC.

Announcing the news the club said: “The rumors were true. Welcome to El Paso, Cristo Fernández. El Paso Locomotive FC announced today that it has signed forward Cristo Fernández.”

Cristo is best known by Ted Lasso fans as Dani Rojas, a beloved member of the Richmond team in the hit Apple TV+ show about a British team with a coach with an American football background.

However, many TV fans were unaware that outside of his acting career, the 35 year old has been taking part in football training, training with the Major League Soccer side Chicago Fire’s reserves this year, he also appeared in pre-season matches for the Locomotive before signing with the football club.

The actor played youth football in Mexico while growing up but was forced to quit after a knee injury. After gaining fame in the football based TV show, he is now set to return, saying in a statement that football has been a huge part of his life.

“Football has always been a huge part of my life and identity, and no matter where life has taken me, the dream of competing professionally never truly left my heart,” said Fernandez, who also trialled with the second team of Major League Soccer side Chicago Fire earlier this year.

“I’m incredibly grateful to El Paso Locomotive FC – the club, coaches, staff, and especially my team-mates – for opening the doors and giving me the opportunity to compete from day one.

“This journey back to professional soccer is about believing in yourself, taking risks, and continuing to chase your dreams no matter how unexpected the path may be.

“Maybe I’m just a crazy man with crazy dreams… so being here with the ‘Locos’ actually makes perfect sense.”

El Paso is a newer club, founded in 2018. The group is currently fourth in Group B of the United Soccer League Championship standings. “Cristo is a great addition to our roster, adding another attacking threat to our forward line,” the club’s head coach, Junior Gonzalez, said.

“His passion for the game and leadership qualities for our locker room allow us to continue growing the positive culture we strive for as a club.”

While Cristo is best known for his appearance in Ted Lasso, he has also had several appearances in films and TV shows including; Spider-Man: No Way Home and Sonic The Hedgehog 3. He has also featured in the State Farm commercial “Bundle is Life” alongside Patrick Mahomes.

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

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

✍️ Author Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📰 The Week(s) in Books

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

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

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

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

📖 Bookstore Faves

The inside of Mystery Pier Books

(Mystery Pier Books)

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

What is the market like for rare books right now?

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

Why should one own a rare book?

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

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

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

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

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