Great writing, even when an author sets a story in early 20th century Maine or during ancient uprisings, often sheds light on our own era. From a novel starring a sentient gale-force wind, on to a memoir from a leading African American writer, this month’s titles provide illumination as we lose daylight.
FICTION
Helm: A Novel By Sarah Hall Mariner Books: 368 pages, $30 (Nov. 4)
U.K. inhabitants of Hall’s native Cumbria region have grappled for centuries with a wind known as “The Helm.” Different eras have deemed it a measure of divine anger or human sin, and more recently, as one of earth’s vital signs. Helm’s narration alternates with chapters from perspectives including an astrologer, an astronomer, a Crusader, an herbalist and a climatologist, each adding to the strength of the immortal force.
Palaver: A Novel By Bryan Washington Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 336 pages, $28 (Nov. 4)
As in his first two novels “Memorial” and “Family Meal,” Houston-based Washington weaves scenes of Americans at home and in Japan with exquisite attention both to queer culture and to emotions. “The mother” and “the son” are never named; her Jamaican origins affect his upbringing, as well as his identity. When she makes an unannounced visit to see him in Japan, the title’s gentle irony becomes apparent.
Readers will recall Dr. Wilbur Larch from “The Cider House Rules.” Here he is the 1919 go-between for Esther Nacht, a 14-year-old Jewish refugee whom he places with the Winslow family as an au pair. Like so many women through the ages, that role results in a different kind of labor for her, one that turns this most Irving-esque (wrestling! sex!) book into writer Jimmy Winslow’s origin story.
The 1975 murder of Italian subversive film director Pier Paolo Pasolini forms the tortured heart of Laing’s first historical novel. In 1974 protagonist Nicholas Wade leaves England and lands in Venice, where he meets Danilo Donati, costume designer for Pasolini as well as Fellini and others. Their relationship reflects those auteurs’ themes, especially those of fascism’s rebirth in Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.”
Noted playwright Hudes pens a stunning debut novel that rends conventional notions of motherhood. Years after disappearing from her child’s life, April Soto writes her daughter Noelle a letter to read on her 18th birthday. Less apology than explanation, and less explanation than soul-searching screed, this novel has a huge voice, a woman’s attempt to create meaning from the depths of family trauma.
Only Margaret Atwood could write a debut memoir at age 85 and make it significantly different from her previous work while at the same time infusing it with her droll wit and many passions, literary, environmental and familial. While she has always combined public and private in her acclaimed and groundbreaking novels, essays, and poetry, this volume beautifully fuses Atwood the person, and Atwood the writer.
Barth, a freelance journalist, spent time in three different Bay Area encampments of unhoused people, including Oakland’s Wood Street Commons, and, as Gov. Gavin Newsom moves forward on a new task force targeting these areas for removal, he argues that solutions to homelessness should come from the ground up, with the involvement of those most affected.
Until the 1970s in most states, a married woman could not legally refuse to have sex with her husband. The 1978 Oregon trial of John Rideout for marital rape of his wife Greta — despite his then-acquittal — raised awareness of this legislation and led to Rideout’s conviction for rape and sodomy nearly four decades later in a case involving two other partners. Weinman (“The Real Lolita”) writes with energy about a case with present-day ramifications.
You say you want a revolution — and historian Sassoon says: Consider your predecessors. Although we focus on hot-button moments, the long tale of these uprisings can lead to long-term instability and injustice (e.g., the young United States choosing to persist with enslavement). What is the real price of transformation? Is it worth considering when people unite against tyranny and oppression?
Wideman’s 1985 essay “The Language of Home” was about the power of words to capture our foundations, so it’s fitting that his new collection covering 50 years of his powerful prose mimics that essay’s title. The new title’s plural refers to the author’s constant themes, which aren’t surprising. What does surprise is his prescience about still-relevant concerns, from a disappearing middle class to police brutality.
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“Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith’s mesmerizing new memoir, only deepens the mystery of who this iconic artist is and where her singular vision originated. I’ve long been struck by her magnetism on stage, her fearless approach to her craft, and the stark beauty of her words on the page, including the National Book Award-winning “Just Kids.” She has a preternatural belief in her own instincts and a boundless curiosity that, taken together, help explain the extraordinarily rich life and oeuvre she’s constructed. This transcendent — and at times terrifying — account of that evolution enriches that understanding. And yet, Smith’s persona remains veiled — sphinx-like — an ethereal presence whose journey to fame was fueled by her questing spirit and later detoured by tragedy.
Like Jeanette Walls’ classic, “The Glass Castle,” Smith’s saga begins with a hard-scrabble childhood she relates as if narrating a Dickensian fairy tale. In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements. Smith’s mother was a waitress who also took in ironing. Her father was a factory worker, a World War II veteran scarred by his experience abroad. They shared their love of poetry, books and classical music with their daughter, who was reading Yeats by kindergarten.
Smith, who was born in 1946, was often bed-ridden as a young girl, afflicted with tuberculosis and scarlet fever, along with all the usual childhood ailments. She writes: “Mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence.” When she contracted Asian flu, the virus paralyzed her with “a vise cluster of migraines.” She credits a boxed set of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” recordings her mother bought with tip money for her return to health.
As a 3-year-old, Smith recalls grilling her mother during evening prayers, posing metaphysical questions about Jesus and the soul, immersing herself in Bible study and later joining her mother as a Jehovah’s Witness. She didn’t confine herself to a single religious discipline, though. For example, while still a young child, she saw the movie “Lost Horizons” and became entranced by Tibet and the teachings of Buddhism — “an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.” While “this seemed beautiful,” she writes, “it nonetheless troubled me.”
There is a romantic quality even to the deprivations Smith chronicles, an effect heightened by what she chooses to highlight or withhold. With little money for toys, she and her siblings entertained themselves using the knobs on a dresser as instruments on a ship, sailing on faraway seas. She and her younger siblings regularly set out with their mother to the nearby railroad tracks, where they harvested leftover lumps of coal to fuel their pot-bellied stove — the apartment’s sole source of heat. Under the floorboards of her closet, Smith conceals “glittering refuse I had scavenged from trash bins, fragments of costume jewelry, rosary beads,” along with a blue toothbrush she’s invested with magical powers.
Their apartment building overlooks a trash-strewn area dubbed “the Patch,” which is bordered by “the Rat House.” There, Smith proclaims herself general of the neighborhood’s Buddy Gang, fearlessly fending off bullies twice her size, while at school, she was viewed as odd by her teachers, “like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.”
Within this urban setting, Smith often paused to marvel at nature. Taking a short cut on the long walk to school, she stumbles on a pond in a wooded area. A snapping turtle emerges and settles a few feet away. “He was massive,” she recalls, “with ancient eyes, surely a king.”
It’s impossible to know if Smith was really this self-possessed and ruminative as a child or if nostalgia has altered her perspective. What’s undeniable, though, is that her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes. She recollects fishing Vogue magazines out of trash cans around age 6 and feeling “a deep affinity” with the images on their pages. She’s immersed in Yeats and Irish folk tales while being bored at school reading “Fun With Dick and Jane.” On her first visit to an art museum, viewing Picasso’s work produces an epiphany: She was born to be an artist. A decade later, she boards a bus bound for New York City.
At this point, about a third of the way into the book, we enter the vortex that is Patti Smith’s talent and ambition on fire. The pace of the memoir accelerates. An alchemy infuses each chance encounter. Opportunities abound. Everywhere she turns there are talented photographers, poets, playwrights and musicians encouraging and supporting her. She writes poetry and finds a soulmate in Robert Mapplethorpe. She meets Sam Shepard, who features her poem in a play he’s writing. She meets William Burroughs, performs a reading with Allen Ginsberg. She forms a musical partnership with Lenny Kaye, and begins performing her poetry, with the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as her spiritual inspiration.
Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale. Luck is with her, bolstered by a fierce conviction in her own bespoke vision. “There was no plan, no design,” she writes of that time, “just an organic upheaval that took me from the written to the spoken word.” Bob Dylan becomes a mentor. Her fame grows enormous with the 1975 release of “Horses” and the international touring that followed, yet she retains the bearing of an ascetic. She writes: “We hadn’t made our record to garner fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned.”
Smith’s rock star trajectory is diverted by her love affair with Fred Sonic Smith, for whom she ditches her career at its height, against the advice of many of those closest to her. But as with every decision she’s ever made, she can’t be dissuaded. In this intimate portion of the book, we receive glimpses of two passionate artists hibernating, in love. They marry, have two children, and cultivate an eccentric version of domestic bliss. But harsh reality intervenes and the losses begin to accumulate. One after the other, Smith loses the men she loves most — Robert, then Fred, then her beloved brother, Todd. These losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.
The book’s final pages reveal Smith continuing to grieve, mourning the loss of other loved ones — her parents, Susan Sontag, Sam Shepard. I wish I could simply reprint those pages here — they moved me deeply. At 78, she reflects on the process of “shedding” — which she describes as one of life’s most difficult tasks. “We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel,” she writes. “And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.”
“All must fall away,” she concludes. “The precious bits of cloth folded away in a small trunk like an abandoned trousseau, the books of my life, the medals in their cases.” What will she retain? “But I will keep my wedding ring,” she writes, “and my children’s love.”
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
By Cameron Crowe Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster: 336 pages, $35
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Cameron Crowe’s charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place, when rock ‘n’ roll culture was still a secret handshake and the music press wasn’t just another publicity tentacle for giant corporations to shill their product (excepting the fine writers at the Los Angeles Times, of course). In fact, the “music press” as a concept is vestigial at best now, the internet having snuffed it out, but when Crowe was writing his features in the 1970s, primarily for Rolling Stone, only a handful of print publications allowed fans to glean any insight about the musicians they admired or to even see photos of them.
Crowe was one of those fans. He spent his adolescence in Palm Springs, a town with “a thousand swimming pools and the constant hum of air conditioners,” in a basement apartment near the freeway. A loner and a nerd raised by a former Army commanding officer and a strong-willed, whip-smart mother who had firm ideas about how young Cameron should conduct himself. Any humiliations Crowe might have suffered as an uncertain teen were for his mother merely speed bumps on the journey to self-actualization, ideally as a lawyer. She had a wealth of Dale Carnegie-esque aphorisms to pump up her young charge, such as “put on your magic shoes,” or “Mind is in every cell of the body. Thoughts are everything.”
“She hated rock and roll,” Crowe writes. “Rock was inelegant, and worse, obsessed with base issues like sex and drugs.”
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
As we have seen in the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” Crowe’s autobiographical account of his early years, young Cameron cared little about sex or drugs, music being his only lodestar. When his family relocated to San Diego, Crowe found himself in a conservative town with virtually no outlets for music except the local sports arena, where he witnessed his first big-time rock show accompanied by his mom: a post-comeback Elvis, knee deep in Vegas schmaltz, bounding onstage “in a glittering white jumpsuit …. striking karate poses.” A week later, mom and son witnessed Eric Clapton, full of fire with his band Derek and the Dominos. “I understand your music,” Alice Crowe finally conceded. “It’s better than ours.”
San Diego had little pockets of cultural insurrection that Crowe sought out like a moth to flame. When his sister Cindy nabbed a job with the local underground paper called the Door, Crowe wedged his way in, not because he had any interest in radical politics: his hero Lester Bangs, the iconoclastic rock critic whom he had read in Rolling Stone and Creem, had contributed work there.
As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye that would serve him so well in his second career as a filmmaker. The Door’s editor Bill Maguire “had a healthy girth, an open shirt with a silver pendant, and rippling brown hair. The kind of character Richard Harris used to play, most of the time with a goblet in his hand.” Maguire and his staff are hippie idealists, wary of sullying their political mission with trivialities like record reviews. But Crowe talks Maguire into letting him weigh in on a James Taylor record, and Crowe’s career is launched. He is 14.
Cameron Crowe, who started his music journalism career as a teen, pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye that would serve him so well in his second career as a filmmaker.
(Neal Preston)
Crowe would encounter no such resistance as he worked his way into Rolling Stone, whose owner Jann Wenner gladly accepted record company advertising to keep his counterculture publication afloat. Crowe had found his professional home, filing long, admiring features with some of the era’s most important acts.
Crowe’s Dec. 6, 1973, cover story on the Allman Brothers was meant to atone for an earlier profile on the band written for the magazine by Grover Lewis, a brutally honest and often unsavory portrait. Crowe’s do-over feature, in contrast, is anodyne and respectful; the band is even given room to refute some of the facts Lewis included in his story.
Far more interesting is the stuff Crowe left out of that piece that he has now put into his memoir. To wit: Shortly after their perfectly lovely afternoon together, Gregg Allman, clearly in a drug-induced psychotic state, calls Crowe to his hotel room and demands that Crowe physically hand over the tapes of their interview, or else face legal consequences. “How do I know you aren’t with the FBI?” Allman asked Crowe. “You’ve been talking to everybody. Taking notes with your eyes.” It’s hard to imagine Crowe’s mentor Bangs not leading with that scene.
Crowe was covering rock music at a time when publicists had not become the human guardrails they are today, insulating their clients from anything that doesn’t celebrate them. There were no record company representatives present when Crowe sat in the lobby of an El Torito restaurant in Mission Hills with Kris Kristofferson, whose wife Rita Coolidge was waiting for the singer with her family in the bar (underage Crowe wasn’t allowed inside). Or when Crowe went long with David Bowie, interviewing him on and off for a year and a half while Bowie was making his 1976 album “Station to Station.”
Camped out with his wife Angie in a Beverly Hills mansion on North Doheny Drive, Bowie is affable and candid, despite subsisting on a diet of red peppers, milk and cocaine. “Over the months, I became acclimated to the normality within his insulated lifestyle,” Crowe writes. “Oh, sometimes there might be a hexagon drawn on the curtains in his bedroom or a bottle of urine on the windowsill.” While showing Crowe the indoor swimming pool, Bowie remarks that the only problem with the house “is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.”
Such weird scenes inside this once-mysterious world have been totally effaced, now that every musician can curate his own image on social media. Reading “The Uncool,” which touches on Crowe’s Hollywood career without delving too deep into it, reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic.
Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
WASHINGTON — Betty Ford reportedly said that if the White House West Wing is the “mind” of the nation, then the East Wing — the traditional power center for first ladies — is the “heart.”
That “heart” beat for more than 100 years as first ladies and their teams worked from their East Wing offices on everything from stopping drug abuse and boosting literacy to beautifying and preserving the White House itself. It’s where they planned White House state dinners and brainstormed the elaborate themes that are a feature of the U.S. holiday season.
That history came to an end after wrecking crews tore down the wing’s two stories of offices and reception rooms this month. Gone is an in-house movie theater, as well as a covered walkway to the White House captured in so many photos over the years. An East Wing garden that was dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy was uprooted, photographs show.
President Trump ordered the demolition as part of his still-to-be approved plan to build a $300-million ballroom.
The Republican former real estate developer has long been fixated on building a big White House ballroom. In 2010, he called a top advisor to then-President Obama and offered to build one. Trump made no secret of his distaste for the practice of hosting elegant White House state dinners underneath tents on the South Lawn. The Obama White House did not follow up on his request.
Now Trump, in his second term, is moving quickly to see his wish for what he calls a “great legacy project” become reality. He has tried to justify the East Wing tear-down and his ballroom plans by noting that some of his predecessors also added to the White House over the years.
First ladies and their staffs witnessed history in the East Wing, a “place of purpose and service,” said Anita McBride, who worked there as chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush.
“Tearing down those walls doesn’t diminish the significance of the work we accomplished there,” McBride told the Associated Press.
McBride said she supports a ballroom addition because the “large and expensive tent option” that has been used when guest lists stretched longer than could be comfortably accommodated inside the White House “was not sustainable.” Tents damage the lawn and require additional infrastructure to be brought in, such as outdoor bathrooms and trolleys to move people around, especially in bad weather, she said.
Others feel differently.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who was policy director for First Lady Michelle Obama, said the demolition was a “symbolic blow” to the East Wing’s legacy as a place where women made history.
“The East Wing was this physical space that had seen the role of the first lady evolve from a social hostess into a powerful advocate on a range of issues,” she said in an interview.
Here’s a look at some of the history that came out of the East Wing and the first ladies who spent time there:
Rosalynn Carter
She was the first first lady to have her own office in the East Wing. Most first ladies before Carter had worked out of the private living quarters on the second or third floor of the residence. Carter wanted a place where she could separate work and home.
“I always need a place to go that is private, where I don’t have to dress and don’t have to put on makeup,” she wrote in her memoir. “The offices of the staff of the first lady were always in the East Wing, and it seemed a perfect place for my office too.”
In her memoir, Carter wrote about her favorite route to her office in winter months. She walked through the basement, past laundry rooms and workshops and the bomb shelter kept for the president and his staff. The thermostats in the residence above had been turned down low because of President Carter’s energy conservation program, making the East Wing so cold that she was forced to wear long underwear.
The subterranean passageway shown to her by a residence staffer provided some relief. “With Jimmy’s energy conservation program, it was the only really warm place in the White House, with large steam pipes running overhead,” the first lady wrote.
Nancy Reagan
Photos from the East Wing in the early 1980s show the first lady meeting with staff, including her press secretary, Sheila Tate. For a generation of Americans, Nancy Reagan was most closely associated with a single phrase, “Just Say No,” for the anti-drug abuse program she made a hallmark of her White House tenure.
As Reagan once recalled, the idea for the campaign emerged during a 1982 visit with schoolchildren in Oakland. “A little girl raised her hand and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.’ And there it was born.”
Hillary Clinton
Clinton bucked history by becoming the first first lady to insist that her office be in the West Wing, not the East Wing. In her memoir, Clinton wrote that she wanted her staff to be “integrated physically” with the president’s team. The first lady’s office relocated to what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building while Clinton was assigned an office on the second floor of the West Wing.
“This was another unprecedented event in White House history and quickly became fodder for late-night comedians and political pundits,” Clinton later wrote.
Laura Bush
Bush wrote in her memoir about what it was like at the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of her staff members, in their 20s, “kicked off their high heels and fled from the East Wing” after they were told to “run for their lives” when reports suggested the White House was a target, she wrote.
“Now they were being asked to come back to work in a building that everyone considered a target and for a presidency and a country that would be at war.”
Michelle Obama
Obama was the first Black woman to serve as first lady, becoming a global role model and style icon who advocated for improved child nutrition through her “Let’s Move” initiative. She and her staff in the East Wing also worked to support military families and promote higher education for girls in developing countries.
Photos from the time show Obama typing on a laptop during an online chat about school nutrition and the White House garden she created.
Melania Trump
Trump pushed the boundaries of serving as first lady by not living at the White House during the opening months of President Trump’s first term. She stayed in New York with their then-school-age son, Barron, so he wouldn’t have to switch schools midyear. When she eventually moved to the White House, she and her East Wing aides launched an initiative called “Be Best,” focused on child well-being, opioid abuse and online safety.
Jill Biden
Biden was the first first lady to continue a career outside the White House. The longtime community college English professor taught twice a week while serving as first lady. But in her East Wing work, she was an advocate for military families; her late father and her late son Beau served in the military. Biden also advocated for research into a cure for cancer and secured millions of dollars in federal funding for research into women’s health.
In Megha Majumdar’s new novel “A Guardian and a Thief,” a cataclysmic climate event in the Bengali city of Kolkata has wiped out shelter and food supplies, leaving its citizens desperate and scrambling for survival. Among the families beset by the tragedy are Ma, her young daughter Mishti and Ma’s father Dadu. They are some of the fortunate ones, with approved passports to travel to the U.S., where Ma’s husband awaits them in Ann Arbor, Mich. But a brazen theft threatens their very existence.
“A Guardian and a Thief” is Majumdar’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed bestselling debut “A Burning.” We chatted with the author about white lies, the pleasures of anthropology and teaching as a form of learning.
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✍️ Author Chat
“A Guardian and a Thief” by Megha Majumdar
(Knopf)
Your novel takes place in Kolkata, which is your hometown. Why?
It’s one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. I was reading about all of these grim predictions. Kolkata has grown significantly hotter and is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades. Reading all of that was really sad, and it was really alarming. The book really grew out of these predictions about the future of the city.
Your character Boomba makes life very difficult for your family, yet he is really a victim of circumstance, right? Calamities can make good people do bad things.
This is the kind of question that got me into this book, which is, are there good people and monsters or do we contain elements of both in us? And is this revealed in a circumstance of scarcity and crisis? That’s the kind of question that I was very interested in. Boomba came to me initially as the thief of the title, but as I started writing more about him, I realized that it wouldn’t be truthful or interesting to simply make him the thief. He was more complex and I needed to write him with all of his complicated motivations and wishes and worries and regrets.
Everyone in the novel lies to some extent, whether it’s for self-preservation, or to protect their loved ones from being hurt.
I think it’s coming from love, actually, the loving function of lies and falsehoods. Anybody who has lived far away from home might find that this resonates with them: This feeling that when you are really far away from your loved ones, you need to assure them that you are OK, that things are all right. It’s a kind of love that you can offer them, because they cannot do anything to help you from so far away. So offering them falsehoods about how your circumstances are fine and they have nothing to worry about is an expression of love for them.
You studied anthropology in college. How did you move into fiction?
Anthropology is about the effort to understand [other people] while acknowledging that you can never fully know, that there are limits to how much any of us can understand another person’s life. That training, in listening for complexity in somebody else’s life story, and honoring the contradictions and intricacies of their life, and maintaining the humility to acknowledge that there are things about other people which will always remain mysterious to us — that space is so rich for a fiction writer.
You teach writing in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. How does that feed into your work?
It’s what I loved about working as a book editor. Teaching feels beautifully related to editorial work, because, once again, I am close to other writers. I’m close to their text, I am thinking with them through the questions of what this text is accomplishing. And I love having the opportunity to think through failures of prose with other incredibly smart and creative and ambitious writers. When I say failure, there’s nothing bad or stressful about it. I fail in my writing all the time. Failure is part of the process. Being able to look at those failures and ask, what is happening here is very useful.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Twenty-five years after “Almost Famous” put his origin story on movie screens, Cameron Crowe (left, with Robert Plant) reflects on his roots as a teenage music journalist.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Valorie Castellanos Clark writes that “The Radical Fund,” John Fabian Witt’s book about a Jazz Age millionaire who gave his money away is a “meticulous” story of “the ways a modest fund endowed by a reluctant heir managed to reshape American civil rights in less than 20 years.”
Leigh Haber is entranced with Gish Jen’s new novel “Bad Bad Girl,” about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, calling the book “suffused with love and a desire to finally understand.”
Vroman’s Bookstore is on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nine months after the Eaton fire, Vroman’s Bookstore continues to be a cherished haven for local residents. The store still vibrates with bookish energy as it continues its ambitious fundraising outreach campaigns for fire victims. We chatted with the store’s chief executive, Julia Cowlishaw, about how things are going at the beloved Pasadena institution.
Nine months after the fire, how is business?
Business has been steady this year and we’re pleased with that, given all the variables in the world.
What books are selling right now?
The new releases this fall are fabulous, and we are seeing a broad range of interests. In nonfiction there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand current events from historical perspectives and Jill Lepore’s “We the People” is one example on our bestseller list. Since it is fall, the list of cookbooks is amazing and Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook “Good Things” along with her older book “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” make great gifts. In fiction, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, Thomas Pynchon and Lily King’s new novels are popular, so literary fiction is alive and well.
How important has the store been for the community in such a challenging year?
Bookstores, including Vroman’s, have long been recognized as a third place in their communities. A third place gives people a space to come together with friends and family over a shared interest and a fine sense of community. That sense of community became even more important after the fires, and it was so important for us to be more than a bookstore and give back to our community in every way we could. Our community really responded by helping us raise money for several community foundations, and collect books and supplies for people impacted by the fires.
KEVIN Federline has continued his string of shock allegations against ex wife Britney Spears – with the dancer now claiming she punched their son in the face.
The couple’s war of words and bad blood has come to the fore with the release of teasers for his new book You Thought You Knew, set for general sale on October 21.
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Britney Spears’ ex husband Kevin Federline has continued his steady stream of jaw-dropping allegations against the starCredit: GettyIn a teaser for his new book, he has suggested the Lucky hitmaker ‘punched’ their youngest sonCredit: Getty – ContributorThe pair share two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden JamesCredit: Instagram / britneyspearsBritney hit back at her ex’s ‘gaslighting’ behaviour this weekCredit: instagram
He has already teased many shock revelations about his relationship with the Toxic singer and life raising their sons, Sean Preston, now 20, and Jayden James, 19.
The former professional dancer, 47, has used his tome to open up about his struggles co-parenting with Britney, 43, throughout her downward spiral from pop princess to troubled artist.
He has now suggested the mum of two “punched” their youngest “in the face”, according to Variety.
Kevin also wrote how she allegedly bleached their scalps without his consent and asked eldest Preston to “bathe with her.”
He suggested the kids had filmed some incidents on their mobile phones.
In another shock allegation, which followed Preston’s holiday with his girlfriend, he claimed she replied with the words: “Her response was chilling: she told him she wished he, his brother, and me were all dead.”
The Sun has gone to Britney’s reps for comment.
CLAP BACK
Earlier this week, Britney clapped back at what she dubbed “exhausting” claims from her former partner.
Kevin and Britney got married on September 18, 2004, just five months after they met but they split in 2006.
In a text post written in black font on a white background, she wrote: “The constant gaslighting from my ex husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting.
“Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.
“Sadly, they have always witnessed the lack of respect shown by own father for me.
“They need to take responsibility for themselves.
With one son only seeing me for 45 min in the past 5 years and the other with only 4 visits in the past 5 years. I have pride too.
“From now on I will let them know when I am available.
“Trust me, those white lies in that book, they are going straight to the bank and I am the only one who genuinely gets hurt here.”
The US chart star then wrapped her emotive message with the words: “I will always love them [her boys] and if you really know me, you won’t pay attention to the tabloids of my mental health and drinking.
“I am actually a pretty intelligent woman who has been trying to live a sacred and private life the past 5 years.
“I speak on this because I have had enough and any real woman would do the same.”
MARRIAGE BREAKDOWN
In an interview with The New York Times, Kevin previously revealed he has kept his distance from his ex-wife and they “haven’t spoken in years,” following their divorce nearly two decades ago.
However, in his book, the DJ also revealed some of Britney’s alarming behaviour, which he learned mainly from their kids.
“They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep — ‘Oh, you’re awake?’ — with a knife in her hand,” Kevin wrote.
“Then she’d turn around and pad off without explanation.”
Meanwhile, the Lucky songstress’ backing dancer has broken her silence on his allegations the pair enjoyed a steamy snog.
In a statement provided to Us Weekly, Britney’s representative said, ‘Once again [Federline] and others are profiting off her, and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin.
‘All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James, and their well-being during this sensationalism,’ they added.
In 2023, Jayden and Sean moved to Hawaii with their dad and his new wife, Victoria Prince, and the their two half-sisters.
There were rife reports of a rift between the two sons and their famous mother, which was sparked after her conservatorship was terminated in November 2021.
Previously, the bubblegum pop queen apologized for “not being perfect.”
The pair were married for two yearsCredit: GettyKevin’s tome also alleges Britney held a knife while watching her sons sleep as well as suggesting she snogged a backing dancerCredit: GettyBritney meanwhile has been slowly rebuilding a relationship with her two sonsCredit: Instagram / britneyspears
BRITNEY Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline claimed the singer drank alcohol during her pregnancy and did cocaine while breastfeeding.
Britney, 43, was married to dancer and actor Kevin, 47, from 2004 until 2007.
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Kevin Federline has made shock allegations about ex Britney Spears during her pregnancy with their sonCredit: GettyKevin claims Britney drank while pregnant and did cocaine when their sons were youngCredit: Getty
The former couple welcomed two sons together during their three-year marriage.
As well as this, Kevin claims that Britney did cocaine while their boys were young – leaving him concerned about their breastfeeding.
The Sun has contacted Britney’s reps for comment.
Kevin told The Hollywood Reporter: “Of course this concerned me.
“Anything that could possibly harm the child is concerning. So yeah, it was a bit shocking for me through some of those moments.
“But yes, that night at the record release party was really what set everything off. I realized that I needed to get into “protect my children” mode, is what happened.
“Like I said in the book, it’s not necessarily the extracurricular activities (i.e., drug use). I was concerned for my children.
“And eventually she filed for divorce. That was the actual breaking point in the marriage.”
She shared to Instagram: “The constant gaslighting from my ex husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting.
“Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.
Britney has accused Kevin of ‘gaslighting’ her with the new bookCredit: Getty
“Sadly, they have always witnessed the lack of respect shown by their own father for me.
“They need to take responsibility for themselves.
“With one son only seeing me for 45 min in the past 5 years and the other with only 4 visits in the past 5 years. I have pride too.
“From now on I will let them know when I am available.
When it was first published in 1975, “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” was immediately recognized as something new. In six taut, probing, far-ranging essays about certain popular or otherwise forgotten musicians, author Greil Marcus cracked open a world of sojourners, tricksters, killers and confidence men — the lost subterranean underlife of America as inflected in the music itself.
“Mystery Train” was a landmark in cultural criticism that took on Rock ‘n’ Roll as a subject of intellectual inquiry. In 2011, Time magazine named “Mystery Train” one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of all time. For the book’s 50th anniversary, a new edition has been published, with a wealth of new writing from Marcus that brings his book up to date.
On a recent Zoom call, I chatted with him on the 50th anniversary of his book about its lasting impact, the anxiety of influence and the staying power of criticism.
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✍️ Author Chat
Book jacket of “Mystery Train” by Greil Marcus.
(Penguin Random House)
Congrats on 50 years of “Mystery Train.” Could you have possibly imagined that it would still have a life in 2025 when you wrote it in 1975?
For this book to have this kind of a life, you can’t predict it. I had a miserable time writing it. I’d never written a book before. I rented a room at a house near our little apartment, and just stayed there all day, trying to write or not trying to write, as the case may be. I didn’t have any hopes or ambitions for it. I just wanted it to look good.
This is the thickest edition of “Mystery Train” yet. Your “Notes and Discographies” section, where you update the reader on new books and recordings about the artists, among other things, is longer than the original text of the book.
That’s what’s kept the book alive. I mean, I still think the original chapters read well. I’m glad they came out the way they did, but for me, they opened up a continuing story, and that has sort of kept me on the beat so that I obsessively would follow every permutation that I could and write them in the notes section.
“Mystery Train” changed the way popular music was written about. Who were your literary antecedents?
Edmund Wilson, Pauline Kael, D.H. Lawrence’s critical studies. Hemingway’s short stories, just as a way to learn how to try to write. There was another book that was important to me, Michael Gray’s “Song and Dance Man,” which was a rigorous examination of Bob Dylan’s music. It was totally intimidating. His knowledge of blues, novels, poetry — I thought there’s no way I can write something as good as this. So I started doing a lot more reading, and listening more widely.
For many readers of the book, it was the first time they came across artists like Robert Johnson or Harmonica Frank. How did you discover these artists?
I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine in 1969 when the Altamont disaster happened, when people were killed at a free Rolling Stones concert. It was an evil, awful day. I was drained and disgusted with what rock ‘n’ roll had become, and I didn’t want to listen to that music anymore. I found myself in this little record store in Berkeley, and I saw an album by Robert Johnson that had a song called “Four Until Late” that Eric Clapton’s band Cream had covered, so I took it home and played it, and that was just a revelation to me. It led me into another world. It became the bedrock of “Mystery Train.”
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger signs autographs at Altamont Speedway. Later, on Dec. 6, the Stones gave a concert where one fan was stabbed to death by a Hell’s Angel.
(Associated Press)
Your book explores how certain myths transfer across vastly disparate cultures. Had you read the great mythologist Joseph Campbell prior to writing the book?
I read a lot of Joseph Campbell in graduate school. Probably a half-dozen of his books. In some ways they cover the same territory as “Mystery Train.” Campbell makes the argument that myths persist, they don’t even need to be cultivated. They cultivate us, and they are passed on in almost invisible ways. That really struck a chord with me when reading Campbell’s work.
You’re very good at explaining what music sounds like. Are you influenced by fiction at all?
I’d say fiction is part of my work. One of the books that hovered over me when I was writing “Mystery Train” was “The Great Gatsby.” Certain lines, they sang out.
What is the purpose of criticism?
My next book is about Bryan Ferry, the leader of the band Roxy Music. Now, you listen to a song like Roxy Music’s “More Than This” and you say, what makes this so great? How did that happen? What is going on here? That’s what criticism is, just wrestling with your response to something. That thing where someone has captured a moment so completely that you sort of fall back in awe. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life as a writer. There is this urge to, not exactly take possession of something, but to become a part of it to some small degree.
Your book plumbs the murky depths, exploring the mysterious dream life of America as transmuted through certain music. Are there any mysteries left for you?
Oh, yes, absolutely. I remember when I met Bob Dylan in 1997. He was getting an award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and I was to give a talk. We met and he asked what I was working on. I had just published a book called “Invisible Republic,” about his “Basement Tapes.” He said, “You should write a sequel to that. You only just scratched the surface.” Now, I’m not saying I did a bad job. He said that to me because certain music has infinite depth. So, yes, there are certainly more mysteries to think about.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Valerie Castallanos Clark loves Jade Chang’s new novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” calling it “equal parts love letter to Los Angeles, narrative about being a first-generation Asian American, exploration of grief and love and a found-family novel featuring an adoptee that doesn’t put reunion as the emotional climax.”
With “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon has delivered a late-career gem, according to David Kipen: “Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, ‘Shadow Ticket’ capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.”
Stories Books & Cafe is on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.
(Claudia Colodro)
Ever since it opened its doors in 2008, Stories Books & Cafe has been a community cornerstone. A snug yet carefully curated store, with loads of obscurantist art books and choice indie press titles, Stories also has a cafe tucked in the back that is always bustling. Owner Claudia Colodro runs the store as a creative cooperative with her five co-workers. I talked to the team about the shop on Sunset.
Stories is small, yet I always see titles in there I don’t see anywhere else.
Stories prides itself on its painstaking curation, influenced by every employee’s area of expertise. Much like the community we have garnered, Stories leans toward the eclectic, esoteric and even fringe. Over our 17 years in existence, Stories has been a bookstore that loves our local authors and independent publishers, and encourages readers to come in with an open mind more than a predetermined list.
Remarkably, you have endured in a neighborhood that has seen a lot of store closures, post-COVID.
In a world predominantly automatized and authoritative, we like our people and books to be a countermeasure to the mainstream creature comforts — in hopes to push people out of the path of least resistance and into the unseen abundance.
Compare that with Republicans, who not only believe in second chances but, more often than not, seem to prefer their presidential candidates recycled. Over the last half century, all but a few of the GOP’s nominees have had at least one failed White House bid on their resume.
Why the difference? It would take a psychologist or geneticist to determine if there’s something in the minds or molecular makeup of party faithful, which could explain their varied treatment of those humbled and vanquished.
The notable lack of self-blame has rankled other Democrats. Aside from some couldas and shouldas, Harris largely ascribes her defeat to insufficient time to make her case to voters — just 107 days, the title of her book — which hardly sits well with those who feel Harris squandered the time she did have.
More generally, some Democrats fault the former vice president for resurfacing, period, rather than slinking off and disappearing forever into some deep, dark hole. It’s a familiar gripe each time the party struggles to move past a presidential defeat; Hillary Clinton faced a similar backlash when she published her inside account after losing to Donald Trump in 2016.
That critique assumes great masses of voters devour campaign memoirs with the same voracious appetite as those who surrender their Sundays to the Beltway chat shows, or mainline political news like a continuous IV drip.
They do not.
Let the record show Democrats won the White House in 2020 even though Clinton bobbed back up in 2017 and, for a short while, thwarted the party’s fervent desire to “turn the page.”
But there are those avid consumers of campaigns and elections, and for the political fiends among us Harris offers plenty of fizz, much of it involving her party peers and prospective 2028 rivals.
Pete Buttigieg, the meteoric star of the 2020 campaign, was her heartfelt choice for vice president, but Harris said she feared the combination of a Black woman and gay running mate would exceed the load-bearing capacity of the electorate. (News to me, Buttigieg said after Harris revealed her thinking, and an underestimation of the American people.)
Harris implies Govs. JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer of Illinois and Michigan, respectively, were insufficiently gung-ho after Biden stepped aside and she became the Democratic nominee-in-waiting.
In her book, Harris recounts the hours after Biden’s sudden withdrawal, when she began telephoning top Democrats around the country to lock in their support. In contrast to the enthusiasm many displayed, Newsom responded tersely with a text message: “Hiking. Will call back.”
He never did, Harris noted, pointedly, though Newsom did issue a full-throated endorsement within hours, which the former vice president failed to mention.
It’s small-bore stuff. But the fact Harris chose to include that anecdote speaks to the tetchiness underlying the warmth and fuzziness that California’s two most prominent Democrats put on public display.
Will the two face off in 2028?
Riding the promotional circuit, Harris has repeatedly sidestepped the inevitable questions about another presidential bid.
“That’s not my focus right now,” she told Rachel Maddow, in a standard-issue non-denial denial. For his part, Newsom is obviously running, though he won’t say so.
There would be something operatic, or at least soap-operatic, about the two longtime competitors openly vying for the country’s ultimate political prize — though it’s hard to see Democrats, with their persistent hunger for novelty, turning to Harris or her left-coast political doppelganger as their savior.
Meantime, the two are back on parallel tracks, though seemingly headed in opposite directions.
While Newsom is looking to build Democratic bridges, Harris is burning hers down.
The world is a confusing and scary place right now. Many of us are anxious wanderers in the wilderness, looking for answers. Is it any wonder that the wellness industry is booming? Into this strange new world comes Jade Chang’s funny and poignant novel “What a Time to Be Alive,” whose protagonist Lola is broke and aimless — until a leaked video transforms her into an instant self-help guru.
Chang, whose first novel, “The Wangs vs. The World,” was a sharp satire on class and ambition, has now turned her gaze to the promise and peril of self-actualization through social media. I sat down with Chang to discuss spiritualism for profit, tech bros and trucker hats.
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✍️ Author Chat
Book jacket of “What a Time to Be Alive” by Jade Chang
(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Ecco)
This book almost didn’t make it, as you physically lost it.
I started it years ago. I was writing in longhand in a notebook, entire chapters of the book. I lost the notebook and I was devastated. Then I moved on and wrote “The Wangs vs. The World.” It took a long time to get back into writing this new book. By the time I circled back to it, the world had changed so much. I think I have become more generous about things, and the story benefited from it.
Lola, your protagonist, unwittingly becomes an online self-help guru on the basis of a leaked video that is posted on social media. She becomes a sort of accidental wellness expert.
As someone who didn’t grow up with religion, I have always been really fascinated by belief. Why do we want to believe, and how are we compelled to certain beliefs? And it was just kind of fascinating and amazing that people could find so much life in religious stories. As I was developing the story of this novel, I realized that everyone in the digital world takes a page from this book as well, using stories to convert listeners into believers. I think Lola starts out sort of thinking she is in above her head, but by the end, her sincerity shines through. She wants to believe what she is telling others to believe.
Do you think the internet breeds cynicism and has turned us all into an angry mob?
I don’t. The digital world doesn’t make us any different from who we are, but it can throw a lens on certain aspects of our behavior. I think the internet allows us to be our best and worst selves. Think about all those strangers who might contribute to a GoFundMe campaign because someone has had a serious injury and needs to pay their medical bills, which can yield tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. That’s the mob functioning at its best.
But isn’t it a little too easy to pull a con job online?
Yes, it’s easy to be inauthentic online, but it’s important to remember that online performance is a tiny percentage of someone’s life. That’s why I was so interested in writing about the rise of this self-help guru, because usually when these stories are told you only see it from the acolyte’s point of view or the skeptic’s point of view. But we all have to make money, and we all are pulling a little something over on someone at some point — it’s part of surviving in the world.
Lola cauterizes the pain in her personal life by offering panaceas to pain for strangers online, but she affects a false persona to do so.
It’s easy to assume that anything we do, whether it’s on social media or elsewhere online, is performative or fraudulent in some way. RuPaul has a great quote where he says gender is drag. Everything is drag, a performance. Every choice we make is often not reflective of our essential self. You can’t codify identity in clothes or that trucker hat you’re wearing; anything you’re going to choose is going to be influenced by the times in which you live and who you surround yourself with. I can only speak from experience, but I think it’s almost impossible to suppress your true self.
You mentioned how self-help gurus and tech bros have a similar public worldview.
As research for the book, I attended one of Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays at Royce Hall. Every single person that spoke had the same arc: “I was down in the dumps, and then I looked up from that hole and I saw a glimmer in the form of CrossFit,” or drumming, or whatever it was that pulled them up from the brink. Then I went to a TED talk, and these tech gurus are saying the exact same thing. It’s the narrative of our time. I saw that crossover, and I knew I had something to say. I was interested in this internal push and pull of, how much do you give in to this tactic, and how much do you not.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Hamilton Cain has mixed feelings about Patricia Lockwood’s autofictional account of the COVID-19 lockdown, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” praising Lockwood’s “rich and kinetic” prose but bemoaning her “self-indulgent and repetitious” narrative.
Steve Henson has a chat with tennis legend Björn Borg about his new memoir, “Heartbeats,” which delves into his heavy cocaine and alcohol use that began shortly after he walked away from the sport at age 26.
Karen Palmer’s harrowing memoir, “She’s Under Here,” “details forgery, a child’s kidnapping, a mental breakdown, struggles to stay afloat — and joy,” writes Bethanne Patrick.
And David A. Keeps reports on the fiscal inequities of the booming audiobook industry: “Many actors are vying for audiobook roles at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
The Book Jewel, located in the city of Westchester, is just minutes from LAX.
(The Book Jewel)
The Book Jewel is a welcome addition to the neighborhood of Westchester, an expansive bookstore with an excellent selection of fiction and nonfiction titles for locals, or those who might stop by there before catching their flight at nearby LAX. We talked with general manager Joseph Paulsen about the store.
Your store is serving a community that hasn’t had a general interest bookstore in quite some time.
The Book Jewel opened smack-dab in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic in August of 2020. Our Westchester community has supported us from Day 1, and we recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. We are the only bookstore in Westchester, and we are locally owned and independent. I live here in Westchester and have raised both of my sons here.
What’s selling right now?
Right now we’re selling tons of children’s literature and graphic novels (“InvestiGators,”Dav Pilkey, etc.). Of course, the ABA Independent Bestsellers. Lots of romantasy.
You are pretty close to LAX. Do you sell a lot of books to travelers?
The travelers give themselves away with their roller bags, and we catch ’em heading out of Los Angeles on the reg! They like long books for long flights. Lots of souvenirs too! We have some unique, local non-book items as well and offer a better vibe than the international terminal.
The Book Jewel is located at 6259 W. 87th St, Los Angeles, CA.
Like all great crime writers, Lou Berney knows that a ripping story is only as good as the characters that make it rip. With his new novel “Crooks,” Berney has created a family saga about a small-time operator named Buddy Mercurio, his pickpocket wife Lillian and their five children.
As Buddy’s brood leave the nest and stake their claim in the world, his patriarchal shadow looms large, and the sins of the father are hard to kick. I chatted with Berney about his sixth novel, crime and why smartphones are his worst enemy.
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✍️ Author Chat
Lou Berney, author of “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family.”
(Lou Berney)
How did you come to crime novels?
The writers I love tend to be crime writers. I really got turned on my freshman year of college to Flannery O’Connor and that just kind of blew my mind. To me, she’s the greatest crime writer ever. “Wise Blood,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Every one of her books has elements of a crime novel in them that she does really interesting things with.
But you started as a more traditional literary writer.
My first story was in “The New Yorker” when I was in grad school. I was writing straight literary fiction. Then I started writing screenplays and learning more about plot and storytelling. I just kind of settled into this idea of crime, which to me is the one genre where you can do almost anything you want. It’s such a big tent. And so it was a great way for me to embrace the limitless, essentially.
What about traditional crime writers?Who moves you?
A big influence was Elmore Leonard. Also Jim Thompson, who was a fellow Oklahoma writer. Those are two guys that really, really affected me. But the current state of crime fiction is just awesome. I love so many contemporary crime writers right now. Sara Gran, Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbott, S.A. Cosby. This is a golden age in some ways for weird, interesting crime fiction that takes you to different places. Everybody’s kind of doing their own thing, which I really love.
Are you a Walter Mosley fan?
A huge fan. I got to work with Walter this year. I wrote for a TV show called “The Lowdown” which was created by Sterlin Harjo, who created “Reservation Dogs.” Walter and I were the two novelists in the writers room, six hours a day for 20 weeks, and I just got to hear Walter Mosley talk. The guy is a genius. His thoughts on writing are just mind-blowingly good. So I got paid for an education.
I love the Mercurios. I feel like part of the appeal of a family like this is that they are everything most of us are not: They are bold risk–takers who dive into things without fear.
In writing about the Mercurios, I was getting to vicariously live these lives that were enormously appealing to me. You know, I don’t want to be a criminal and I would probably make a bad criminal, but it’s sure fun to sort of live without rules and live without fear and be reckless and do whatever you want.
“Crooks” is set in the pre-camera phone era, when life had an entirely different texture, and information traveled slowly.
I was walking through the airport yesterday, and it was so demoralizing to see every single person on their phone, with literally no exceptions. Everyone walking, sitting and standing were on their phones, and I thought, “Man, I’m glad I’m old enough to remember when none of that existed,” because that was way, way more interesting to me as a writer.
I love the chapters that are set in ’80s Los Angeles. How did you conjure all of that up?
I read a lot of old magazines. Los Angeles magazine was great. I got all the old issues on EBay. And I have a friend who grew up in the ‘80s in L.A., so I ran some stuff by him. I just love research. I wasn’t into homework as a kid at all, but now I’ve discovered that if it’s homework I need to do for a book, I’m all about it.
The novel is divided into six parts, and every section is so deftly plotted. How difficult is the plot for you?
I do extensive outlining so I can get a sense of plot. But I end up probably changing 75% of it as I go. With this book, the Jeremy chapter worked perfectly, whereas Alice took me like three times as long as any of the other chapters, because I had to keep figuring out how she was going to outsmart this guy, and nothing was working or wasn’t fitting right. It really depends on the particular kind of plotline.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Julia M. Klein thinks Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda does a fine job of probing the inner artist, a “joyous, charismatic, well-meaning, occasionally imperfect man.”
With Oasis and Pulp on the road, Dave Rowntree makes sure his group Blur gets a hand in the Britpop Revival with a book of band photographs.
And finally, our reviewers pick 30 Fall books that everyone must read.
📖 Bookstore Faves
A book-loving cat wanders through the aisles of Small World Books located on the Venice Boardwalk.
(Adam Lipman)
Small World Books is the grandaddy of indie book stores in L.A. Established in 1969 on the Venice Boardwalk, the store has always been well-curated and loaded with a diverse array of titles. We spoke with manager Adam Lipman about what customers are snatching up.
What are some popular genres that your customers like?
Romantasy, horror and architecture are getting snatched up right quick these days.
And those that love poetry are always impressed with our poetry section. But we are selling all types of books right now! From bestsellers to books about lo-fi cassette culture, sextrology, and Charles Oakley. Anything important or interesting to us we try to get in store and keep in stock.
Why are books still necessary in a wired world?
Susan Orleans wrote in “The Orchid Thief”: “There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”
Part of why we are called Small World Books is because we believe books are an excellent way to “whittle the world down to a more manageable size,” small enough to not seem so overwhelmingly exhausting, and hopefully, then making it easier to expand our circle of empathy.
For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues. The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic. Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping co-dependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.
I spoke with Anderson about his book, and the long tail of missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.
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✍️ Author Chat
Author Scott Anderson.
(Nanette Burstein)
The overall feeling I get reading the book is fecklessness and foot–dragging on the part of the American government in the service of protecting our oil sales and military contracts with Iran. There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of, well, just about everything.
Even after the revolution when Khomeini had come in — that nine month period before the hostages were taken — the Americans pretty much replicated the mistakes they’d made with the shah. There’s this whole idea of like, well, they’re going through this revolutionary anti-American fervor right now, but they need us. They’re going to come back around because our economies are so intertwined. All their weapons are American, so they’re going to need us to service them. So there’s just this manner that everything was going to work out and, of course, that became institutionalized.
With a few exceptions, none of the U.S. officials in Iran even spoke Farsi. You talk about how they had all those cassettes of Khomeini’s speeches in the drawers at the CIA and no one bothered to translate them.
So Khomeini comes back from exile on Feb. 1, 1979, with 4 million people greeting him. He goes to the cemetery to give his inaugural speech and the Americans don’t even send an embassy worker. They don’t even send a local out to the cemetery to hear the speech. They didn’t know whether it is a pro- or anti-American speech. It was just astonishing.
Do you feel like 1972 is the turning point? This is the year that President Nixon lifted all restrictions for arms sales to Iran.
I really do. And for what I think is a pretty interesting reason. The shah was a congenitally insecure man. He could never be affirmed enough. And it doesn’t matter how many presidents said, “You’re our man,” he always needed to hear more and more. So what happened in ’72 was the shah’s dream came true. He had knelt at the feet of FDR in 1943. Kennedy was dismissive of him. He had always been trying to push in the door with the Americans. He’d been humiliated again and again. And now he’s got carte blanche from Nixon and Kissinger. This is when you saw the huge escalation in arms purchases and the catapulting of the Iranian military into the first tier of militaries around the world.
Do you think the revolution could have been prevented?
I spent a lot of time studying the revolution as it unfolded, and what struck me was how mysterious the whole thing was, how it came to be. There were so many moments where the outcome might have been different. If the shah’s confidante Asadollah Alam hadn’t died in the early days of the revolution, for example, because he was decisive and the shah was not. There were so many odd quirks that took things down a certain path.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Justin Currie, lead singer of Scottish rock band Del Amitri, chronicles his struggle with Parkinson’s in the book “The Tremolo Diaries.”
(Colin Constance)
“Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way,” Ilana Masad writes about the author’s new novel, “A New New Me.” “Such whimsy … could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer … that you know you are in good hands.”
R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “Katabasis,” is “a dark academic fantasy” that is “more mature and less showy” than the author’s earlier works, according to Valorie Castellanos Clark.
David Baron has written a book called “The Martians” about the frenzy over extraterrestrial life that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century, and Chris Vognar approves. Baron “approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive,” he writes.
Finally, Stuart Miller talked with Justin Currie of the band Del Amitri about his new book, “The Tremolo Diaries,” about Currie’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease.
📖 Bookstore Faves
Malibu Village Books is the only general interest bookstore in Malibu. We spoke to owner Michelle Pierce about the beachside literary hub.
(Malibu Village Books)
Malibu Village Books is the first new bookstore to arrive in the beach city in 15 years. A small yet inviting space with a well curated selection of books, the store has had its share of challenges over the past year. I spoke to the store’s owner, Michelle Pierce, about it.
This is the first new bookstore to open in Malibu in quite some time. How did you come to open it?
I also own Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, and the owners of the Malibu Village Mall came by and liked what I was doing there, so they asked me if I wanted to open a store in their mall.
The fires have affected us enormously. With the Franklin fire, we lost so much of our holiday book sales, and then the Palisades fire shut down PCH for six months. So our sales are definitely down, and the summer tourism traffic has not been what it should be, so yes, we are definitely in a challenging period.
What about the locals? Are they shopping in your store?
Local residents are really excited that we’re here. We have a lot of active book clubs, and we’re working with the library on a lecture series at the Soho House, where we will bring in authors to speak. We’re still fighting, and the community is definitely supporting us. It’s true what they say — bookstores are all about community.
Malibu Village Books is located at 23359 Pacific Coast Highway #23359, Malibu, 90265.
This week, we are chatting with Ada Tseng and Jon Healey about their new book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.” We also take a look at what our critics read, and visit a bookstore that has become a social beehive in Culver City.
The entertainment industry is experiencing a massive transformation, as traditional jobs are vanishing and artificial intelligence increasingly upends the way media is created. Thankfully, former L.A. Times editors Ada Tseng and Jon Healey are here to help. The duo, with extensive experience covering show business, have written a new book for anyone who’s ever dreamed of working in Hollywood. Tseng and Healey interviewed hundreds of insiders who work in front of and behind the camera to provide a thorough look at how to break in, and what it’s like when you do find that dream job.
An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews.
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The glamorous fantasy of Hollywood is so intoxicating. But if you’re going to work in the industry, you need to navigate the day-to-day reality of it.
— Ada Tseng, co-author of “Breaking Into New Hollywood”
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Tseng and Healey are here to help you pursue your Hollywood dreams with their book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.”
(Ricardo DeAratanha; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
This is the most comprehensive how-to guide for Hollywood careers I’ve ever read. Where did the impetus for the book come from?
Ada: The book started as a Hollywood careers series at the Los Angeles Times, when Jon and I were editors on a team that specialized in writing guides and explainers. As we were thinking about how to be useful to L.A. Times readers, I pitched a project to help people who were interested in getting a job in Hollywood. A lot of people come to L.A. starry-eyed with big dreams, but the film and TV industry can be pretty brutal.
As journalists, we’re Hollywood outsiders, but we had access to hundreds of professionals who were generous enough to share what they wished they knew when they were starting out. We see it like this: On behalf of the people who don’t have connections in the industry, we cold-emailed people, asked for informational interviews, picked their brains, listened to stories of what they did to build a career — and did our best to consolidate their most practical pieces of advice into an actionable guide.
Jon: A lot of folks I interviewed had similar origin stories in this respect: They knew that they wanted to work in the industry in some capacity, but they didn’t know what exactly they could do. So it made sense to do a book for that sort of person — a guide that would show an array of possible career paths to people who didn’t know what role they wanted to fill.
I feel like “How to Break into the Business” books in the past have tended to focus on positive outcomes rather than the struggle. Did you want to temper expectations, or at least make sure people think things through very thoroughly before jumping in?
Ada: We just wanted to be honest. The glamorous fantasy of Hollywood is so intoxicating. But if you’re going to work in the industry, you need to navigate the day-to-day reality of it. I don’t think we were trying to encourage or discourage anyone. I’d hope that some people would read the chapters and think, “This seems doable, and now I can make a plan,” while others would read it and think, “If I’m honest with myself, I’m someone who needs more stability in my life.” Because it’s not just a career choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.
Jon: Right, this was about expectation-setting and reality-checking. The very first interviews I did in this project were of Foley artists. An expert I interviewed said there were 40 to 50 established Foley practitioners in the U.S., and 100 to 200 folks trying to get into the field. That’s a very tough nut to crack. Then there are the Hollywood unions, which present a catch-22 to anyone trying to join their ranks — they have to do a certain number of hours in jobs covered by union contracts, but union members get first crack at all those gigs.
Your book also covers jobs above and below the line. I think many people don’t even realize how many different career opportunities exist.
Ada: There are two things we heard over and over again. People would say, “It’s incredibly important to understand what all the different departments do.” And they’d also say, “So many people — even our own colleagues in the industry — don’t understand what we do.” So we wanted to encourage newcomers to learn about all different types of jobs in Hollywood and how they work together.
Jon: Talking about the emotional components is about setting expectations too. The vast majority of people who work in Hollywood, from A-list actors to entry-level grips, are freelancers. That’s a tough life of highs and lows, and you have to prepare for that mentally as well as financially. People have to hustle for years to establish themselves, and that takes an enormous capacity for rejection. On top of that is the physical toll the work can extract, especially on the folks involved in setting up and tearing down sets. Part of the point of the book is to tell people with Hollywood dreams that they’ll need to gird themselves emotionally and physically for the work.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Karin Slaughter’s new book series, which launches with “We Are All Guilty Here,” is not for the squeamish.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Mark Athatakis finds much to like in “Ready for My Close-Up,” David M. Lubin’s book about the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard.” “Though the book has its shortcomings,” he writes, “[Lubin] rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself.”
Robet Allen Papinchak weighs in on Phoebe Greenwood’s Middle East satire “Vulture,” finding it “a darkly comic, searing satire grounded in historic politics.”
Emma Sloley’s novel “The Island of Last Things” envisions a future where animal life, and then entire ecosystems, are wiped out, but Ilana Masad writes that Sloley also highlights “the small moments of beauty, joy and care that emerge even during … horrible times.”
“Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives,” says the owner of Culver City’s Village Well bookstore.
(Jennifer Caspar)
Four years after it opened its doors to the public, Village Well Books & Coffee has become a community locus in its Culver City neighborhood. Owner Jennifer Caspar has created a vibrant space with a full-service cafe, allowing her customers to linger for as long as they please while perusing Caspar’s ample and well-curated selection of new books. I chatted with Caspar about her store and what’s selling right now.
Why did you open the store?
I wanted a place where people can facilitate connections with others, because I think that’s what people need. Everyone is so overwhelmed by their phones and technology, and we tend to take the easy path, which is to not get out and see people.
Why books now? Why not the Substack, social media, etc.?
Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives. People need to connect offline, and books give us a chance to settle down and focus. Studies show that what we learn from books stays with us longer. You can read a Kindle, and I do, but there is something about sitting down with words on paper. For me, it’s great physical therapy for my emotional state.
Village Well is located at 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City.
Jennifer Aniston just came out with an unexpected, wistful comment about her “Friends” co-star Matthew Perry’s death: Part of her, she said, thinks it might be “better” for him that he died.
“We did everything we could when we could,” the “Morning Show” star said in an interview published Monday by Vanity Fair, talking about Perry’s friends’ attempts to help him when he was struggling with addiction. “But it almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight.”
Indeed, Perry discussed his friends’ efforts to help him in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” which recounted his decades-long struggles with substance abuse as well as his numerous recovery efforts.
“Although he asserts he was never high while filming ‘Friends,’ he’d often be sick or hungover,” former staff writer Christina Veta wrote in The Times’ review of the memoir. “Once, Perry passed out on the Central Perk couch and [co-star Matt] LeBlanc had to nudge him awake to say his line. Later, Aniston called him out for drinking again, telling him, ‘We can smell it.’”
Perry told Aniston, “I know I’m drinking too much, but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.”
“In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,” he wrote in his memoir. “This is what my costars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney [Cox], being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage. In between rehearsals and takes, I’d head back there and ride that thing like the fires of hell were chasing me — anything to get my brain power back to normal. I was the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down.”
Aniston told Vanity Fair in the new interview, “looking solemn and out toward the ocean” as she spoke about Perry’s death, “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better. I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”
Perry said in his memoir that amid all his drinking and drug use, he was never suicidal.
“In the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept,” he wrote about the period after “Friends” ended.
“That’s how skewed my thinking had become — I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don’t want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion.”
Almost exactly a year after the memoir came out, on Oct. 28, 2024, at 4 in the afternoon, Perry was found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home. The drug ketamine would later emerge as his official cause of death, with drowning a contributing factor.
Emily Hunt Kivel’s book is unlike any novel you will read this year, a story about millennial angst that is also a bewitching fable. Evie Cavallo, Kivel’s protagonist, is a 20-something mid-level graphic designer at a New York ad agency who loses her rented apartment and finds herself cast adrift. Landing in a fictional backwater town in rural Texas called Gulluck, Evie discovers a hidden gift for shoemaking and finds herself welcomed into an eccentric community of fellow cobblers. “Dwelling” is social commentary wrapped into a delightful allegory about identity, work, ritual and tradecraft.
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I chatted with Kivel about her debut novel, and how, despite its fantastical elements, “Dwelling” nails our present cultural moment.
I think everyone is feeling it to some extent — this incredible lack of stability and alienation.
— Emily Hunt Kivel
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Emily Hunt Kivel’s “Dwelling” is “unlike any novel you will read this year,” writes Marc Weingarten.
(Julia Hole)
I started reading your book thinking, “Ugh, a polemic about the housing crisis,” and by the end of the book I was deeply moved by Evie’s journey.
That’s what I wanted. I wanted readers to think they were reading one thing and to end up at the end thinking, “Where the f— was I?” I wanted to write a book that changed shape and form while in the reader’s hands.
Was that the original intention going in?
I don’t know if I started out with the intention of writing the book I did, but I certainly didn’t want to write a maudlin dystopian commentary on the housing crisis. I did want to touch on this feeling of complete instability that millennials in particular are feeling, but also I think everyone is feeling it to some extent — this incredible lack of stability, and alienation.
Evie, maybe, kind of wants to be a creative, but instead she blossoms by learning a craft that involves using her hands and her head, not a computer.
I think there’s a parallel between finding a craft and coming into your own, and in that way, I think it’s a fairly earnest description of what it feels like to discover yourself through something that you’re passionate about. Evie goes from being an insular character who’s living a self-absorbed life, because that’s what society wants us to do, to living a life that’s actually very generous.
The book takes on the contours of a fable. Did you read fables in preparation?
I read a lot of fables just to keep myself motivated and interested during the writing process. One of the primary texts that I found very helpful was Italo Calvino’s translation of Italian folk tales. It brought me back to this kind of irreverent but weirdly earnest and enchanted quality that I wanted to create in the book.
Unmoored from her prior life, Evie finds her identity in Texas. I think this is something a lot of people are struggling with, not just Millennials. We are asking: Who are we? What is our purpose in life?
I think we’re meant to feel relatively valueless in our society right now. The economy wants us to feel that way, and so I think what Evie is doing is finding value in herself and giving the middle finger to the version of society that she was living in.
The key element of Evie’s new life is this robust community that welcomes her.
I wanted another world to open up to Evie, a world that’s oriented towards life rather than the self. The book is really the story of how to find a home, and what makes a home. Community is the only actual way to resist the forces that we have in our society that are alienating us from our work, friends and family.
In the acknowledgments, you thank the UCLA Writing Extension program. What was that experience like for you?
One of the most formative experiences of my life was the UCLA Extension. I went to UC Santa Barbara and was absolutely miserable. and so I graduated early and moved to L.A. I was finding community and portals into another world at the Extension, which is available to everyone. I was writing alongside such a diverse array of people. I finally started to feel like a writer there. I took classes with Lou Matthews, who I think is the heart of the program in many ways.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
“Jeopardy!” host and “The Complete Kennections” author Ken Jennings says he was “a sponge for weird information” as a kid.
Hamilton Cain weighs in on Ed Park’s new collection of stories “An Oral History of Atlantis,” submitting that “We’re complicit in his fiction … the act of reading a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all directions like a spray of bullets.”
Chuck Hogan’s “The Carpool Detectives,” about four moms who solved a murder, is a “true crime mystery that reads like a novel,” according to Diane Garrett.
“Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape,” says Jeff Resnik, general manager of Pages, A Bookstore in Manhattan Beach.
(Pages, A Bookstore)
Located just steps away from the ocean, Manhattan Beach literary mainstay Pages, A Bookstore is one of L.A.’s best indie shops. We chatted with general manager Jeff Resnik about what his customers are buying right now.
Do you find that, because you are near the ocean, people tend to look for beach reads during this time of year?
Definitely. Being so close to the ocean, we get a steady stream of readers looking for something light and enjoyable to bring to the beach. Whether it’s a breezy romance, fast-paced thriller, or witty novel, “beach reads” are in high demand during the summer, and we make a point to stay well-stocked on them.
Given the infinite text we can find on the internet, why are books still important?
There’s a tactile, immersive experience to reading a physical book — turning pages, marking favorite passages, setting it down on a nightstand. There’s a different kind of focus and connection that comes with holding a book. In our fast-paced, distraction-heavy world, reading invites us to slow down. Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape. One of the best parts of my job is helping people reconnect with that experience, or discover it for the first time.
Adam Aleksic has somehow managed to make linguistics cool. His rapid-fire videos have attracted an audience of millions across the social media universe.
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A Harvard graduate with a linguistics degree, he has now published a book called “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” which explores in depth some of his more fanciful and fascinating theories. We chatted with Aleksic about edutainment, brainrot and President Trump as influencer in chief.
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Author Adam Aleksic
(Adam Aleksic)
Did you get into linguistics because you wanted to explore online language?
I don’t think you can actually hope to fully be caught up with online language itself, as it’s mutating by the minute. The book is more of a road map of the general patterns we’re seeing. I personally got interested in etymology in ninth grade. I didn’t know I would be going into internet linguistics.
How do algorithms shape and change language on the web?
You can’t avoid talking about algorithms if you’re talking about modern language change. I’m looking at my own videos thinking, “Wow, I can’t say this specific word because of the algorithm. I have to say it another way.”
I use the example of the word “unalive” as a replacement for “kill.” That developed in English-language mental health spaces to circumvent platform community guidelines that were enforced by an algorithm used by Chinese government, which was then retooled for TikTok. Suddenly, “unalive” was all over the internet. Algorithms are creating new words.
In the book, you talk about context collapse, the notion that effective videos are designed to appear as if they are addressed directly to the user, even though they are, in fact, bringing in disparate users to a single focal point.
When you’re looking at a video on your For You page, you really think it’s for you. But it never is.
As a creator, I never think about individual people. I think about what’s going to go viral, but also, what do I want to make? I make the video first for myself, then I make it for the algorithm. Never do I consider the actual people that end up seeing the video.
Your phone is an extension of yourself. You perceive a message coming from your algorithmic version of yourself. The algorithm doesn’t actually align who my intended audience might be with who the actual audience is. It just sends my video to whatever makes the most money.
What about brainrot — the notion that the internet is damaging young people’s ability to think and reason. Does this apply to online language?
I think there’s no such thing as “brainrot” with words. They’ve done neurological studies. No word is worse for your brain than other words. Now, the other stuff, culturally, is another conversation. It probably is bad that these platforms are monopolizing our attention to sell us things. So I can say, linguistically, we’re fine.
Do you think the internet makes us smarter?
It’s an interesting question. What is “smarter”? I know that’s a hard thing to define. I think like with any tool, it can be true. Every tool has good and bad, right?
You talk about rage-baiting and hyperbole, or hype, as a tool to gain virality online. Our president is quite proficient at this tactic.
I think Trump’s language uniquely lends itself to virality. He has these phrasal templates, like “Make X Y Again,” or “This has been the greatest X in the history of Y.” People use his sentence structures as these skeletons, which they can remix. He coined “sad” as an interjection, which I regularly see my friends using. I don’t know how much of it is intentional. Maybe he just stumbled into it. But the fact of the matter is, I think we have Trump in office because he is uniquely suited to the internet.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Anna Wintour, longtime Vogue editor and chair of the Met Gala, recently announced that she would be stepping back from some of her duties at the iconic Condé Nast magazine.
Hamilton Cain calls “The Aviator and the Showman,” Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s joint biography of Amelia Earhart and her husband, “a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife’s career may have cost her life.”
According to Ilana Massad, Kashana Cauley’s novel “The Payback,” a satire about student loans, of all things, is a “terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.”
Valorie Castellanos Clark thinks fan fiction writer turned novelist Brigette Knightley’s debut novel “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy” is “proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
Hennessy + Ingalls bookstore serves those with a taste for the visual.
(Hennessy + Ingalls)
Today we are chatting with Carlos Chavez, a bookseller at Hennessey + Ingalls, a sprawling space in downtown L.A. that specializes in books about art, architecture, graphic design and all things visual.
What’s selling right now?
Because we are a speciality bookstore, sales are really across the board. Everyday it can be something different. Someone came in yesterday and bought a bunch of books featuring art from the painter and sculptor Claes Odenberg, for example. We also sell a lot of books on industrial design, and fashion designers have been buying books about shoes. The other day a prop designer came in and purchased books with red covers. It’s a mixed bag.
Art books can be very expensive. Why do you think there is still a market for them, despite the plenitude of images online?
There are still plenty of book lovers who want to hold a book, and they want to see it before they buy it. For many of our customers, books are a great source of artistic inspiration of the kind you just can’t find online. This is the kind of store where customers are free to linger for hours if they want to.
There has been a lot of social unrest downtown this year. How is the store coping?
Business has been up and down. Some days are better than others. I think people were scared to come out, but yesterday was a good day, for example.
Embeth Davidtz’s home is so quiet. Nestled in Brentwood Park, the 59-year-old actor’s spacious yet cozy place feels like a sanctuary, the skylight in her kitchen offering plentiful afternoon sun. Once owned by Julie Andrews, the house is where Davidtz feels most comfortable. It’s taken most of her life to find somewhere that made her feel that way.
“I seldom leave,” she says, smiling. “I’m not someone who likes to run around. I like being here.”
She’s lived in this house for about 20 years — it’s where she and her husband raised their children, now 22 and 19. She moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and before then, hers was a completely different world. Lately, that world has rarely been far from her thoughts.
In the early 1970s, when Davidtz was eight years old, she moved from America with her South African parents to Pretoria, in the midst of that country’s apartheid system. Long wanting to come to terms with the institutional racism she witnessed during her childhood, she has done something that previously had never held much interest: write and direct a movie. Pivoting from an on-screen career of stellar, precise performances in movies like “Schindler’s List,”“Junebug” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Davidtz has at last made a directorial debut with “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” (in theaters Friday), a gripping and somber drama based on Alexandra Fuller’s acclaimed 2001 memoir about growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film is about Fuller’s family, but it’s also very much about the lessons Davidtz never wants to stop learning herself.
“It’s a constant processing,” she says of how she is always reckoning with her past. “I think I’ll probably have to grapple with it till the day that I die — what I remember seeing.”
Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren in the movie “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
(Coco Van Oppens / Sony Pictures Classics)
Set in 1980, the year that the African region known as Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority, would become the independent nation of Zimbabwe, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” features Davidtz as Nicola, an angry, alcoholic policewoman whose privileged life crumbles as the Zimbabwean War upends the country’s racial power imbalance. However, the movie is not told from Nicola’s perspective but instead, from that of Bobo, her 8-year-old daughter (played with beguiling immediacy by newcomer Lexi Venter), who reflects Fuller’s own blinkered worldview at the time. As Bobo provides voice-over narration, we witness a disturbingly naturalized culture of colonialism in which our main character, a seemingly innocent child, bikes through town with a rifle slung on her back and parrots the racist attitudes espoused by white landowners around her.
Zimbabwe isn’t South Africa, but when Davidtz read Fuller’s stark memoir, the similarities of racial injustice were striking.
“She cuts you off at the knees,” says Davidtz. “You recognize it, then you feel shame.”
Davidtz was born in Indiana, but after some time in New Jersey, her family moved to Pretoria when she was eight. Her 17 years in South Africa left their mark. Even though she’d never written a screenplay before “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she had been working on something about her upbringing. But after reading Fuller’s memoir, Davidtz says, “I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s the definitive book on it. I’m never going to be able to write a book like that.’”
“I wouldn’t say mine was a happy childhood,” she continues. “I think it was very unhappy in ways. Did I love Africa? Yes. But was it an idyllic childhood? No.”
Bobo’s bigoted views — the girl has come to believe Black people don’t have last names and are secretly terrorists — weren’t what Davidtz experienced growing up. “My family didn’t act that same way, they didn’t speak that same way, but you were part of the system by being there,” she says.
Like Bobo’s family, Davidtz did not enjoy many luxuries, except in comparison to the help around her. “If you had servants in your home, you were part of the system,” she says. “[My parents] certainly were not out marching for civil rights. They fell in that gray area.”
Not that Davidtz excludes herself from the racist mindset that’s evident in Bobo, who enjoys spending time with her family’s housekeeper, Sarah (Zikhona Bali), despite treating her as beneath her. That relationship picked an emotional scab for Davidtz. “There’s uncomfortable memories that I have,” she admits. “I remember playing with [Black] children and being bossy and being just an a—hole.”
Her personal connection to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” goes deeper. Fuller’s mother was a drinker; in Davidtz’s family, it was her father, who studied applied mathematics and physics in the States. She sees his alcoholism as the byproduct of an idealism that got crushed.
“He was a physical chemist; he was a scientist,” she says, “and his whole thought was this altruistic thing of, ‘I’m going to take everything that I’ve learned and bring it back [to South Africa].’ That’s where the alcoholism emerged. That government that was running South Africa really tightly controlled everything that my father did. I think they were highly suspicious of somebody coming from America. He very much felt his wings were clipped. And so the bottle got raised.” (These days are happier ones for her dad: “He’s medicated; he’s calmer,” she says. “He doesn’t drink anymore.”)
“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” Davidtz says of her turn in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” as a racist farm owner in Rhodesia.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
Davidtz can’t quite pinpoint where her passion for performing originated. “No one else has it,” she says of her family. “I really think that 7-year-old me sat in my living room in New Jersey watching the ‘Sonny & Cher’ show. Cher with that hair was just the most glamorous, amazing thing I’d ever seen. And then, suddenly, we land in this dirty, dusty farmhouse with my dad in decline and no television.”
Davidtz escaped Pretoria — at least in her mind — by going to the movies, including an early, formative screening of “Doctor Zhivago,” David Lean’s 1965 historical romance. “My mind was blown by the sweep, the story, the epicness,” she recalls. “Maybe I wanted, somehow, to remove myself from that dirt and squalor and aspire to something.”
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” doesn’t contain the gratuitous violence you often see in films about racism. In its place is a codified class structure ruled by its white characters, who strongly encourage the locals to vote for approved candidates in the upcoming election in order to maintain the status quo. But once revolutionary Robert Mugabe comes to power, that old system gives way, leading to an unsettling scene in which Nicola wields a whip to keep Black Africans off what she considers to be her farm.
The questionable optics of a white woman telling a story about Zimbabwe entered Davidtz’s mind. She did her homework about the region, even though she ultimately had to shoot in South Africa because of Zimbabwe’s current political unrest. She spoke with her cinematographer, Willie Nel, about how the film had to look.
“I need the light shining through her eyes like that,” Davidtz remembers. “I want the closeup on the filthy fingernails. This is the way Peter Weir gets in super-close, how Malick [shows] skies and nature.” And she made sure to center her pessimistic coming-of-age narrative on the white characters, condemning them — including young Bobo.
“I don’t think a Black filmmaker could tell the experience of a white child,” she says. “I think only a white filmmaker could tell that. [Bobo] misunderstands a lot of what [the Black characters are] doing. That was deliberate — I tried to handle that really carefully. I’m certainly not trying to make the white child sympathetic in any way.”
She was just as adamant that Nicola be an utterly unlikable, virulent bigot. “You needed her to be diabolical in order to show what really was happening there,” says Davidtz. “I saw people behave like that.”
This isn’t the first time she’s played the villain, but she wanted to ensure there was nothing sympathetic or devilishly appealing about Nicola. Recalling her portrayal of the superficial, materialistic Mary Crawford in the 1999 adaptation of “Mansfield Park,” Davidtz observes, “She was just cheerfully going about her life — being diabolical, but with a smile. She was charming. That was more acceptable, more palatable.” She allowed none of that here, tapping into the desperation of a woman whose self-worth is wrapped up in the subjugation of those around her.
The veteran actress has often done terrific work by going small, her breakthrough coming as a Jewish maid prized by Ralph Fiennes’ sadistic Nazi in 1993’s “Schindler’s List.” More recently Davidtz has earned rave reviews in series like “Ray Donovan” and “The Morning Show.” She doesn’t do showy and she’s the same in person, appealingly modest and soft-spoken. But in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” she gives a boldly brazen performance as Nicola, a portrait of ugly, entitled hatred. Although Davidtz felt anxious playing such a demonstratively racist character — especially around her Black cast — she also found it a refreshing change from how she usually approaches a role.
“This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,” she says, Getting herself to such a dark place for “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” was easy, though. The trick? “I didn’t have time,” she says. “Everything was focused on only the three hours [a day] that I had with the kid. It was like, ‘I got to get this quick,’ and I was on my last nerve, which was great for the character — I was pretty worn down by the time we shot a lot of my stuff.”
“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” Davidtz says of injustices occurring both in America and abroad. The actor and director is photographed at home with her two rescue dogs, Parfait (front) and Zoomie.
(Matt Seidel / For The Times)
Similarly to “The Zone of Interest,” which Davidtz reveres (“I love that film,” she declares, awed), “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” illustrates the insidiousness of bigotry by stripping away the simplistic moralizing. Bobo, her parents and the other white settlers benefit from an unjust system, always presented matter-of-factly, as the adults relish their domestic bliss at the expense of the indentured locals. I ask Davidtz if she’s showing us what everyday evil looks like.
“Evil’s a strong word,” she replies. “I’d say ‘oblivious’ or ‘unconscious’ or ‘culpable.’ It’s all of the above. I really wanted to reveal something the way ‘The Zone of Interest’ revealed something. It’s the casual racism. An ordinary person watching [the film] goes, ‘Oh, my God, that was normal to them. That was their normal.’ Then you see the full picture. Then, the evil of it shows up.”
In her memoir, author Fuller writes about her later political awakening, a process Davidtz underwent as well. “I saw moments around me — horrible, violent police arresting men on the streets, the people chucked into the back of police vans,” she says. “Just that terrified feeling inside and knowing, ‘If you’re white, you’re safe. If you’re Black, you’re not.’ Then as I got older, [there was] the disconnect between what I’m seeing and what is right.”
According to Davidtz, “the scales fell off” once she attended South Africa’s liberal Rhodes University in the early 1980s and started taking part in protest marches. “I felt like that was the big awakening,” she says, “but it’s an awakening that continues.”
There is one frequent sound in the calm oasis of Davidtz’s home: the chatter of news broadcasts. “It’s often on in the background,” she says, “but I think it’s a habit that’s eroding my peace of mind.” She admits to the same conflicted feelings many in Los Angeles have, a desire to stay informed of everything that’s happening — the ongoing war in Gaza, the stories out of Ukraine, the violent ICE raids in Southern California — but not succumb to despair and anger. No amount of quiet can tune out the world, and Davidtz doesn’t want to.
“When you’ve been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,” she says of the injustices occurring both here and abroad. “One thing that we can do is say what we think.” Remembering her own childhood, and pondering what prompted her to make this movie, she suggests, “I think it comes from watching something silently for a long time. I think that part of me will never want to not say, ‘I don’t think this is right.’”
With “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Davidtz is speaking up, but she knows those bad old days aren’t over. In fact, they’ve never been so present. As the film ends, Bobo takes one last look at the town and the locals that shaped her. There’s a glimmer of hope that, one day, this girl will outgrow the racism she’s ingested. But the land — and the pain — remains. Davidtz has not allowed herself to look away.
Helen Schulman is not afraid to make you squirm. Across her long and distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer, she has fearlessly explored the awkward collisions between our private and public selves, between what we present to the world and what we conceal from even our closest companions. Her 2011 best-selling novel “This Beautiful Life” dared to plunge headfirst into the shark-infested waters of the internet while most of us were still basking in the glow of the web’s shiny benevolence. “Fools For Love,” her latest collection of stories, finds Schulman’s characters weighing the past against the present, looking for redemption in the wrong places and occasionally coming up roses.
My own artistic hope is to go as long as I can. I live to write!
— Helen Schulman
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Helen Schulman’s new story collection, “Fools For Love,” hits bookshelves this July.
(Knopf)
When it comes to ideas, what becomes a short story and what becomes a novel?
A lot of my ideas spring forward from something Henry James called the “germ” — the bit of overheated gossip, the newspaper article, an eavesdropped conversation on a public bus, a story told by other parents when you are both pushing toddlers on the swings in a playground, which injects itself into the writerly imagination and grows — often over large swaths of time. Sometimes these obsessions entangle, too. That’s what happened in [my story] “The Revisionist.” My husband had a college buddy over for dinner who told us this story about a friend of his who was walking home from work when a strange man ran into his own house and slammed the door in his face. Why? What? Who? The reality was somewhat pedestrian — the intruder was a drunken next-door neighbor, who I guess had overshot. But the anecdote stuck with me.
For some of your characters, the past is ever-present — they are fated to live with the sum of their choices, and it engenders a lot of regret. Can you speak to that?
My all-time favorite writer is William Faulkner. You must be familiar with his quote from the novel “Requiem for a Nun”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I sometimes feel this way about existence in general, like each and every moment in a lifetime is somehow equal, and that as one ages the moments accrue and tag along wherever one goes. Certainly in my own life I don’t sweat my big choices; I’m happy about them. I think a person does the best they can with what they know at the time. But I’m infinitely curious about what could have happened instead.
There is a lot of status anxiety in your work— not just financial status, but marriage, career — the things you think will align pleasingly in middle age but often don’t.
My husband and I are both working writers. The marriage works; the financial status has gone in and out. I’m not sure I always looked to middle age as a time of “pleasing alignment,” but I also didn’t think the world would be as effed up as it is now. Some of my characters get older and wiser; some are just more wrinkled, taller kids. But there is a lot of endurance over time in these stories — love, friendship, workplace passions. I would venture to say that most of my characters have real lives, and some very real satisfactions within the stresses that inevitably go along with them.
There are also secrets in your stories. Are we as sick as our secrets, or are they simply unavoidable?
Everyone has secrets. In “The Revisionist,” the protagonist even keeps secrets from himself. One of my closest friends, after the death of her parents, found out that one was married before and that the other had two other children with someone else. Now everyone is dead, and so we don’t even know if the spouses knew this about each other. There is nothing pedestrian about “ordinary lives.” We all roil and we all excite. I feel like one of my jobs as a fiction writer is to dive down beneath the surface.
In the story “My Best Friend,” there is a shocking act of violence. Why did you take it in that direction?
That story is about two men, one an up-and-coming-actor and the other a want-to-be novelist, who fall into a deep brotherhood while sleeping with the same woman. In fact, they each marry her — sequentially, of course. At some point, the friendship goes south; the protagonist, Jake, and Jeannie, the woman, have kids together and his career dries up. The first husband, Phil, becomes a very successful TV showrunner and producer. Out of pity, he hires Jake to be a character in one of his nighttime soaps. Jake starts to become an audience favorite, and Phil tortures the character on the series. All their pent up homoerotic attachments and jealousies explode in a “manly” brawl, which I see as tragicomedic, at the end of the story. The love story is theirs, after all.
Kurt Vonnegut has a quote about, when one reaches advanced middle age, life becomes an epilogue. That is a hard thing to carry. Do you feel that this is the case? I guess I’m thinking about your story “In a Better Place,” which revisits the characters from the book’s titular story in old age.
No, honestly I don’t. That story is really about the celebration of long love between the couple at the heart of the story, its healing powers and sustaining comforts. What may make this all feel epilogue-y to you (not a word, I know) is because these two people feel happy and fulfilled by their marriage. … My own artistic hope is to go as long as I can. I live to write!
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Charlie English spotlights the CIA’s use of literature to fight communism during the Cold War in his latest book.
(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)
Valerie Castellanos Clark weighs in on Charlie English’s “The CIA Book Club,” about how Polish citizens fought Russian communism with books. “As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win … but how English gets us there is exciting,” Clark writes.
Leigh Haber raves on Amy Bloom’s latest novel “I’ll Be Right Here.” “As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career,” writes Haber, “she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime.”
Jim Ruland calls Megan Abbott’s latest thriller, “El Dorado Drive,” a novel for our present age of anxiety, propelled by Abbott’s masterful narrative drive and her skill at “rendering the hot, messy inner lives of young people.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
Ken Concepcion, owner of Now Serving, tells us what’s been flying off the shelves at his Chinatown bookstore that specializes in cookbooks.
(Shelby Moore / For The Times)
This week we are perusing the shelves at Now Serving, a cozy bookshop devoted to the culinary arts and located on the ground floor of Chinatown’s Far East Plaza. Co-owner Ken Concepcion gives us the scoop on the hot goods.
What food trend are customers excited about right now?
Being that we are in L.A., there has always been a demand for vegetarian and vegan titles. The interest in plant-based cookbooks that delve into specific cuisines such as Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican and Japanese has definitely grown over the years, and the diversity of voices has been wonderful to see. There needs to be better representation for Ecuadorian, Guatemalan and other Central and South American cuisines as well — there is a real demand for it.
Why do you think cookbooks are still important, despite the ubiquity of recipes online?
As with anything that you can find online, recipes are no different. There are thousands upon thousands available. Most of them are copycat recipes. We think cookbooks are still unparalleled in that they can deliver a narrative, historical context and incredible imagery and stunning design in a world that is more reliant on technology than ever. Cookbooks at best are functional objects of art that can be then passed down from generation to generation. They can often become keepsakes, time capsules and family heirlooms.
In this week’s newsletter, we have a chat with Susan Gubar, whose new book, “Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists,” profiles seven creators who found a second wind in their advancing years. We also look at recent releases reviewed in The Times. And a local bookseller tells us what’s selling right now.
Seventeen years ago, Susan Gubar was handed a death sentence. A distinguished professor emerita of English and women’s studies at Indiana University and the co-author (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of 1979’s “The Madwoman in the Attic,” a groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gubar in 2008 was staring down a terminal cancer diagnosis. A clinical trial involving an experimental drug prolonged her life and gave her the impetus to tackle a new project about seven artists — George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Lou Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks and Katherine Dunham — who entered a new phase of creative ferment and productivity as they grew older.
I talked to Gubar about her new book, the myth of old age and the persistent stereotypes attached to female artists who may be perceived as having outlived their usefulness as creators.
Any sort of creative activity involves expression, which is a great antidote to depression.
— Susan Gubar on why she writes
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
“Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists” by Susan Gubar
(W. W. Norton)
Can you talk about how the book came about?
In 2008, I was told that I had 3-5 years to live with late-stage ovarian cancer. The standard treatment was ineffectual. But then in 2012, my oncologist encouraged me to enroll in a clinical trial that was experimenting with a new drug. After nine years in the trial, she then urged me to take “a drug holiday” since long-term use of the medication could cause leukemia. I am still on that holiday. An unanticipated old age made me appreciate the wonderful gifts longevity can bestow.
In researching your subjects, what do they all share in common?
All of my subjects are artists who experienced the losses of aging. They needed canes and wheelchairs and helpers while they suffered the pains of various diseases and regimens. One coped with blindness, another with deafness and still others with the loss of intimates. Yet in the face of such deficits, they used their art to exhibit their audacity, mojo, chutzpah, bravado. They’re exemplars of Geezer Machismo.
All of your subjects are women, who have a much tougher time in terms of earning respect and attention as they age. Can you speak to the obstacles they had to overcome as they reinvented themselves as artists in their advanced years?
The stereotypical old lady is invisible or risible, but we know that many elderly women thrive. My old ladies did not approach their life stories as prime-and-decline narratives. Instead they reinvented themselves. In part, they managed to do this by changing their objectives as artists. They moved from the stage to the page or from elite to popular forms. Some of them underwent religious or political conversions that energized their last years. They fully understood the losses of old age, but they did not settle for less. Instead, they made much of less.
What’s interesting about these artists is that — contrary, I must admit, to what I thought would have been the case — these women were supported by men who became their benefactors, and helped them to negotiate their careers.
Quite a few of the women that I write about were helped by much younger men in their lives, who became facilitators. This is true for George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeoise, Mary Lou Williams and others. Williams, the great jazz pianist, was helped by a Jesuit named Father O’Brien, who helped her get control of her copyrights. Georgia O’Keeffe, in contrast, has been championed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but she had to leave him in her midlife to establish her autonomy late in life. He was very controlling, even though he definitely established her reputation. She was aided in her later years by a man young enough to be her grandson.
You are an octogenarian, and writing a book isn’t easy, as you know. Where do you find the inspiration and the strength to keep going as a creator?
What keeps me going is what kept my subjects flourishing in their seventies, eighties or nineties. Any sort of creative activity involves expression, which is a great antidote to depression. It may take the form of sculpting, painting, playing an instrument, teaching a dance routine, making a quilt or a garden, establishing a park or a prize, you name it. Without my two current writing projects, I’d be lost. Even (or maybe especially) in our dismal political climate, ongoing creative projects make each day an adventure.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Paula L. Woods writes about five crime novels to read this summer and their authors reveal the writers who inspire them.
(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)
Leigh Haber weighs in on Jess Walter’s book “So Far Gone,” calling the author a “slyly adept social critic [who has] clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken.”
Daniel Felsenthal thinks Geoff Dyer’s memoir “Homework” is somewhat meandering, yet “bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state.”
And Paula L. Woods talked to five mystery writers about the inspirations for their new books.
📖 Bookstore Faves
Chevalier’s Books in the neighborhood of Larchmont in Los Angeles, April 10, 2024.
We’ve been moving Percival Everett’s “James” and Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness” hand over fist. Thanks to BookTok, Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter” has become a mainstay on our bestseller list. We also had the honor of hosting Bryan Byrdlong for a reading from his debut poetry collection “Strange Flowers,” and we’ve been handselling it right and left ever since.
What are your perennial sellers?
Kaya Doi’s series of picture books, “Chirri and Chirra,” is a smash hit around here. Joan Didion and bell hooks are reliable customer favorites as well. As an indie shop, though, we love the deeper cuts too — whether that’s “Água Viva,” literally any Yoko Ogawa work or something from our zine collection.
Are you seeing more young people buying books?
Despite all the reports about declining literacy rates among young folk, our children’s section makes up a quarter of our sales. We really try to carve out a space for the next generation of readers with programs like storytime, a middle-grade book club and summer-reading punch cards. To us, messy shelves are annoying everywhere except the kids’ section!
Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West
By Kelly Ramsey Scribner: 338 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Fire changes whatever it encounters. Burns it, melts it, sometimes makes it stronger. Once fire tears through a place, nothing is left the same. Kelly Ramsey wasn’t thinking of this when she joined the U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew known as the Rowdy River Hotshots — she just thought fighting fires would be a great job.
But fire changed her too.
In her memoir, “Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West,” Ramsey takes us through two years of fighting wilderness fires in the mountains of Northern California. She wrote the book before January’s deadly Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, and what she encountered in the summers of 2020 and 2021 was mostly forests burning, not city neighborhoods. But at the time, the fires she and her fellow crewmen fought (and they were all men that first year) were the hottest, fastest, biggest fires California had ever experienced.
“My first real year in fire had been a doozy, not just for me but my beloved California: 4.2 million acres burned,” she writes, in the “worst season the state had endured in over a hundred years.” That included the state’s first gigafire — more than 1 million acres burned in Northern California.
The job proved to be the hardest thing she’d ever done, but something about fire compelled her. “At the sight of a smoke column, most people feel a healthy hitch in their breath and want to run the other way,” she writes. “But all I wanted to do was run toward the fire.”
Ramsey’s memoir covers a lot of ground, skillfully. She learns that being in good shape isn’t enough — she has to be in incredible shape. She learns how to work with a group of men who are younger, stronger and more experienced than she is, and she figures out how to find that line between never complaining and standing up for herself in the face of inappropriate behavior.
She also writes about the changes in her own life during that time: coming to terms with her alcoholic, homeless father; pondering her lousy record for romantic relationships; searching for an independence and peace she had never known.
“It wasn’t fire that was hard; it was ordinary life,” she concludes.
Sometimes her struggles with ordinary life threaten to take over the narrative, but while they humanize her, they are not the most interesting part of this book. What resonates instead is fire and all that it entails — the burning forest and the hard, mind-numbing work of the Hotshots. They work 14 days on, two days off, all summer and fall, sometimes 24-hour shifts when things are bad. They sleep rough, dig ditches, build firebreaks, set controlled burns, take down dead trees and, in between, experience moments of terrifying danger.
Readers of John Vaillant’s harrowing 2023 book “Fire Weather” — an account of the destruction of the Canadian forest town of Fort McMurray — might consider Ramsey’s book a companion to the earlier book. “Wildfire Days” is not as sweeping or scientific; it’s more personal and entertaining. It’s the other side of the story, the story of the people who fight the blaze.
Ramsey’s gender is an important part of this book; as a woman, she faces obstacles men do not. It’s harder to find a discreet place to relieve herself; she must deal with monthly periods; and, at first, she is the weakest and slowest of the Hotshots. “Thought you trained this winter,” one of the guys tells her after an arduous training hike leaves her gasping for breath. “I did,” she said.
“Thinking you shoulda trained a little harder, huh,” he said.
But over time she grows stronger, more capable, and more accepted. In the second year, when another woman joins the crew, Ramsey is torn between finally being “one of the guys” and supporting, in solidarity, a woman — but a woman whose work is substandard and whose attitude is whiny.
“Was I only interested in ‘diversity’ on the crew if it looked like me?” she asks herself. “Had I clawed out a place for myself, only to pull up the ladder behind me?”
But competence is crucial in this dangerous job, and substandard work can mean deadly accidents.
For centuries, natural wildfires burned dead trees and undergrowth in California, keeping huge fires in check. White settlers threw things out of whack.
“The Indigenous people of California were (and still are) expert fire keepers,” Ramsey writes. “Native burning mimicked and augmented natural fire, keeping the land park like and open.”
But in the 20th century, humans suppressed fires and forests became overgrown. “Cut to today,” she writes. “Dense forests are primed to burn hotter and faster than ever before.”
Ramsey’s descriptions of the work and the fires are the strongest parts of the book.
“We could hear the howl — like the roar of a thousand lions, like a fleet of jet engines passing overhead — the sound of fire devouring everything,“ Ramsey writes.
Later, she drives through a part of the forest that burned the year before to see “mile upon mile of carbonized trees and denuded earth, a now-familiar scene of extinguished life.”
But she also notes that the burned areas are already beginning to green up. “New life tended to spring from bitterest ash,” she writes.
“The forest wouldn’t grow back the same, but it wouldn’t stop growing,” she observes earlier.
There is a metaphor here. Ramsey’s memoir is a moving, sometimes funny story about destruction, change and rebirth, told by a woman tempered by fire.
Hertzel’s second memoir, “Ghosts of Fourth Street,” will be published in 2026. She teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia and lives in Minnesota.
