‘Bad Nature’ spins a comic tale full of grievance and wit: review
Book Review Bad Nature By Ariel CourageHenry Holt and Co.: 304 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a…
‘Expert of Subtle Revisions’ review: History, language aren’t neutral
Book Review The Expert of Subtle Revisions By Kirsten Menger-AndersonCrown: 256 pages, $28If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a…
Joseph Wambaugh, cop-turned-best-selling-author, dies at 88
Before Joseph Wambaugh came along, the unofficial bard of the Los Angeles Police Department was Jack Webb, whose unsmiling Sgt. Joe Friday peppered every episode…
HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’: John Lithgow to star as Dumbledore
It seems John Lithgow spilled the (Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor) beans about his involvement in HBO’s upcoming “Harry Potter” series. The Oscar-nominated “Terms of Endearment”…
10 promising books to add to your reading list in February
February arrives after a tough January for Los Angeles and its environs; if you haven’t been reading much, it’s understandable. Perhaps a few of the…
David Lodge dead: British author and Booker nominee was 89
LONDON — David Lodge, a witty and prolific British novelist and critic who gently satirized academia, religion and even his own loss of hearing in such…
10 promising books to add to your reading list in January
Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles — fiction and nonfiction — to consider for your January reading list.Each of us approaches a new year…
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Netflix series team took creative risks
When Colombian director Laura Mora was first approached about joining the team tasked with adapting Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” into…
Author Cormac McCarthy’s ‘secret muse’ reveals herself
Great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensively private and didn’t share much about the inspiration behind his books — or about himself. However, the author,…
USC’s Percival Everett wins National Book Award for ‘James’
Percival Everett has won the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s classic “Huckleberry Finn.”Published in March to…
I hope reality is catching up to my fiction about a female president
When I was 19 years old, in the early 1980s, I started writing a novel about the daughter of the first female United States president.…
How does Robert Downey Jr. fare in his Broadway debut?
NEW YORK — A friend texted soon after I arrived in New York to see “McNeal,” the new play by Ayad Akhtar at Lincoln Center Theater’s…
Heather Thomas: How a TV star evolved into a behind-the-scenes politico
Heather Thomas arrived at a Santa Monica restaurant and ordered a cheeseburger and a margarita — “top shelf tequila,” she whispered to the waiter. It…
Jill Schary Robinson, writer and mom of UTA’s Jeremy Zimmer, dies
Jill Schary Robinson, a novelist, memoirist, essayist and journalist who was also daughter to one Hollywood executive and mother to another one, died Saturday in…
‘Lady in the Lake’ centers the women at the core of the story
The seeds of “Lady in the Lake” were planted in 1969 with the disappearances and deaths of an 11-year-old Jewish girl and a 33-year-old Black…
The 1999 novel that predicted our (traumatic, relentlessly bleak) future
South African author J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning ‘Disgrace’ stacks crisis atop crisis — and depicts its characters learning to live with it anyway. Sound familiar?…
It’s time to invite Sean Baker to the Oscars
You’d think hearing a single word read 34 times would get a little repetitive. And yet ... Newsletter From the Oscars to the Emmys. Get…
The novel ‘Old King’ explores the meaning of ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski today
Book Review Old King By Maxim LoskutoffNorton: 304 pages, $27.99If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org,…
Opinion: The ideal beach read? It’s not what you’d expect
I’ve been a reader for nearly all of my life, yet I always feel perplexed at the beginning of summer, when the term “beach reads”…
Why do books have chapters? How writing changed from antiquity to children’s books and streaming
Nicholas Dames remembers the first time he really got thinking about a very obvious but largely invisible writing device.It was around two decades ago, when…