From the monthly archives:
Can you feel the links tonight? By now you’re all sick of hearing me go on and on about Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gang Leader for a Day, but you’ll have to endure at least one more post on the subject. Slate’s Alex Kotlowitz has been debating the book with Venkatesh. So far, they’ve gotten into [...]
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Surfing around the interwebs yesterday afternoon, we came across this video of a performance by the local band Jean Paul Yamamoto from our “The Edge” Summer Music and Author Series. Jean Paul Yamamoto was paired with author James St. James, who read from his book Freak Show. (You might know James St. James as the [...]
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Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, one of the saddest, heaviest books I’ve ever read has an interesting piece in Slate today about why Russian tennis players are so attractive. To say it’s a bit of an about face for her would be an understatement, but she does offer an interesting theory: To put [...]
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Last Friday I posted a link to a review of Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children. Suffice to say that novel has blown up. Beautiful Children reaches bookstores today (and Bock will be at Vroman’s on February 22) but the media blitz has already begun. Bock was the subject of a major writeup in Sunday’s [...]
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A couple years ago, I walked into The Arclight movie theatre here in Hollywood, to catch a small indie flick that was generating a ton of ‘buzz’ in the local and national media; entertainment media in particular. The film in question, Brokeback Mountain, had originally been penned as a short story by Annie Proulx, winner [...]
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It’s a miracle I’m here today, since it’s raining outside, and everyone knows that Southern California comes to a standstill whenever it rains. But here I am, and here are a couple of quick things to get you a head start on the weekend: The LA Times reviews Michael Shermer’s new book, The Mind of [...]
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Last night, folks braved the wind and rain to hear Sudhir Venkatesh discuss his book Gang Leader for a Day. I was one of them…OK, so I was already here, but you get the point. Venkatesh came to national prominence after his story was told in the runaway bestseller Freakonomics. While working on a PhD [...]
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The Academy Award Nominations were announced this morning, and three prominent literary adaptations led the way in the Best Picture category. No Country for Old Men, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, and There Will Be Blood, a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! earned eight nominations each, while Atonement, adapted [...]
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We’re a little late on it, but the National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists have been announced. The major surprise was Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, a book that adorned many Top 10 lists in 2007 and won the National Book Award for fiction, wasn’t nominated. Joyce Carol Oates was nominated in both fiction and [...]
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As I mentioned yesterday, our President, Allison Hill, was lucky enough to attend the Beijing Book Fair as part of the American and British delegation of booksellers put together by Book Expo’s Lance Fensterman. Now that she’s back stateside and recovered from jet lag, she agreed to sit down with me and discuss her experiences. [...]
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