Monday, May 14 2012
Eli Broad, proudly ‘Unreasonable’
For more than half a century, Eli Broad has taken inspiration from a paperweight on his desk, a gift from his wife, Edythe, that has…
Author Victor Villasenor tracks difficult journeys
In his best-selling book “Rain of Gold,” Victor Villasenor chronicles the lives of his parents from their early days growing up in Mexico, through the…
Biographer C. David Heymann told titillating tales about the rich, famous
LOS ANGELES — C. David Heymann, a bestselling biographer whose titillating accounts of famous lives often were criticized as inaccurate or dishonest, including a book…
Charlaine Harris, living and dying in Bon Temps
You could start a holy war by attempting to proclaim any one author the “queen” of vampire fiction. Yet whether they like their vampires cute…
Friday, May 11 2012
Alain Mabanckou’s wry novels are finally being translated for U.S. audiences
In a UCLA classroom one day not long ago, Alain Mabanckou was teaching a course in post-colonial African fiction, which he instructs in his French…
Jonathan Franzen senses our interpersonal separation and encourages engagement
I didn’t much like Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Farther Away” when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a…
Thursday, May 10 2012
Why does James Patterson care about our kids’ reading habits?
PALM BEACH, Fla. — He is one of the most successful writers in the world, so he knows how to grab attention, but then that’s…
Gregg Allman bares and shares in new memoir
ATLANTA — It’s fitting that Gregg Allman had to alter some dates on his book signing tour because of a health scare. After experiencing arrhythmia,…
Nothing’s black and white with the mommy porn of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
Black and blue is the new black. Or so you might conclude, given the surge in popularity of the bondage romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,”…
Monday, May 7 2012
The B-word has cameos all over television
LOS ANGELES — Last year, when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals curtailed the Federal Communications Commission’s powers to punish networks for “fleeting expletives,” many…
