Books: A dancer, a thriller, the birth of a museum and more
Welcome to books this week! I’m Los Angeles Times Books Editor Carolyn Kellogg with the news of what we’ve got for you, and more.
THE BIG ESSAY
Back when David Kipen — now one of our critics at large — was director of literature at the NEA, he met a man with a crazy idea: a museum dedicated to authors and writing. Kipen recalls that meeting, and considers how we think about what culture belongs where, on the occasion of the opening of the American Writers Museum in Chicago. (He hasn’t been yet; if you have, let me know!)
BOOK REVIEWS
“Isadora” is not a history of the famous dancer Isadora Duncan; it’s a biographical novel. “Amelia Gray’s prose is ideally suited to writing this particular life,” explains Ellie Robins. “As seen in her previous novel, ‘Threats,’ and, particularly, her last short story collection, ‘Gutshot,’ her writing has a carnivorous intensity.” Read the review.
George Orwell was a novelist and journalist; Winston Churchill was England’s prime minister. The two never met. So why has Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, put the two together in his new book, “Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom”? It has something to do with their emergence from near-anonymity, the times that shaped them, and the way their core beliefs — if different — had common ground. Mary Ann Gwinn has our review.
THRILLING
The main character in Dennis Lehane’s new thriller, “Since We Fell,” Rachel Childs, is a journalist whose mother refuses to tell her who her father is. I asked Lehane how being a parent has affected how he thinks about the dynamics between parents and children. “It’s all I think about,” he told me. “As a parent, you live with this terrible knowledge that you fail all the time, and a lot of times in ways you can’t even see.” Read our interview.
POP
Chuck Klosterman’s writing about pop culture includes Guns N’ Roses, Taylor Swift, Kobe Bryant and much more, and it’s collected in the new book “Chuck Klosterman X.” Jim McLaughlin asks him, “Is Kobe Bryant the loneliest man on Earth?” The answer is in our interview.
BESTSELLERS
“The Girl on the Train” was a massive international hit; now Paula Hawkins is making her mark with her follow-up, “Into the Water,” which debuts at No. 1 on our fiction bestseller list this week. “In all my stories, I want to write about ordinary people in kind of extraordinary circumstances,” she told The Times. “People whose lives are just going along quite normally and then something suddenly goes wrong.”
NEWS
Author George R.R. Martin has a pile of pilots in development with HBO connected to “Game of Thrones” — and it’s been hard for him to find time to work on “The Winds of Winter.” Also for HBO, Matt Ruff’s novel “Lovecraft Country” is being adapted as a series by Jordan Peele, the comedian who wrote and directed the breakout horror hit “Get Out.” A book recommendation from Bill Gates can make an instant bestseller. McDonald’s is giving away books in Happy Meals again — but only in Canada. And here at home, Amazon will be opening its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in L.A. — Amazon Books is slated to go into a 5,227-square foot space at Westfield Century City mall.
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