Home again home again, jiggity jig

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Wind turbines near Palm Springs, Calif. Photo by Carolyn Kellogg

Driving east from Arizona on the 10, I thought about Tod Goldberg, writing books and blogging in the neighborhood of Palm Springs. I thought about Marisa Silver’s new novel, ‘The God of War,’ set at the nearby Salton Sea. I thought about all the literary features of the California desert I might learn about, yet I kept driving. Los Angeles was too close; I couldn’t resist its pull.

I arrived just in time for Book Expo, a cornucopia of literariness overflowing the boundaries of the convention walls (all the way to Prince’s house). It was impossible for one person to see everything, which is why I’m glad that John Fox was out there with the Red Fence video crew, interviewing Kelly Link, Eli Horowitz and someone dressed up in an old-timey dress to promote a book. And that Boris Kacha was hobnobbing with porn star turned bestselling author Ron Jeremy for New York magazine, that some people actually went to the panels, that John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton were spotted together (Galleycat got a photo), that Sherman Alexie and Neil Gaiman can be heard together in this podcast and that Laura Miller brought her perspective on the current state of the publishing industry.

Now it’s time to get my books unpacked and introduce them to my BEA-acquired advance copies.

Carolyn Kellogg