Great Reads

Beneath this small farm town at the end of what's left of the Kings River, the ground is sinking.

It could be headaches, infertility, sorrow or bad luck. In New Kru Town, where the afflictions of the poor are plenty, there was always work for a prayer warrior like Dorothy Sawer.

Imagine getting paid to make bacon jewelry, build a nacho cheese hot tub, cover lawn chairs in sod.

Andy Phan sauntered up to a pingpong table about 7 a.m. at the senior center in Monterey Park. Quickly, he shooed away two other players.

Luisa Hilario's ponytail swings from side to side as she races for the train.

After hand-finishing the stainless-steel case of one of his timepieces in a whirring industrial polisher, watchmaker Cameron Weiss carefully submerged it in an ultrasonic cleaning tank.

For four years, the little girl lay in an unmarked grave beneath the low hum of high-voltage lines — a buzzing lullaby.

The Ukrainian special forces sergeant jumped into the front seat of Alexander Kosenko's white minibus with two Kalashnikovs slung over his shoulders, his vest stuffed with a dozen ammo clips, some hand grenades and a couple of machete-size daggers.

June Patti had a hunger to be heard.

The excitement had been building all day. On election day 2008, every TV in the prison was tuned to the news.

Graciela Villanueva should have been hosting a victory party on election night, celebrating a successful run for school board in this verdant valley of apples and wine grapes, peaches and hops.

On a mural-lined corner of Echo Park, a dozen people gather around a tricycle painted a summery yellow. But even more eye-catching than the color is its main feature: a triple-decker shelf filled with books.

The phone call that changed Police Chief Kevin Murphy's life came late on a Friday afternoon last year: The mayor of this cordial Southern capital asked him to greet a delegation arriving the next morning from Washington.

Eminem's "The Monster" ricocheted off the cinder-block walls and worn linoleum floor at Sylmar's Juvenile Hall.

The grandmother sat outside in her Sunday best next to a house with peeling paint, her canned iced tea resting on top of a washing machine that didn't work. She'd been without running water for four months.

Here on the fertile edge of the Taklimakan Desert, people have long believed that placing a knife on their bedside keeps away bad dreams. On a baby's seventh day of life, it's tradition for parents to briefly slip a blade under the sleeping infant's head to guarantee a long and...

The prayer room in the 12th century mosque had the feel of a bachelor pad — cups of tea and coffee and half-full ashtrays covered most surfaces. A lanky teenager named Hussein Mansour plopped himself down and placed a grenade and a small bag of pretzels on the table.

Gerrick Miller tugged on a blue tarp to shade his pit bull puppies from the sun blasting their plywood pen.

The doctor's phone rang. It was another request for his expertise.

They sit at a table near the bar, the three farmer's daughters and their boisterous friend, all of them single, in their 40s and 50s. With Johnny Cash on the jukebox, their cocktails before them, they're ready for an action-packed Saturday night.

Sal Perricone always had something to prove. Growing up poor and Italian in a city dominated by Creoles and Anglos, Perricone found respect on the streets after high school by becoming a cop. He pulled graveyard shifts to put himself through college and eventually took night classes to earn...

The Chinese engineers passed by Antonio Cardenas' dusty plot of land the other day. They didn't say anything to him. They never do.

Jerald Rice typed his wife's name into an Internet search engine. A series of unsettling stunts had perplexed him.

When Silvia Padilla was pregnant with her second daughter, she and her husband, Marvin Varela, hatched a plan that broke their hearts: They would go to America and leave their girls behind.

The pastor walked the streets of Lower Manhattan, his hands trembling. A day earlier, he'd been stripped of his ministry, defrocked by the United Methodist Church for presiding over his gay son's wedding. He was afraid he'd never lead a church again.

At first blush, Zhang Wei hardly seems like the kind of guy who cares about the social justice issues of the factory floor.

Henry Kornman's window looks like one at a ticket office, with a metal grille to speak through and an opening for papers to be passed. People jot down their names with a pencil affixed to a plastic spoon and patiently wait to be summoned.

On a cluttered card table at a Westside estate sale, Sandy Marks spotted an antique silver trophy. It was a large bowl, so deeply tarnished that she struggled to read the inscription:

Groceryships is about healthful food, but for participants, the conversation goes much further: 'This class has helped me put my fears up front and look at them.'

Ildiko Tabori has never stood on a stage trying to make strangers laugh, doesn't write jokes and admits that she's not great at telling them. Trying to recount something clever she heard, she makes advance apologies: "I'm not going to do it justice."

A Times photojournalist catches up with a young Honduran who rode freight trains alone to the U.S. 14 years ago.

Afternoon descends on the piney woods of East Texas with a heat that clings to your skin, the air so thick you have to work at drawing a full breath.

The remarkable thing when this tiny nation legalized same-sex marriage in June wasn't that the conservative-leaning prime minister, Xavier Bettel, supported the new law.