Meghan Daum has made a career of mining her life with candor to explore larger points about our culture in essays, books and opinion columns for the Los Angeles Times. "My Misspent Youth" describes how she racked up $80,000 in debt in her 20s. In "Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That...
Book Reviews
What to Read
More Reviews
-
Lydia Millet's new novel, "Mermaids in Paradise" (W.W. Norton: 290 pp., $25.95), operates on a variety of levels, from parody to romance to (in its own way) oddball thriller, tracing a couple on their honeymoon who get embroiled in high-stakes drama after they discover actual mermaids...
-
Twenty-two years ago, Michael Connelly introduced the world to Harry Bosch, a determined cop with a haunted past and a heart of gold. Bosch was an old soul at the start of "Black Echo," a homicide detective in his early 40s with an infamous, colorful career and two tours in Vietnam to boot....
-
In the preface to "One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War," Bing West announces that "this is my sixth and final book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." If so, West has clearly left the best for last: a gripping, boot-level account of Marines in Afghanistan during the bloody...
-
George Clinton's memoir features aliens, spaceships, George W. Bush, grown men wearing diapers and platform shoes, and a wealth of stories about some of the seminal music Clinton and his collaborators in the Parliament-Funkadelic collective have made during the past 30 years. It also features...
-
Among the many remarkable aspects of designer Elsa Schiaparelli's remarkable life — she became a world-famous couturier without knowing how to sew, collaborated on sartorial projects with Surrealists like Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, raised her daughter alone at a time when this was...
-
Kekla Magoon's riveting postmortem account of a tragic shooting is as familiar a scenario in contemporary urban YA fiction as it has been in recent national headlines. "How It Went Down" opens seconds after a white bystander, Jack Franklin, guns down African American teen Tariq Johnson after...
-
Assaf Gavron's 2010 novel "Almost Dead" does something I would have thought impossible — it makes satire out of terrorism. The story of a man who becomes an Israeli national hero after surviving three attacks in a single week, the book offers a sharply ironic look at the intersection of...
-
Amy Poehler has written a book. Called "Yes Please," it is, as Poehler fans might expect, funny, wise, earnest, honest, spiritually ambitious, occasionally self-indulgent and structurally messy.
-
Now nearly 73, Wonder Woman has become a relatively uncontroversial cultural icon in her old age, for sale on countless lunch boxes, T-shirts and collectible toys — even gracing the big screen in her very own motion picture slated for 2017. In "The Secret History of Wonder Woman,"...
-
"Last Winter, We Parted," the third novel by Japan's Fuminori Nakamura to appear in English, is crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm.
-
Twenty-five years ago, Killarney Clary's first collection made an international splash: The prose poems of "Who Whispered Near Me" wove evanescent description of Clary's native Los Angeles, from her childhood's backyards to her office mates' cubicles, together with pithy regrets and vivid...
-
The most transformative technology to affect the lives of women in the 20th century might seem an odd subject for Jonathan Eig, the bestselling author known for his books about the lives of notables such as Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig and Al Capone.
-
At 92, Norman Lear belongs to a world-tilting generation of writers that, these days, he has almost all to himself. Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and not many others remain from the great westward migration of talent that began after Sept. 4, 1951, when the first transcontinental coaxial cable made...
-
As a young Republican in 1969, Leon Panetta joined the Nixon administration as the director of the Office of Civil Rights. Panetta worked to integrate Southern schools, but after discovering that Richard Nixon's White House was trying to delay integration, Panetta resigned. He wrote a 1971...
-
Darcey Steinke has published five novels and a memoir in the last 25 years (her first book came out in 1989 when she was 27). For all her apparent productivity, Steinke has been relatively quiet in recent years: It has been nearly a decade since her last novel, "Milk," and seven years since the...
-
Why has author Sheila Weller chosen these three particular women as her subjects? Get yourself past that question and you'll find in "The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour — and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News" a well-reported...
-
What happens in the middle-American farm town of Denby, Iowa? Not much.
-
Up against John Banville and Colum McCann in an unending round-robin (The Favored Irish Writer Cup), Colm Toibin is an international literary figure. We know the deal with the international literary figure. The novels inspire sighing genuflection and sometimes even get audio-recorded by That...
Loading