Laila Lalami

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend, which means that I will be closing up shop early this week in order to travel to California. The FOB is one of my favorite book fests–it’s always singularly well organized, well attended, and has a great line up. You can view the event program here and the list of authors here. So many people, so little time! But I plan on somehow making it to all of Tod Goldberg’s panels.

I will be doing a panel myself on Sunday; here are the details:

Sunday, April 30
10:00 AM
First Fiction: Finding a Voice
Mark Rozzo (moderator), Laila Lalami, Lisa Fugard, Adrienne Sharp and Marlon James
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
UCLA Campus

If you are in town for the fest, I also recommend you clear your schedule on Saturday night for Jim Ruland’s Vermin on the Mount, which takes place at the Mountain Bar in Chinatown. This time, readers include: Cecil Castellucci, Ron Currie, Neale DeSousa, Ben Ehrenreich, Lisa Glatt, Alexis Orgera, Salvador Plascencia, and Steve Rinella. Until then, ciao.

Dan Wickett relates this amusing anecdote at his blog, the Emerging Writers’ Network:

The three copies of Heti’s Ticknor caught my eye, especially as a woman who I’d guess was in her early fifties was picking one up. She didn’t glance at the blurbs, or skim the inside flap jacket - she just grabbed it like there was a line for them. I said, “Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you where you hear about that particualr book? Did you read her short story collection?”

Her response was “It’s being discussed on the Litblog Co-op this week and it sounded good.”

I smiled and said, “That’s so cool that you’re just grabbing a copy because of the LBC -I’m actually one of the members.” I then extended my hand and said, “My name is Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network.”

Read on.

Alex Chun talks to a few comic artists about Sunday strips, and finds them pretty anxious about the future:

While strips such as “Boondocks” and “Over the Hedge” are making forays onto the small and large screen, respectively, the comics page is struggling to find its place in a post-”Calvin & Hobbes” world as its readership grows older and as its piece of newspaper real estate shrinks.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,” says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. “The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience — great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.”

Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as “Peanuts,” which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and “Blondie,” which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

You can read the rest here.

I’m trying to get a few things finished (including Chapter 5) before I head out of town again, so there’s not much up here today. A few links to tide you over till later in the day:

• John Barlow at Slate: “My failed fling with a book packager,” or how he didn’t end up accused of plagiarism.
• I read excerpts of Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah when they appeared in the Atlantic a few months ago, and they really irked me, for all the reasons that Evan Wright details in his Los Angeles Times review.
• I was very curious about Chris Abani’s take on the new Wole Soyinka memoir. Here it is, in last Sunday’s SF Chronicle. (Yes, it is another rave.)
• Film to character: How Capote explains Capote.

This month, Los Angeles-based writer and photographer Ibarionex Perello sends in this lovely photo:

Of the picture, he says, “I was recently visiting friends near San Diego and we stayed at a hotel that had an adjoining golf course. I’m not a golfer, but when I saw the morning light coming through the mist, I walked out to the course and saw this pair of chairs. It was as if they were just waiting for me. It made getting up early on a weekend morning worthwhile.”

The shortlist for the 2006 Orange Prize has been announced: Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules For Scientific Living, and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch made the cut.

The new issue of Failbetter is up, with contributions by Benjamin Krier, Colleen Mondor, and Portland author Kevin Sampsell, among others. There is also an interview with Anne Tyler. Check it out.

The 2006 PEN World Voices Festival opened yesterday in New York, with dozens of readings and discussions on the bill. I’m looking forward to reading some of my friends‘ dispatches from the front lines. I did, however, want to highlight one event that might get lost in the shuffle:

Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St.
Tickets: Free;
Call (212) 334-3324
Presented by The National Book Critics Circle

Writers read from Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl (winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the explosion of Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant. The readers include Philip Gourevitch, fiction writers Ken Kalfus, Julie Otsuka, Lynne Tillman, Martha Cooley, and Jim Shepard, along with poet Lawrence Joseph and translator Keith Gessen.

Related: Slate has a photo essay by Paul Fusco on the 20-year anniversary of the explosion.

RAWI, the Arab American Writers’ association, has launched its website. Find out more about members, read the newsletter, and check out opportunities and annoucements.

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, recommends memoirs, novels, articles, websites, films, music, and art from and about Iran for the Washington Post.