Who walks in L.A.? Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

It was Orhan Pamuk's first L.A. visit. The Turkish native, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, has taught in New York without making it here -- until he appear at an L.A. Public Library ALOUD event earlier this month. Before things got started, he mosied around downtown with writer Lewis MacAdams, who chronicles the experience in today's books pages.

He asked about the history of Bunker Hill. It wasn't the sleek business towers that enchanted him, but the historic core. "All my friends say there is no downtown Los Angeles," Pamuk said, but clearly he was pleased to see that there was. "There is a downtown here," he noted approvingly. "And it looks very old-fashioned." ...

"I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own."

Pamuk, MacAdams writes, "was strolling down Hill Street, recognized by nobody." What a difference a continent makes. In March of 2007, Laura King reported on an increasing uneasiness among the literary world of Istanbul. This is her report of what those days were like for writers, including the outspoken Pamuk.

March 1, 2007: ISTANBUL, TURKEY -- At a recent dinner party on the shores of the Bosporus, the bookish chatter among the Turkish writers and academics present took a sudden grim turn: Are you under police protection yet?

"We were all comparing notes about which of us had only one bodyguard and which of us had two, and we joked a little about being in competition with each other over this," said journalist and novelist Perihan Magden, who was among those placed under police protection after threats by ultranationalists. "It was comical, but also very tragic."

In the wake of the January assassination in Istanbul of prominent ethnic Armenian editor Hrant Dink, Turkey's intellectual community is feeling under siege to a degree not experienced in decades.

A mass outpouring of dismay and revulsion when Dink was gunned down, illustrated by a funeral that drew tens of thousands of mourners, has given way to a powerful right-wing backlash. Shadowy nationalist groups have issued chilling threats against authors and thinkers who, like Dink, speak out against Turkey's official denial that the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 constituted genocide, or on the power of the Turkish military, or the status of minority Kurds.

As a result, novelists are canceling book tours, once-outspoken professors are maintaining a low profile, and crusading columnists like Magden wonder whether their words will wind up costing them their lives.

Shakespeare and Company's new literary mural

The English-language bookstore on Paris' left bank, Shakespeare and Company, has been a draw for generations of expatriate writers. That goes for both its first iteration, owned by Sylvia Beach, who was the original publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses," and the more recent version, opened in 1951 by George Whitman. And those writers are rendered in portraits in a new mural in the shop, on the stairwell between the ground floor and the upstairs browsing/reading room.

On its website, Bomb Magazine has a slideshow of the mural's creation, and an interview with the artist, Badaude (a.k.a. Joanna Walsh). 

I’m somewhere between being a writer [and] an illustrator. I look with envy at other artists’ sketchbooks which are full of pictures and are beautiful objects. Mine tend to be pages of scribbled notes with the odd sketch thrown in....

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers -- looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used -- I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth [of] their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter ("Quartet," " A Moveable Feast," "Tropic of Cancer"). This is why I chose the quote from "Ulysses" ...  hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he -- and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator -- furnished his Paris persona.

Today, the shop is run by George's daughter Sylvia Whitman -- George, now in his 90s, is mostly retired. It continues to offer events with French and American writers, like Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant in June and Charles D'Ambrosio later this month.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Paul Morris / Bomb Magazine

Oprah pick Uwem Akpan in the Southland tonight

Oprah Book Club fans in the Southland can see Uwem Akpan this evening at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library. The author is set to appear at 5:30 p.m.

Akpan, a native of Nigeria, is the author of Oprah's latest book pick, "Say You're One of Them." The book marked two firsts for Oprah's Book Club: It was the first set in Africa and the first short story collection.

"He is the author of the most powerful collection of short stories that I believe I've ever read," Oprah said on her book club broadcast.

Akpan is a Jesuit priest who received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Michigan. After earning his degree, he has returned to Nigeria, where he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.

"I started off going into the priesthood," Akpan said on the "Oprah" broadcast, "and the writing came later. For me, the two are very intertwined, right now, connected."

It is not Akpan's first visit to Southern California. Last year he appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Uwem Akpan. Credit: Comfort Ukpong / Little, Brown & Co.

Studs Terkel and the FBI

In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy -- maybe if he'd gotten the job, we would have had "CSI: Studs Terkel." But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that would last for more than four decades. Our report has the details:

Terkel's paper trail started in 1945. It references Terkel speaking at a Paul Robeson rally in Chicago and quotes a source who questioned Terkel's "loyalty to the United States" because he worked with the BBC on a piece about the "sordid side of life in Chicago."

Terkel was an energetic journalist who lost his broadcasting job during the McCarthy blacklist era. He went on to write landmark oral histories of working-class America, including "Division Street," "Hard Times" and "Working," which made him either a patriot or suspect, depending on your point of view. After he died in 2008 at age 96, New York's City News service filed a Freedom of Information Act request, leading to this week's release.

Terkel was aware he was being tracked by the FBI, and several accounts of his life recall him joking that his file wasn’t as thick as the one compiled on his wife Ida Goldberg, a social worker and anti-war activist.

The FBI stopped following Terkel in 1990. More than 100 pages of Terkel's 296-page file remain undisclosed for "privacy and other reasons," City News reports. Exactly whose privacy is mysterious -- Terkel outlived most of his contemporaries.

The Chicago History Museum has a selection of his recordings online; his final book, released last year, was "P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: What's that, an agent upstairs? Studs Terkel at home in Chicago 2003. Credit: Aynsley Floyd / Associated Press

Marcel Theroux on Siberia, disaster and the bafflement of technology

In Marcel Theroux's National Book Award-nominated novel "Far North," Makepeace has survived in a remote Siberian town, essentially alone, until coming across a desperate adolescent raiding an empty house. This disturbance changes Makepeace's path, so that staying alive means searching out what bits of civilization might remain in a shattered world. It's the fourth novel for Theroux, who has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine, and the first since he worked on a documentary for the BBC about climate change.

Jacket Copy: Right now we're surrounded by post-apocalypse fictions: The movie "2012" just topped the weekend box office, the movie version of "The Road" is coming out, there's your book and Margaret Atwood's. What do you think the appeal is of setting stories after an apocalypse?

Marcel Theroux: I didn't embark on it to be a post-apocalyptic novel -- I can see why people say that about it – but I started with the character of Makepeace. I suppose to answer your question, I think one of the attractions is it gives you another angle on the way we live now. It's a way of writing about the present without seeming to write about the present. That's one of the things I liked about it. It makes you realize that things we take for granted are contingent and could change, and things haven't always been this way. In a very huge way, it situates the time we live in a much bigger historical perspective. In the case of post-apocalyptic books, it makes you think about the present from the point of view of disaster.

When I was writing "Far North," I was thinking a little bit about how the achievements of ancient Rome would have appeared to a Medieval peasant. For such a long time in Western history, the greatest technological and scientific achievements appeared to be behind us. It's only now that we feel like we're living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there's nothing natural about that, if you look at history.

JC: Makepeace is someone who is both savage and civilized, because she has a moral code.

MT: Yes, she's got a moral code. She's also got a possibly misplaced respect for her predecessors on the planet. She looks back at us and thinks we knew all sorts of things and were impressive and civilized and smart. I often think she got the wrong end of the stick about us. But there's something kind of noble about her desire to preserve what she sees as best about human beings.

JC: In some ways, that's made tangible in the books that she saves, which is how your book begins.

MT: She saves them, but she doesn't actually read them herself. She feels like she ought to, but it gives her a headache when she reads them. She feels kind of inadequate when she considers these treasures of her civilization, but she's the only person there.

JC: There are some mysterious elements that are beyond her.

MT: I think it's true of all of us that we're surrounded by things we take for granted but we don't actually understand. I'm looking around the [hotel] room, I see my mobile phone and my computer and a plasma-screen TV. I couldn't take one of these apart and put it together – I have a very primitive understanding of the way these things work. I think there is a huge gap between the technological sophistication of things around us and our actual understanding of them. I was interested in that gap.

Makepeace is a very resourceful person who is hugely capable. Like a lot of people in traditional societies, she can fix anything that goes wrong. She's mastered all the technology that she needs to master, albeit on a more basic level than mobile telephones. She feels an awe and inadequate when she's confronted by these things that we take for granted, like planes and cars and internal combustion engines.

It's somehow compelling when you have a narrator who's doing their best but somehow knows slightly less than the reader feels they do. I think it's good to feel superior to the narrator in a way – I think it's a good device. My knowledge about the world is greater than hers – there's a lot of things she's ignorant about, and she's aware of it. I was kind of interested in the idea that it's possible for knowledge to disappear.

JC: When she sees an airplane, it inspires her.

MT: It's pretty amazing, isn't it? An airplane is pretty amazing. Actually, traveling in an airplane is horrible, and it doesn't feel anything like amazing, but the idea of it. When was the first powered flight, 1906? [1903]. It is a miraculous thing. It's a device for letting the reader know – it's hard now, because the book's been reviewed, but I was thinking that at the beginning you could be in the American West in the 19th century. It's only the plane that makes you know for sure.

Haunted: Michael Mewshaw on his 'Lying With the Dead'

Will Michael Mewshaw ever slow down? At age 66, Mewshaw continues to be productive as a novelist, book reviewer, travel writer, investigative journalist and tennis reporter. "Lying With the Dead," his 11th novel, has just appeared (his 19th book, "Between Terror and Tourism," will be published this winter). And yet, NPR's Alan Cheuse has called him “the best novelist in America that nobody knows.”  If that’s true, then it must be said that Mewshaw has been hiding in plain sight. In the course of a varied career, the experiences Mewshaw has had are quite unique, as he suggests: “I’ve played basketball with Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving, played tennis against Roy Emerson and spent two weeks in Rome with Sharon Stone when she starred in the film of my novel, 'Year of the Gun' -- and I never scored with any of them.” Jacket Copy talked to Mewshaw on the occasion of his new novel and its relationship to his past.

"Lying With the Dead" has the feel of a novel with deep personal meaning.  You end with an afterword connecting it to incidents from your childhood.

All my novels have personal meaning for me. But while the Dresbach murders, which directly touched my family and which I wrote about in "Life for Death" in 1980, can be seen as the genesis of "Lying With the Dead," it would be wrong to read the book as autobiography. Rather than a factual account, it’s a meditation on possibilities, a reflection on the impact of similar events on different characters.

The mother in "Lying With the Dead" seems frighteningly real. Where did she come from?

A much different place than my biological mother. The fictional Mom came from my imagination. The character in the book isn’t my mother, any more than the character of Candy is my sister. In real life, I had polio as a kid. In the novel, Candy’s life is defined by the disease. That’s how fiction works, through a process of selection and rearrangement.

Still, there are the murders from your childhood. Why go back to them?

I’ve never really gone away from them. Murder, family turmoil, confusion about names and identities run through my books -- the nonfiction as well as the fiction. Call them themes, call them obsessions. I believe the Greeks had it right: Man hands on misery to man. But he hands on other things too: forgiveness, hope, redemption.

For all the references to Greek tragedy in "Lying With the Dead," there’s a lot to suggest you’re also a Catholic novelist.

Well, I’m Catholic and I write. But the category of "Catholic novelist" has never gained traction in the U.S.  In a 40-year career I’ve never been referred to as a Catholic writer. Maybe Catholicism has simply passed into midstream America, and its beliefs and rituals have lost any stigma -- which is a good thing -- yet have also lost any great resonance ... which is a shame if true.

Your work is divided between fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism.  Did you plan it that way? Does one feed the other?

There was no plan. I published five novels and expected to continue teaching creative writing. But with "Life for Death," my first nonfiction book, I found a different way to make a living. In that sense, the nonfiction didn’t just “feed” my fiction. It fed my family. But I don’t want to leave the impression I did hackwork to pay the bills. I turned down some plum jobs that didn’t interest me. I refused to do a script for Goldcrest Films about Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II, and backed out of a $150,000 deal as a ghostwriter for a top political advisor. But then, in 2008, for an advance barely big enough to cover expenses, I traveled overland across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco to do a book. What real writer wouldn’t want to do that when there’s supposed to be a clash of civilizations?

-- Desmond O'Grady

O'Grady's books include the novel "Dinny Going Down" and a travel book about Italy's Abruzzo region, "The Sybil, the Shepherd and the Saint."

Photo: Michael Mewshaw. Credit: Sharon Wohlmuth

Stephenie Meyer emerges to appear on 'Oprah' today

Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular "Twilight" series, will appear on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" this afternoon (the show broadcasts at 4 p.m. in many markets). The television appearance is a rare one for the author, who apologizes to fans on her website for "doing the hermit thing this last year."

Meyer is being lured out by the shine of "New Moon." The second film to feature Robert Pattinson as vampire Edward Cullen and Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan opens wide on Nov. 20. Meyer writes on her website, "I am so pleased and amazed and thrilled with what [director] Chris Weitz has done with 'New Moon' that I want to talk about it, and to show my support for him."

Earlier this week, serious "Twilight" fans submitted their too-specific-for-Oprah's-show questions to Meyer through the Twilight Saga website, which will be posting her answers on Monday.

Oprah will be the only talk show host to get time with Meyer, apparently; she writes that she's doing only this one interview. After that, she'll slip back into the dark.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Stephenie Meyer, credit: Vince Bucci/Getty Images. Oprah Winfrey, credit: Warren Toda/ EPA

Al Gore tonight in Beverly Hills: tickets still available

Al Gore is hitting stages again with a brand-new book. "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" picks up the environmental themes of "An Inconvenient Truth" and presents a call to action. He's in the Los Angeles area tonight at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Independent bookstore Book Soup, which is helping to present the event, has tweeted that there will be tickets available at the door. The $40 ticket comes with a copy of "Our Choice." Start your (hybrid) engines: The show is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Al Gore at George Washington University, Nov. 5. Credit: Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press/MCT

Colum McCann on high-wire acts, writing and 9/11

Colum McCann's novel "Let the Great World Spin" is set in New York in 1974, with a wide array of characters: hookers under a freeway overpass in the Bronx, an Irishman living in the projects nearby who is kind to them without ever telling them he's a monk; an affluent Park Avenue matron who's lost in grief; an ambitious teen photographer obsessed with subway taggers; a group of early computer programmers. Their lives intersect, however obliquely, through Philippe Petit's astonishing highwire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. McCann's novel, which echoes with resonances of Sept. 11, is nominated for the National Book Award; he talked to Jacket Copy from his home office in New York.

Jacket Copy: Philippe Petit's walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 is at the center of your novel. How did you come to know about his feat -- was it something that you'd heard about when it happened that stayed with you?

Colum McCann: A good few years ago, long before Sept. 11, I read Paul Auster's "The Red Notebook," and in that book there was an essay about Philippe Petit. I sort of stored it at the back of my memory. I thought it was a spectacular feat, and they seemed to have a very strong relationship, Paul Auster and Petit. Almost immediately after 9/11, when the towers came down, I remembered the essay, I remembered the fact that somebody had walked up there. It seemed to me that his walk had been an act of creation, in opposition to the act of destruction that had happened. It was very shortly after 9/11 that I re-remembered  it and started thinking about it over the next couple of years -- to see if it would work just on its own as a story and see if it would work as an allegory, you know?

JC: Have you seen the documentary about Petit's walk, "Man on Wire"?

CMcC: I was about two years into my novel when I suddenly heard there was going to be a documentary and I was like, "OK! Well, there's going to be a documentary." Then I heard there was going to be a really good documentary. I said, "Well, OK." Then I heard it was coming out shortly before my own novel came out, and I thought, trouble now. Then I went to see it. I thought it was wonderful; I really think it's a fine work of art, but it was completely different to what my novel was trying to do. In a curious way, I think that they dovetailed in together. I wasn't frightened by it after I saw it. I went into the cinema at Lincoln Plaza on the West side of Manhattan early one morning, must have been 11 o'clock in the morning, shivering in me boots, thinking, "Uh oh, all that work that I've done for the last couple years, was it all down the drain?" But it wasn't.

JC: Although Petit's walk is at the center of the narrative, you start in a very different place, and bring the edges of New York to life. Could you talk about your experience with New York – is it something you yourself experienced?

CMcC: In August of 1974, which is when the novel takes place, I was most likely running ...  in the west of Ireland wearing my short pants. I knew absolutely nothing of New York -- at that stage, I was 9 years old. I have been here the best part of 15, 16 years. I've known it from a lot of different angles. It is my home now, and I do love it. I had to go back in and re-create – so I did a lot of walking in various parts of the Bronx. I spent a lot of time in public libraries, especially the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where they have all sorts of access to photographs of the time, maps of the time, oral histories from various people, lingo and all sorts of things. I did ride-alongs with the police, in both Manhattan in the Bronx; that was fascinating. They showed me rap sheets of various people. I had to do work discovering what the computer world was like back then. I've done other novels that were more difficult than this novel in terms of research, because I know New York and I love New York and it is my city now.

It wasn't a huge embarkation. It was a fair amount of work, but that's what I love about writing novels – that moment of research, stepping into a body that's not necessarily yours, or time that's not necessarily yours, and discovering new things about it. That was what was challenging. And I wanted to see the walk in a kaleidoscopic way, not just as heroic moment, this man walking up above in the air. But it's seen from lots of different angles: some people just don't like it, some people think it's a flagrant flirtation with death. I think this is the real world as we have it, in the sense that stories have to be told from all sorts of different angles. My favorite writer, John Berger,  says, "Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one."

JC: You inhabit so many different characters – hookers, people with strong beliefs, who've lost their beliefs, people subsumed in grief, people trying to get lost -- which of these many characters was the hardest for you to get right?

Afghanistan's Malalai Joya speaks in So Cal

At age 27, Malalai Joya was the first woman elected to Afghanistan's parliament. She's an outspoken advocate for democracy -- so much so that she's been suspended from her job in the National Assembly for allegedly insulting her colleagues on television (the suspension has been criticized by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch). She's survived five assassination attempts and stays on the move to keep safe, although her friends will tell you that her car has been breaking down a lot lately. She's been the subject of a documentary and now has released a memoir, "A Woman Among Warlords"; tonight, she'll speak at All Saints Church in Pasadena.

Thursday afternoon, more than 50 Angelenos packed into a front room of a Beverly Hills home to hear Joya, who is fluent in English, speak about her experiences. About half were activists affiliated with the antiwar group Code Pink, and they were supportive of Joya's criticisms of the Obama administration's policies toward Afghanistan. "We must end this continuing occupation," she said to a round of applause, with all the conviction and modulation of a practiced politician.

Speaking with an accent that thickened as she gained momentum, Joya, who stands less than 5 feet tall, held the room in her sway. Her targets were warlords and corruption at home first, but it was her unflinching criticism of American policies that found traction with this peace-activist audience. "Democracy cannot be won by war," she said, to more applause. 

When she noted that a new report by the UNDP rated Afghanistan 181st out of 182 countries, one woman raised her hand. "What is UNDP?" she asked. About two-thirds of the crowd responded without hesitation: "The United Nations Development Program." Some women in the room had traveled to Afghanistan recently, and Joya appealed to their sense of connectedness. "The silence of good people is worse than the action of bad people," she urged, to more applause.

The cars parked on the street near the Beverly Hills home were an equal mix of middle-class sedans and high-end sports cars, with a generous smattering of KPFK stickers throughout. Southern California may be one of the few places in the country where dedicated peace activists dine within arms' reach of original art by modern masters. If Joya noticed any incongruity, she kept it to herself. She is a politician, after all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Malalai Joya speaks. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg