Remote, picturesque Mazama, Wash., to host book festival

The remote hamlet of Mazama, Wash., will host its first literary festival, the Mazama Festival of Books on Aug. 18 and 19, and has begun announcing the authors who will attend.

Located on the eastern side of the Cascade mountain range near the Canadian border, Mazama is about 3.5 hours from Seattle and four hours from Spokane. If that seems a long way to drive for culture, it might not be for those in the Pacific Northwest. There's already a major music festival, Sasquatch, which is held at The Gorge, a stunning natural amphitheater in the mountains almost three hours from Seattle. The environment is part of the attraction.

Admittedly, Sasquatch's roster of bands is also pretty breathtaking. This year, when it was held over Memorial Day weekend, performers included Jack White, Beck, the Roots, Bon Iver, the Dum Dum Girls, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Spiritualized, Blitzen Trapper, the Walkmen, Mark Lanegan, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, St. Vincent, the Civil Wars, M. Ward, Explosions in the Sky, Feist and many, many more.

The inaugural Festival of Books schedule won't be nearly as jampacked -- or as loud. Its lineup so far leans heavily toward authors from the Pacific Northwest, led by Washington poet laureate Kathleen Flenniken. Other authors include children's book author and illustrator Erik Brooks, young-adult author Blake Nelson and memoirists Lidia Yuknavitch and Colleen Mondor. Also on the bill are the novelists Jim Lynch, Pauls Toutonghi, Ryan Boudinot and Danbert Nobacon -- the latter of whom started out as a founding member of the anarchist pop group Chumbawumba, giving the literary festival its own little dose of rock 'n' roll. Katherine Lanpher is on tap as an interviewer. Additional authors are expected to be announced in July.

All festival events will be free. It will be presented by the Methow Valley Arts Alliance, the Trails End Bookstore and the Mazama Country Inn. That inn may come in handy because if you plan to attend, you'll have to find a place to stay (though there are other hotels nearby).

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Philip Roth to headline National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

LéaLA celebrates Spanish-language books, at the L.A. Convention Center

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Mazama, Wash., landscape. Credit: Bill Pope

Philip Roth to headline National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

 
Iconic American author Philip Roth will headline the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., this fall. Roth, now 79, has won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the Pulitzer Prize once, and received piles more accolades. His most recent novel is 2010's "Nemesis."

Initially having taken place during a single day, the 12-year-old National Book Festival will now span an entire weekend, Sept. 22-23. Book fair enthusiasts may be disappointed; that Sunday is also the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Presented by the Library of Congress, the 2012 National Book Festival has many literary boldface names: T.C. Boyle, Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert Caro, Geraldine Brooks, Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, Philip Levine and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mystery writers attending include Charlaine Harris, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell. There will be a pavilion for children and a dedicated storytelling stage.

While further details about the schedule are forthcoming, the National Book Festival has released a preliminary -- and long -- list of authors who will be participating:

Katherine Applegate, Avi, Natalie Babbitt, Bob Balaban, Fergus Bordewich, Natalie Pope Boyce, Christopher Bram, Giannina Braschi, Peter Brown, Douglas Brinkley, Stephen L. Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Bryan Collier, James Dashner, Anna Dewdney, Michael Dirda, Maria Dueñas, Stephen Dunn, John A. Farrell, Sharon Flake, Thomas Friedman, John Gaddis, Michael Grant, Linda Greenhouse, Jenny Hahn, Joy Harjo, Charlaine Harris, Paul Hendrickson, Ellen Hopkins, Nalo Hopkinson, Tony Horwitz, Steve Inskeep, Walter Isaacson, Eloise James, Jewel, Tayari Jones, Laura Kasischke, Charles Kupchan, Hope Larson, David Levithan, Margot Livesey,  Mike Lupica, Lois Lowry, Thomas Mallon, Sonia Manzano, David Maraniss, Leonard Marcus, Chris Matthews, Steven Millhauser, Walter Dean Myers, Corey Olsen, Mary Pope Osborne, Patricia Polacco, Chris Raschka, Marilynne Robinson, Laura Amy Schlitz, Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella, Susan Richards Shreve, Anita Silvey, Sally Bedell Smith, Jerry Spinelli, Philip C. and Erin E. Stead, Margie Stiefvater, David Ezra Stein, David O. Stewart, R.L. Stine, Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, Raina Telgemeier, Craig Thompson, Jeffrey Toobin, Justin Torres, Vernor Vinge, Siobhan Vivian, Eric Weiner, Jacqueline Woodson and Daniel Yergin.

The National Book Festival, which is held on the National Mall between 9th and 14th streets, is free.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Philip Roth in 2010. Credit: Nancy Crampton

LéaLA celebrates Spanish-language books this weekend

Here’s a trick question (at least for non-Spanish speakers): What’s North America’s most book-loving city? New York? Los Angeles? Toronto?

A good case could be made for awarding the bibliophiles’ prize to Guadalajara, a metropolis that many U.S. tourists associate only with mariachis and tequila.

The beautiful baroque-colonial city, Mexico’s second-largest, annually hosts what is reputed to be the largest book fair in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. Formally known as La Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, or FIL, the yearly convocation draws tens of thousands of visitors as well as hundreds of the world’s preeminent Spanish-language authors, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires.

This weekend, Angelenos will be flocking to the 2nd annual edition of  LéaLA, Feria del Libro en Español de Los Ángeles, a kind of scaled-down version of Guadalajara’s massive book festival, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Backed by the University of Guadalajara, and free and open to public, LéaLA aims to promote Spanish-language and Spanish-translated literature through book publishers’ sales-displays and readings and talks by distinguished authors.

Simultaneously, the festival is intended to bolster a growing cultural connection between Southern California’s enormous Mexican American/Latino population and Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco, the ancestral home of more L.A. Latinos than any other Mexican state.

Finally, LéaLA attempts to help make amends for a bizarre L.A. cultural phenomenon: the city’s near-absence of Spanish-language bookstores. Apart from public libraries, university bookstores (which stock course-related titles) and a handful of small shops like Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar and the Libros Schmibros bookstore/lending library in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles -- with the United States’ largest Spanish-speaking population -- has virtually no place to find and buy Spanish-language books.

In only its second year, LéaLA already has become one of the largest Spanish-language book-related events in the United States. Last year it drew 36,000 people to its inaugural edition. This year, with 200 individual exhibition stalls, up from 84 last year, and four times as much total floor space, festival organizers expect an even larger turnout.

Among the boldface names at this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, are the best-selling Mexican-Spanish writer and novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II, crime writer James Ellroy, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and Mexican political analyst and intellectual Enrique Krauze.

Festival of Books: How the 'boys on the bus' cover campaigns

We are, it seems, living in fragmented times.

Four notable political journalists and a media critic spent an hour late Saturday afternoon dissecting the state of American politics and political journalism. The L.A. Times Festival of Books panel was called "The Boys on the Bus," but as moderator (and L.A. Times political reporter) Mark Z. Barabak pointed out, these days half of the nation's political reporting class are women, and the bus was long ago replaced by chartered airplanes.

The panel's title was drawn from Timothy Crouse's 1973 landmark book "The Boys on the Bus," which was among the first and best-known works to examine the role of the media during presidential campaigns. Crouse helped create the modern perception of political journalists as celebrities in and of themselves, a role since elevated by the talking-head shows on cable and Sunday morning network news shows.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

But as anyone who has been on the bus knows, celebrity has little to do with the day-to-day coverage of campaigns (Disclosure: I covered political campaigns for the L.A. Times from 2000 to 2008, where I worked with Barabak and his fellow panelist Ronald Brownstein, and against panelist Adam Nagourney, then a political correspondent for the New York Times). 

And in this era of instant news, tweets as stories, and television programming propelled by opinion, both the practice of politics and political journalism are undergoing tectonic shifts. Nation magazine media critic and journalism professor Eric Alterman condemned the predominant mode of coverage, arguing that most political journalism is about the process with a de-emphasis on what kinds of leaders the candidates would be if elected.

Rodney King and the L.A. riots: When 20 years can seem like yesterday

One aspect of Los Angeles hasn't changed in the 20 years since the 1992 riots: Traffic tie-ups. Rodney King, whose March 1991 beating by L.A. police officers was the first link in the chain of events that culminated in the 1992 riots, was a half-hour late Saturday for his interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison.

So, in a sense, the session ran in reverse. With Morrison, who also anchors a radio show on KPCC, as the moderator, Angelenos spent a half-hour talking about their own experiences during and after the riots as they awaited King's arrival. The general consensus: The LAPD has changed for the better, but the socio-economic conditions that set the stage for the riots have worsened. And the racial divides are still chasms.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

"I'm surprised at how white we are here," said one white woman, looking around at the crowd of more than 500 people in a basement auditorium at USC's Ronald Tutor Campus Center, about four miles north of where the riots began near South Central's Normandie and Florence Avenues. The woman said she lived in South Central, in a neighborhood in which she is the rare white resident. "The riots can certainly start again, until we have socio-economic changes, and in how we view other people."

King, for his part, arrived out of breath, and spoke of forgiveness for the officers involved in his videotaped beating after a high-speed chase. With his history of substance abuse, he said, he has been in need of some forgiveness. "I am a forgiving man," he said. "That's how I was raised, to be in a forgiving state of mind. I have been forgiven many times. I am only human. Who am I not to forgive someone?"

On Sunday: T.C. Boyle's basement, David Treuer and more

Is there anything in your basement worth $425,000?  The answer to that question informs Carolyn Kellogg’s conversation with author T.C. Boyle this Sunday. It centers around the archive of his life’s work -- manuscripts, research, notes and bound volumes -- all of it residing in the basement of his Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Santa Barbara.

When the Montecito Tea fire raged through the area in 2008, Boyle said, “It scared the bejesus out of me” because what was in the basement was irreplaceable. The fire didn’t touch his house, although it claimed more than 200 others. Eventually, the Ransom Center came knocking, offering to buy his archive for that tidy six-figure sum. The center, at the University of Texas in Austin, is now the home for the papers of Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo among others.

Boyle reflects on the center and his archive in the article that starts on Page One of Arts & Books. He will be reading at the Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 21.

Also in our Sunday coverage is David Ulin’s profile of David Treuer, the novelist and USC professor, about his book “Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life,” which recounts Treuer’s childhood growing up on Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota (he’s the son of an Ojibwe mother and a Jewish father).

Treuer says he took on the project after a 16-year-old named Jeffrey James Weise went on a shooting spree at a school on Minnesota’s Red Lake Reservation. He thought the issues of reservation life could be discussed with relative ease, but he found them more complex than he anticipated: “What does identity mean when traditional languages are dying, when the very thing that has brought money into Indian communities -- the commercialization of the casinos -- threatens to undermine a more traditional way of life?" Treuer will also be appearing at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 22.

Neal Gabler checks in with a perceptive commentary on Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image,” on the 50th anniversary this year of its publication.

Boorstin’s book described the culture’s shift from valuing the genuine to celebrating pseudo-reality. It was considered, Gabler writes, “one of those seminal books that not only capture the zeitgeist but change the American mind-set." The book “invented what would later become known as postmodernism -- the odd cultural Moebius strip by which so many elements of our lives become imitations of themselves.” Fascinating reading from one of our more interesting social critics.

West Hollywood Book Fair coming Sunday

Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the West Hollywood Book Fair, an event that features booths, panels, performance stages, a reading area for kids and book signings.

Some highlights include:

Jackie Collins -- the queen of bad-girl bestsellers is scheduled to appear at 1 p.m.;

Justin Torres -- the rising short fiction star is on the 10:30 a.m. panel, "New Fiction from LGBT Authors";

Meredith Baxter at 2:15 p.m. and Tatum O'Neal at 4:15 p.m. -- the actresses will each discuss their memoirs;

Len Wein, co-creator of "Swamp Thing" and "Wolverine," appears on the panel "Comics to Screen and Back Again" at 4:00 p.m.;

Two actresses from the original "Dark Shadows" cast -- Lara Parker and Karthryn Lee Scott -- join  Catwoman (1966-'67) Julie Newmar at 3:30 p.m.;

Simon Reynolds -- the author of "Retromania" appears on the 12:15 p.m. panel "Rockers, Ravers, Roadies and other Rabble-Rousers in Music Land";

Novelists Gary Phillips and Naomi Hirahara, comics creator Joshua Dysart and nonfiction writer Adam Winkler cross genres to discuss our fascination with guns and violence at 11 a.m.

Appearing from the L.A. Times are Book Critic David L. Ulin (in conversation with novelist Lisa See); journalist Hector Tobar, discussing his debut novel, "The Barbarian Nurseries" with novelist Susan Straight; and Deborah Vankin, talking about her graphic novel for young adults, "Poseurs."

The West Hollywood Book Fair begins at 10 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m.; it includes free parking. The brand new West Hollywood Library, which is just down the way, is closed Sundays -- but it's holding its grand opening Saturday, for those who want to get a look inside.

At the West Hollywood Book Fair, there are also snacks and drinks. Last year, on a very hot fall day, the Hawaiian Ice cart was very popular -- this year, other carts may present some competition -- temperatures are supposed to stay in the 70s.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The 2010 West Hollywood Book Fair. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

When American writers meet haggis

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

More than two dozen American writers will be traveling to Scotland later this summer to participate in the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Will they be brave enough to try haggis, the traditional Scottish sausage that's made from sheep's heart, liver and lungs?

Bestselling novelist T.C. Boyle will be traveling to Scotland for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Jennifer Egan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Visit from the Goon Squad," will also attend. Sapphire, the author of "Push," which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film "Precious," will introduce her follow-up, "The Kid."

Nonfiction writer Ben Mezrich will talk about his latest, "Sex on the Moon"; he's the bestselling author "The Accidental Billionaires," which became "The Social Network," another Oscar-winner.

Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," has curated festival events on the theme "writing across boundaries," which include appearances by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and Chris Adrian.

Postmodern novelist Robert Coover, who teaches at Brown, will be holding a master class about writing.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival begins Aug. 13 and continues through Aug. 29 and is the literary component of Edinburgh's suite of arts festivals. Launched in 1983, the festival is held in the city's Charlotte Square Gardens; about 220,000 readers attend. In addition to the discussions and readings, there is a full slate of programming around children's books and a set of evening events that include music and, for the first time, the rowdy Literary Death Match.

Notable Scottish writers who will participate in the festival include Ian Rankin, A.L. Kennedy and Alexander McCall Smith. Also participating are Nobel Prizewinner Gao Xingjian, who left China for France in 1997, and Irish-born writer Colm Tóibín.

Entry to the gardens where the Edinburgh International Book Festival takes place is free, but some events are ticketed. A few, such as Alexander McCall Smith's reading, have already sold out.

Will the American authors make time to try haggis? It's been banned in the U.S. for decades. Although Scotland has hoped in recent years that America might allow haggis imports, for now, the best place to try haggis is Scotland.

[For the record, 10:20 a.m., July 7: An earlier version of this post said two writers, Yiyun Li and Miguel Syjuco, would participate in the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Although they are among the writers featured on the festival's website, they are not scheduled to participate this year.]

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A festively decorated haggis sausage. Credit: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

8 ways to celebrate James Joyce and Bloomsday

All you literarians know that June 16 is Bloomsday, so called for Leopold Bloom, the main character in James Joyce's "Ulysses," which takes place in Dublin in a single day in 1904. That day being June 16, of course.

Despite of the modernist classic being a somewhat difficult read, Bloomsday has become a way for fans of James Joyce to come together and celebrate his iconic work. Here are eight ways you, too, can celebrate Bloomsday and James Joyce on Thursday.

1. In Ireland, celebrate all day long around Dublin with the James Joyce Centre; events include a breakfast, readings, Joycean tours around the city, songs and poetry readings, and actors wandering the streets dressed as characters from "Ulysses." And when the day is done, head to the Great Hiberian Metropolis Pub Quiz, where Irish whiskey is sure to be served.

2. For those of us who can't get to Ireland, the entire novel "Ulysses" is online -- as 2-D bar codes. The hundreds of black-and-white images render as the text of the book when turned under the gaze of a properly equipped cellphone, 800 characters at a time. Why would the people behind Books 2 Bar Codes do such a thing? No reason, really. As the Very Short List explains, "It's the sort of totally pointless/oddly amusing/ultimately affecting effort that Joyce's countryman Samuel Beckett would have appreciated."

3. OK, you don't need to have a cellphone with a bar-code reader. "Ulysses," which was originally published in 1922 -- its suitability for American readers was determined by the courts 11 years later, when an imported version was found not to be obscene -- can be found as an e-book at Project Gutenberg, online and entirely free.

4. Angelenos, New Yorkers and anyone with a decent Internet connection can listen in on Radio Bloomsday, which broadcasts an audio version of the excerpted "Ulysses" on the East Coast and West Coast from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. In Los Angeles, it can be heard on KPFK-FM (90.7); in New York, on WBAI-FM (99.5). Readers include Alec Baldwin, Wallace Shawn, Anne Enright, Bob Odenkirk, Paul Muldoon, Roma Downey, John O'Callaghan, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and Garrison Keillor.

5. In New York, buy tickets to the 30th annual Bloomsday on Broadway, featuring more than 100 actors,   including Denis O'Hare, Fionnula Flanagan and Michael Cerveris, reading "Ulysses" at Symphony Space. Things get started at noon and continue for about 13 hours; starting at 8 p.m., the show is to be broadcast live on WNYC-FM (93.9).

6. In Los Angeles, go to Machine Project's Bloomsday Silent Read-A-Thon. Starting at 8 a.m. and going until 3 p.m., Echo Park's Machine Project will enable attendees' reading of "Ulysses" in its entirety. The goal is aspirational -- readers would have to clip through the dense text at 100-plus pages an hour -- but the environment will be welcoming, with chairs, spare copies of "Ulysses" and a coffee shop next door.

7. Another L.A. way to celebrate "Ulysses" is James Joyce at the Hammer, a reading focused on the women of "Ulysses" that gets underway at 7:30 p.m. The event will be preceded and concluded -- or bookended, as they say -- with Guinness-enhanced, musically accompanied happy hours in the Hammer's courtyard.

8. And for a little taste of the real thing, there's this rare recording of James Joyce reading from his own writing, pointed out by Boing Boing in 2009. The James Joyce Centre says that he was recorded reading from his work in 1924 and 1929 at the urging of Sylvia Beach, a woman who knew "Ulysses" was special -- she was its publisher.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: James Joyce in 1939, the year he published "Finnegan's Wake," with his grandson. Credit: LA Times File Photo

 

Festival of Books tallies 140,000 attendees

 On April 30 and May 1, 140,000 people turned out to celebrate reading at the 16th Annual L.A. Times Festival of Books, held for the first time on the campus of the University of Southern California. 

"We are thrilled to see our vision for moving the festival to our new home downtown come together in a more robust way than we even imagined when we first started discussing the idea with USC,” said Times Publisher Eddy Hartenstein in a statement. “We were honored to welcome new and old friends and are very pleased that everyone had a great Festival of Books experience.”

Other facts and figures about the 16th annual Festival of Books: The festival app was downloaded by almost 10% of those who attended. Four thousand books were donated at the donation station set up by Target, a festival sponsor, to benefit classrooms and libraries. And shuttles brought nearly 1,000 people per hour to USC's campus, for a total of close to 17,000.

The event hosted a record number of exhibitors, sponsors and authors. And then there was the ice cream -- more than 30,000 free samples of Ben & Jerry's ice cream were handed out to attendees.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Saturday crowds at the 16th annual Festival of Books. Credit: Anne Cusack /Los Angeles Times