One of the country’s greatest book festivals, and my favorite, is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. They’ve just announced their 2013 schedule – the full program is here.

Marisa Silver will be on the panel Fiction: The Social Novel with Rachel Kushner and Jonathan Lethem, moderated by David Ulin on Saturday April 20th at noon.

Matthew Specktor will be on the panel Fiction: Inside Hollywood on Sunday, April 21st at Noon with Nina Revoyr, Adam Braver and Alex Espinoza.

Molly Ringwald will read on the LA Times Main Stage Saturday at 12:10pm and she’ll also be in a conversation with Maria Semple, moderated by Carolyn Kellogg, at Noon on Sunday.

And a shout out for former client, eternal favorite person, Bernard Cooper who will be on the panel Why Did the Writer Cross the Genre, on Saturday at 1:30pm with Luis Alfaro and Sandra Tsing Loh.

The full line up, including location details, is here.

Follow @latimesfob on twitter for updates and news.

Housing Works & McNally Jackson present
A Downtown Literary Festival
Sunday, April 14 from 10:30am to 5:00pm

McNally Jackson and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe are collaborating on the inaugural Downtown Literary Festival, a daylong celebration of the literary culture of New York City. The festival will take place at both bookstores simultaneously throughout the day on Sunday, April 14, 2013, followed by a happy hour mingle at Housing Works Bookstore and an after-party at Pravda, featuring Russian literature–themed cocktails.

Why a Downtown Literary Festival? The goal of DLF is to showcase the literature and writers of New York City. We will aim to reflect the diversity and creativity that characterizes downtown NYC with a day of the non-traditional events for which McNally Jackson and Housing Works Bookstore each have become known. This panel-less festival will include:

– A puppet show featuring stories of downtown life for the young ones
– Tumblr’s WPA guide update project, featuring Gabriel Kahane and Lapham’s Quarterly
– A virtual walking tour of the literature of downtown NYC with LitCrawl NYC
– Stories of the best show ever from musicians and fans, curated by music writer Alan Light and featuring Thurston Moore
– A celebration of the lost art of memorization and recitation with Rachel Syme and Maris Kreizman
– A Frank O’Hara lunch hour featuring NYC poets Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, Paul Legault and more
– Writers on their favorite bookstores, presented by PEN America
– A short history of street food in NYC and stories from the street vendors themselves, presented by NYC a la Cart’s Alexandra Penfold and Siobhan Wallace
– Live interviews and readings from the archive of The Paris Review
– Stories of the subway with John Wray, Charles Bock and Sophie Blackall
– A tour of downtown NYC through the years in pop culture with lit/TV blog Slaughterhouse 90210.

For more information and program updates, check The Housing Works Bookstore events calendar.

There is an excellent piece in The Guardian’s Books section today by A.L. Kennedy. She asks, “why do we write? Why do we choose to work in forms like the short story, the literary novel, the essay, the sonnet – forms which have very little commercial value?”

Her answer is a must-read for all writers: here.

NPR Fresh Air gives Marisa Silver‘s new novel Mary Coin a rave review today. Critic Maureen Corrigan says, “Far from romanticizing the suffering of the Great Depression, Silver stares at it hard, square in the face, just as Lange must have done…” “Silver is an evocative, precise writer, and her story … takes readers deep into the callous realities of life during the Dirty ’30s….” “Silver tackles big questions about the morality of art and, in particular, the exploitation of subjects in photography. Indeed, Silver herself “exploits” Lange’s famous photo here for her own powerful ends. Sometimes artists have to be selfish in that way. To paraphrase one of the greatest and most selfish of them all, Pablo Picasso, artists are trying to create lies that tell the truth.”

Read a transcript of this excellent review, and hear it too, here.

Read an excerpt of Mary Coin here.

Pre-order a copy of Mary Coin here. It comes out on March 7.

Last night Roxana Robinson gave a preview of her soon-to-be-published novel, SPARTA, at the reading series Fiction Addiction – a live feed of her reading was projected fifty feet high on a brick wall across East 2nd St and Avenue A.
How cool is this:

SPARTA will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Sarah Crichton Books on June 4 this year and I am thrilled to be working with Roxana and FSG’s resident genius Lottchen Shivers for the first time. We have a limited number of advance copies that have just gone out to the media – please email me if you are a journalist and haven’t received one yet.

The line up for this year’s Charleston Festival has been announced and it is, as it is every year, phenomenal. The festival takes place on the beautiful grounds of Charleston House, the former country retreat of the Bloomsbury Group in Sussex, and this year features events with Julian Fellowes and Pat Barker and conversations about the Profumo Affair, The Jazz Age and one with the devastatingly talented Patrick McGrath on Trauma, Creativity and Why Writers Drink – I want to attend every single event on this program, (I mean, programme)!
Some day I’ll get there.

You can see the events here. What other ones stand out?
The Charleston Festival runs May 17th to May 26th. Tickets go on sale February 25.

I’m very late coming to it, but I’ve stumbled into a wonderful rabbit-hole of a website: Open Culture.

I was intrigued by this post of audio clips of Gertrude Stein reading work inspired by Matisse, Picasso and TS Eliot.
Listening to her I couldn’t help but wonder: Would Gertrude Stein be published now? How many blank stares, total, did she receive in her lifetime? How difficult it must have been to be Gertrude Stein.
The audio clips motivated me to dig out my copy of Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice – her Malcolmian biography and investigation of how two odd looking elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis and lived openly in Vichy France. Two Lives is now back on top of my To-Be-Read-Again stack. But Stein’s books … wait on the shelf for another day. The closest I’ve come to understanding her writing, or understanding what she was trying to convey, was this fascinating and clear-headed NYTBR review by Lynne Tillman, Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein. But for me, her life remains infinitely more interesting than her writing.

Me looking at Gertrude.

Back to the Open Culture rabbit hole and now going downmarket: The post on Gertrude led to this photo of a shirtless Mark Twain. It’s real. And now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it.

Clicking as quickly as possible away from the Mark Twain photo led to a fabulous video clip of James Joyce in Paris that describes one of the greatest writers of the 20th century as a “small, thin, un-athletic man with very bad eyes.” It also notes that Joyce and Hemingway did a certain amount of drinking together, and in the course of their drinking, if Joyce ran into any sort of belligerence, he would jump behind his “powerful friend,” shouting “Deal with him Hemingway, deal with him!” So. What was true 100 years ago is still true today: Some writers you want to know, some writers you don’t. (Thanks Open Culture!)

The wonderful new travel website Fathom has an excellent list of recommended books to lose yourself in while traveling. See the list here. There are a few books I’ve already read, (don’t even get me started about how much I loved David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves, I go on!), but also a couple I’ve been meaning to get to.

Fathom is a treasure trove of great and inspiring ideas. The site is the brainchild of Pavia Rosati, the sort of person who knows exactly what to do and where to do it, and if she doesn’t, she knows who does. Pavia has impeccable taste in, well, everything, and Fathom reflects her discernment. Best lunch? Lo Scoglio on the Amalfi Coast. What to do if you only have one day in London. Different ideas for a family reunion. How to travel and do good. Find the most romantic hotels. And on and on, around the world.
Bookmark and sign up for Fathom’s newsletter here.

By the way, if you happen to be going to Paris, I helped put together a list of my favorite “Literary Paris” books for Fathom – here. And an itinerary of literary things to do once you’re there.

Former NYT restaurant critic and Gourmet Mag editor Ruth Reichl is a Certifiable National Treasure. Don’t miss the Daily Front Row interview with her here.

The Guardian recently ran a great article by the bibliotherapists (yes!) at London’s The School of Life. They’re saying reading fiction has “not only the power to lift spirits, but to effect fundamental psychological shifts.” I like especially that they mention (one of my favorite books) Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a way for the disillusioned to re-engage with life, and prescribe Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as “a calming balm.” Ann Leary (my client) has a wonderful piece up on NPR.org this week about how she turns to Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne to feel better when she is depressed. You can read Ann’s piece here.
If you’re racking your brain to think of novels to read to cure what ails you, note that TSOL’s bibliotherapy services are available in person as well as via phone/skype.