Like Mother, (Not) Like Daughter

When she was 15 years old, digging around where she shouldn’t have been, Anna Stothard found an old box of her mother’s love letters. The letters, which weren’t from her father, were all signed “Douglas” or simply “D."

Stothard read those letters over and over, puzzling over who could have written them. Eventually, after recognizing a few unusual phrases about aliens and Galactic bureaucracy, Stothard realized the letters were from Douglas Adams. Yes, that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and, coincidentally, one of Stothard’s favorite authors. Flash forward 15 years ...

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Hollywood: It’s Not Just for Reptiles

Matthew Specktor is sticking up for a city that writers and filmmakers have been dissing for far too long. “I read wonderful books set in Chicago, London, Brooklyn,” Specktor says. “Shouldn’t Los Angeles be treated on par with those places, and not as an aquarium filled with beautiful but poisonous fish?”

With American Dream Machine, Specktor, author of the novel That Summertime Sound and a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, depicts the movie business, and L.A. proper, in a way that celebrates its humanity and even dignity.

“I’ve worked in Hollywood, that’s ...

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The Second Act of Charles Dubow's American Life

To a certain extent, Harry Winslow, one of the key characters in Indiscretion, Charles Dubow’s debut novel, lives something close to his author’s dream. Harry, a National Book Award winning author, and his wife Maddy summer in the Hamptons, engaging in the boozy, lively existence of wealthy artists. There’s something pleasantly old-fashioned—the word Gatsby-esque comes to mind—about Harry and Maddy’s sun-soaked life of cocktail parties and boating expeditions.

But the rarefied world isn’t a fantasy for Dubow—in fact, that’s where the author grew up. “I was lucky,” Dubow confesses. “My parents ...

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The School of Life (and Sex)

Though people are definitely buying Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex, de Botton knows some readers won’t buy his book in their local bookstore. “The sales have been much higher online,” de Botton said during a recent interview. “There’s still an awful lot of shame [about sex]. Shame is the key word.”

It’s this sense of shame that de Botton’s new title seeks to shatter. The author of 12 books, many of them best-sellers, including Status Anxiety, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and How Proust Can Change Your Life, de Botton ...

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