Dear Wags,

Apologies for leaving you without a Book Wag last week; I was in La-La Land for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It was my third appearance there, but my first as an author. I took part in a panel called Life, Interrupted: Mental-Health Memoirs, with fellow memoirists Alice Carrière (Everything/Nothing/Someone) and Anna Gazmarian (Devout), moderated by my colleague, Chicago critic Elizabeth Taylor. 

We had a packed audience, which included my stalwart Counterpoint Press editor Dan Smetanka, who is now editorial director at Catapult. We fielded a lot of good questions and signed plenty of books.

The festival has been around since 1996 and draws around 150,000 fans annually. It’s a Lollapalooza for book nerds. My panel happened to be up against an event featuring literary stars Pico Iyer and Lydia Millet, so I’m thankful we held our own.

Sadly, I’ve returned home to more book world natter about how nobody is reading books. Please. Plenty of people are reading books. The booksellers at the festival were selling out of titles. A diversity of readers stood in very long lines to have their favorite titles signed by authors of every type.

The profits in book publishing are rarely huge. But book publishing does make billions in profits each year. Today’s consumers have lots of competition for their attention. I’m not chastising anybody for setting aside a doorstop to do the Wordle, because a lot of the time, that’s me. Americans may read differently, but books remain a remarkably durable cultural product.

A lot of corporate frustration has to do with the fact that publishing is a human art as well as a cynical industry. Try as you might, you still can’t algorithm your way to a bestseller. Thankfully, there are no easy hacks in this game. Discovering a really good book will always involve tremendous creative risk.

No book appeals to every reader, and yet magically, there is a book out there for every reader. The alchemy involved persists despite layoffs and endless memoirs from Real Housewives. That’s the wonder of events like the LA Times Festival, where casual and avid readers can hear from authors directly and connect with their work in a way that’s more personal than thumping a like or share button. An fragmented world, this sort of meet-up matters.

It makes all the difference to me, anyway. After my panel was over, I hung out with pals and colleagues who share my passion for books. I geeked out with Traci Thomas of The Stacks podcast, Kaveh Akbar, author of the terrific new novel Martyr!, and Miwa Messer, host of B&N’s Poured Over pod. You can obsess over profits or you can revel with your people. Whatever happens to publishing, book people are the best.

Yours ever,

BKP

Clockwise from upper left: Kaveh Akbar, Traci Thomas, Yours Truly, and Miwa Messer at the LA Times Festival.

PS: I took an extra day in California to visit The Huntington Library, with its glorious galleries and gardens. The roses were in full bloom and yes, I did stop to smell them. I also got to see Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. He’s worth it.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton

Let’s ignore the NYT review, not just because it was unkind, but because it was totally wrong. Dutton, who wrote the breathtaking Margaret the First, has put together an experimental collection of short meditations that make up a sort of artist’s manifesto. This is a surrealist work of literature, set in an earthy Midwest. “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read,” examines garments from authors as disparate as Edith Wharton and Jamaica Kincaid, which reminded me of Kiki Smith’s Historic Clothing Collection at Smith College. It may not be for everybody, but the daring is admirable.

Crow Talk by Eileen Garvin

Corvids are remarkable. As a kid, I was lucky enough to live close to a wildlife museum that hosted a talking crow, who despite being no one’s pet had a vocabulary that grew to almost 75 words. Garvin’s novel features Frankie, an ornithologist Frankie and composer, Anne, who has a nonverbal son. The trio bond when they find an injured baby crow. The humans find solace from grief and other losses while tending to the injured creature. Garvin renders a quiet story that’s intriguingly complicated not just cozy. And it’s beautifully set amid the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

Oracle by Thomas Olde Heuvelt