Q: Would you tell readers about your novel?

“The Ministry of Time” is a tragicomic time-travel romance about empire, bureaucracy and cigarettes. It follows Graham Gore, a Victorian naval officer and ‘expat’ from a doomed 19th century Arctic expedition to the 21st century; and the book’s narrator, his ‘bridge’ – a civil servant who works as a liaison, helpmeet and supervisor for expats from history. I was partly inspired by Graham Greene novels and James Bond films, partly inspired by the history of British polar exploration, and partly just really wanted to mash these two characters together like Barbie dolls to make them kiss.

Q: Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?

I don’t know about ‘always’ – it depends on the reader and the situation – but I can tell you I’ve been recommending “Beautyland” by Marie-Helene Bertino to everyone since I read it last month. It’s incredibly funny, it has a sort of deceptive weightlessness of prose that is doing major emotional heavy lifting, and it moved me so much that I finished it on a plane and was weeping so hard that I forgot I’m terrified of flying.

Incidentally, if anyone read that and thought, “Oh, I love novels that make me feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach [complimentary],” I also recommend “A Burning” by Megha Majumdar and “The Storm We Made” by Vanessa Chan.

Q: What are you reading now?

I’ve just finished “Real Americans” by Rachel Khong – what a belter of a novel! I slammed the last page at about 1 a.m. last night and went, “Now that’s writing!” to my fiancé (asleep). I’ve also been in a reading group for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for the past nine months. We’re finishing the book on Bloomsday. I really don’t know what I’ll do when Joyce’s fart jokes are no longer a part of my regular reading landscape.

Q: How do you decide what to read next?

I have so many TBR piles around my house that the decision has been taken out of my hands. I’m trying to work my way through them.

Q: Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?

My joint edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll. It was the first book I read by myself as a small child. I thought – and still think – it was a stupendous work of playfulness and strangeness. I love the way Carroll treated language as plastic, elastic, and endlessly mouldable. I can still recite ‘Jabberwocky’ by heart and half the words in that aren’t real.

Q: Is there a book you’re nervous to read?

I’m planning on shunting the “Ulysses” gang into a long group read of “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo, but I’m worried it won’t be as fun (fewer fart jokes), or that we’ll lose momentum because it is so large and requires a fair bit of commitment. I’ve never even seen the musical so I don’t know what to expect. Anna Hathaway has a bad time, I think?

Q: Can you recall a book that felt like it was written with you in mind (or conversely, one that most definitely wasn’t)?

Pretty much anything written by Kingsley Amis feels like it was written against me, even as I find him very funny (in a ghastly way) and an effortless stylist. I identified with Margaret Peel in “Lucky Jim” out of sheer pique.

Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?

I recently read “The Conquest of Bread” by Peter Kropotkin and I was amazed by his empathy for and understanding of the contribution of unwaged domestic labour and care work – chiefly performed by women – to the economy and to communities. It really cheered me up to imagine that a man in 1892 (!!!) was already certain that the emancipation of women had to involve liberation from, or truly equal sharing of, those forms of unwaged labour.

Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?

Yes, it’s the cover of “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley, available from all good bookshops.

Q: Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?

I don’t listen to audiobooks. My brain goes for a walk and I miss key plot points. I’d experience “Anna Karenina” as a novella.

Q: Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?

I read a lot of literary fiction and classic fiction. I’d like to read more classic SFF. Over the course of the “Ministry” book tour, I’ve also met a lot of romance writers and booksellers, and I’ve found them so welcoming, smart and unpretentious. I’d love to read more romance.

Q: Do you have a favorite book or books?

Too many to list. I can tell you that my most re-read books are from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. They have sometimes felt like a life raft to me.

Q: Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?

On the TBR pile next to my bed (as distinct from, say, the TBR pile in my office, the other TBR pile in my officer, and my TBR pile at work), the next two books are “Thousand Cranes” by Yasunari Kawabata (in Edward G. Seidensticker’s translation), and Aristotle’s “Poetics” (in Malcolm Heath’s translation). They are both extremely short. “Ulysses” has been so very long, you see. Brilliant, and one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, but so. very. long.

Q: Is there a person who made impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

My grandmother – my dad’s mother – wanted me to be Extremely Literate, on the grounds that this was how one got on in life. (Regrettably I think you have to be Extremely Numerate, which I am not.) I was given a copy of Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare” when I was a small child, along with the aforementioned copy of “Alice in Wonderland.” When I was about 11, she gave me “Frost in May” by Antonia White (she’d been brought up in a Catholic convent) which blew my tiny mind; and “Masquerade” by Kit Williams, which I was simply not clever enough to solve but I liked looking at anyway.

Q: What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?

The language. There’s no particular style that I prefer, but I most admire style that feels deliberate and crafted, that’s serving a particular purpose. I also like it when you can see the writer just doing gymnastics at sentence level. That’s very fun. I know that, e.g., Sheena Patel, Francis Spufford, Julia Armfield, Bryan Washington, Ben Marcus, Raven Leilani and A.K. Blakemore are all doing extremely different things – but I think they’re all being deliberate and also brilliant. This is also why I think translators are so important, and why it’s always worth naming the translator of a book; their creative and stylistic choices will change the way you read a work in translation.

Q: What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share? 

I read “As Meat Loves Salt” by Maria McCann when I had COVID during a 40-degree Celsius [104 degree Fahrenheit] heatwave and it felt like the text was happening just behind my left shoulder (I was very feverish). I got COVID again earlier this year, while I was reading “City of Corpses” by Yoko Ota (in Richard Minear’s translation). It’s about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, which Ota survived. I do not recommend reading this book when you are very sick and distressed as it is.

Q: What’s something about your book that no one knows?

Well, that would be telling.

Q: If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?

Is “Les Misérables” any good?

For more about the novel, go to the Kaliane Bradley author page

Just ask the author.

“I was sitting in my office, working away; air conditioning was on. I’m in London on a foggy, cold day in winter, and I thought I’d better stop for a bite to eat,” says Winspear during a Zoom interview a few days before the June 4 publication of her latest book, “The Comfort of Ghosts.” “I came out of my office into the garden, and went, ‘Oh my god!’ I had a real culture shock.”

Turns out, that dank London fog had all been in her imagination. She was at home in 21st-century California. 

“I was in Ojai writing. I’d had the curtains closed because, you know, it’s bright and sunny out there and it was a very hot day,” says the British-born author who has lived in the United States for 34 years, mainly in California and the Pacific Northwest. 

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“I just was so immersed I didn’t realize where I was. It’s easy to do that, but I guess I’m so well-practiced now that I can really drop into the era I write about. I can drop into the story.” 

However, the author says she isn’t planning to drop in on Maisie Dobbs anymore.

After 18 books about psychologist and investigator Dobbs and her supporting cast of characters, Winspear announced that “The Comfort of Ghosts” is the final book of the series, which she began writing 24 years ago and first published in 2003. Winspear says the novel, without giving away spoilers, aims to provide a satisfying accounting for all the main characters.

“It’s not a new decision,” she says about ending the series. “I wanted there to be an arc to the overall body of work, not just an arc to each story.

“It’s bittersweet because I’m saying goodbye to the characters. But the great thing is, I have my body of work. It’s there, it’s solid, and it’s not drifting off anywhere,” she says. “I didn’t see the point of carrying on a series or coming up with plots just to carry on … I had done what I needed to do with them, what I wanted to do.”

The novel’s publication also brings Winspear back to her first publisher, Soho Crime, which first launched the series. “The Comfort of Ghosts” is dedicated to the late Laura Hruska, Soho’s co-founder and Winspear’s first editor.

“There was just something right about the idea of coming full circle,” she says. “It was as if, you know, it was the arc to my story.” 

Way Out West

Winspear wrote a moving tribute to the character Maisie Dobbs in a newsletter published June 4, in which she also revealed the very California origins of this very British character. (She followed up with another update on June 10 to say she’d broken a bone in her foot while at the airport and needed to put her appearances on hold.)

“You certainly changed my life, the day you walked into my imagination while I was stuck in traffic,” writes Winspear about Maisie Dobbs. “By the time I reached the office, I had your whole story in my head, even though I had not written a word of fiction since childhood.”

Considering that Winspear has lived here so long, does she consider herself a California writer?

“I think a lot of there’s a lot of California in me,” she says in a crisp British accent, adding that she’s occasionally mistaken for an American when visiting friends in the U.K. “Have I changed? There are things about me that have changed, but there are also my foundations, which are very firmly British.”

Speaking from her home in the Pacific Northwest, where she spends a lot of time, she explained how she landed in Ojai.

“When I first came to California, I lived in Ventura County, and I always liked Ojai very much because it’s got that small-town feel, and it has a great bookshop, good old Bart’s books,” says Winspear. “It was actually for my husband’s health; he needed to live in a more stable climate. And also, my brother lived there … it’s nice to have family close by.”

Winspear speculated on another reason that might have led to her move out West. “My dad loved cowboys. We watched American TV shows when I was a kid,” she says. “America was the shining star on the hill.”

Family stories

Winspear’s 2020 memoir about growing up in rural England, “This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing,” is rich in detail about her early life and provides glimpses into the inspirations for her work. Her interest in the past was piqued during her peripatetic childhood, which at times involved living on a farm without indoor plumbing

“Storytelling was big in my family … Everything became something to talk about,” she says. “Where we lived, there weren’t many kids; there were actually a lot of elderly people. And ever since I was a little girl, someone only had to say, ’Well, in my day…’ and I was ears flapping, you know? I couldn’t wait to hear about ‘their day.’”

The Maisie Dobbs novels, which span the period between the two World Wars, combine history and mystery, often exploring the visible and invisible effects of violence and trauma upon soldiers and people back home. Winspear’s interest in the experiences of soldiers in the First World War arose in part from her interactions with her own grandfather.

“Veterans don’t have finite dates for their wars. My grandfather, who was severely wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was still removing shrapnel from his legs when he died, aged 77, in 1966,” says Winspear, who wrote in her memoir about seeing her grandfather massaging his scarred legs and picking metal splinters from out of his skin.

She recounts a beloved teacher and neighbor who told her about seeing a WWI veteran with severe facial wounds, a story that both haunted her and helped inspire elements of the first novel. That teacher, Ken Leech, and his wife Pat, influenced Winspear in other ways: their passion and care for animals found a willing audience in the author. (In her recent essay, Winspear, a dog lover who trains in the equestrian sport of dressage, praises her “writing buddies,” the dogs who dozed under her desk as she wrote. During our conversation, she talked about volunteering at the Humane Society and spoke passionately about aiding horses endangered by the war in Ukraine.)

Winspear says the memoir helped her unearth memories that had played an important part of her life, but she’d not been consciously aware of.

“When I wrote my memoir, I recounted a conversation between me and my mother that I realized has underpinned everything I’ve written for the last 24 years,” says Winspear. “I only realized it a few years ago when I wrote the memoir.”

Winspear’s formidable mother – who told her daughter many stories, including that she’d been pulled from the rubble of a bombed-out building during the London Blitz – at one time worked as an administrator in Britain’s prison system, and Winspear recalls asking her mother about the young offenders at the detention center and how they had ended up there.

“She said, ‘You know, Jackie, it’s because someone, somewhere along the line, didn’t care enough,’” says Winspear. “That had such an impact, and I didn’t know it. It was almost as if it nestled in my heart and stayed there.

“I realized it’s underpinned the character of Maisie Dobbs. I wanted to write about people who cared enough amid everything that’s happened,” she says. “I wanted to write about a character that cares enough through the best and worst of times.”

Farewell, Maisie

Having concluded the series, Winspear has “several” new projects underway, including a more lighthearted story about a character who’d previously had a small role in the saga. For that one, or perhaps another, Winspear is already doing prep.

“I’m doing the research right now, and I’ve got a trip planned later in the year. I’m not even going to tell you where I’m going,” she says. “Because I’ll give the game away.” 

So she’s got plenty to do, but it must be asked: Won’t it be hard to say goodbye to Maisie Dobbs? 

“My story is wrapped up in the story of Maisie Dobbs,” she says. “I don’t think she’s ever going to leave my head.” 

And that’s when the novelist saw a message from his literary agent: Call me.

But Battles didn’t have a moment to spare, making it on the plane as the doors closed behind him. 

“I couldn’t even make the call; I had zero time,” says Battles during a Zoom interview. “Once I got to Europe, I had to wait another six hours because now she was asleep.” 

Battles, a novelist with more than 40 books to his credit, including his Jonathan Quinn thriller series, had served as a co-writer on a Stuart Woods’ novel, “Obsession,” about former CIA operative turned Hollywood producer character Teddy Fay. 

“I wrote spy books and I worked in Hollywood,” says Battles of how he came to co-write the Fay novel. “We worked together to do that book. … Two weeks after I turned it in, Stuart passed away in his sleep. I honestly thought that was it; I wouldn’t be playing in his universe anymore.”

So as he strolled around Lake Zurich with friends, Battles tried to stay awake and stave off jet lag until he connected with his agent and got the news: Stuart Woods had been working on a new novel in his popular series of books about cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington when he died. Would Battles be willing to come on and write the rest of the book?

“They were interested in having me finish it. So that was a very shocking moment for me. And of course, I said, ‘Well, yes, please, I would love to do that,’” says Battles, who immediately got to work on what would be published as 2023’s “Near Miss.”

“This was October and they needed it by December 15. And, of course, I was at the beginning of a two-week trip also. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ … Who’s going to pass up on that opportunity?” says the author. 

Battles threw himself into the challenge, reading Woods’ drafts and listening to the audiobook versions of the novels while on his trip. “I’m making notes, I’m listening to books and going on tours with everybody when I can,” he says. “And then came home and just got to work.”

It sounds like his traveling companions were an understanding bunch.

“Very understanding. They think more highly of the fact that they have a friend who’s an author than I think they should.” he laughs.

Into the Woods

Battles has just published his first solo Stone Barrington novel, “Stuart Woods’ Smolder,” which arrived in stores June 4. The thriller, which includes stops in New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe, involves art, arson, forgery, fraud, revenge, romance, and the legacy of Barrington’s mother, a painter. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Barrington and his previous 60+ adventures, he seems in the mold of well-to-do crime fighters such as Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage, Batman, and “The Thin Man” team of Nick and Nora Charles. Barrington is a wealthy lawyer with charm, good looks and important friends. These include several former U.S. presidents, the heads of MI6 and the CIA, and his sometime girlfriend, who happens to be the sitting president of the United States.

“It’s a really fun world to play in. Stone has enough money to do whatever he wants, or whatever he needs to do, but he still works,” says Battles. “The jokes and the quips and everything – that’s the charm of the novels … they’re enjoyable and just keep you entertained.”

“It’s a very rich world,” says Battles, referring to its creative possibilities before joking about its high-end appeal. “And then it’s also a very rich world.”

Despite collaborating on a book while Woods was alive, Battles says his face-to-face interactions with the author had been brief.

“I had in person only met him twice,” says Battles, who explained that they’d been on a panel at a festival and then later appeared together at a Skylight Books event. “We may have passed and shaken hands, but that’s about it.”

When it comes to bridging his own efforts with all the stories that came before, Battles says he scoured the novels, taking note of anything he might be able to refer or call back to. In “Smolder,” for example, a beach house briefly mentioned in an earlier novel plays a role in the new adventure, which is one way of connecting Battles’ work to Woods’.

“It’s his stuff, but I like to think I’m keeping it alive,” says Battles.

In his own world

Battles and this reporter, full disclosure, first crossed paths more than 15 years ago; we worked for the same company and he signed a copy of his first Jonathan Quinn novel, “The Cleaner,” for me in my office. Last year, we ran into each other at Bouchercon, the mystery writers’ convention in San Diego, and caught up.

Battles, who had worked on various Hollywood projects over the years, told me that he’d always known what his calling was.

“I always wanted to be a writer. In fifth grade, I was telling people I was going to be a novelist. And that was always what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know exactly how to get there. So I went to Cal State Northridge and got a degree in television & film because I also liked film,” he says.

But after working at a TV studio, a graphics company and a cable TV channel, he began to wonder if he’d ever achieve his dream. “I had just kind of fallen into this whole visual arts portion of entertainment while all the time I wanted to be a writer.”

So he decided to get serious about making it happen.

“I actually lived very close to the office so that I could walk and have more time to write in the mornings,” he says. “And then after work, I’d write for an hour or two.”

“In three years, I wrote three books while working,” he says. “That’s always what I wanted to do. I was starting to think I’d never get there and so that’s why I put on the turbo to get stuff done.”

Battles, who is contracted to do more Teddy Fay and Stone Barrington titles, says he’s also currently at work on two related series of his own, which will take him into some new territory. “I love apocalyptic fiction and so I just kind of wanted to play with that a little bit and see what would happen,” says Battles. “I can do it – so, why not?”

Continental draft

As he was working on his next Woods’ novel, Battles says he felt a bit of déjà vul. While making it clear that it was no one’s fault, just a scheduling quirk, he says his deadline for the manuscript changed so the due date coincided with, yes, a vacation overseas.

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll work on the trip.’ So I’m on another river cruise, getting up early and working on that,” he says. “I literally finished the draft of that book in the airport 45 minutes before we boarded the plane to come home.”

“Maybe I should not go to Europe anymore,” he says. “That’s the message I’m getting.”

That’s what we were left with when I last wrote about Janet Halverson, the creator of iconic book covers from the 1950s to the 1990s, including Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur.”

Despite creating indelible designs for classic books, Halverson herself is largely unknown and unheralded. And that shouldn’t be.

That’s what Michael Russem, book designer and owner of Katherine Small Gallery near Boston, thought. So after years of tracking down everything he could about Halverson and her work, Russem mounted an exhibit of her designs.

As Russem, who’s also a friend, told me earlier this year, he’d been shocked at how little information there was.

“There’s nothing about her anywhere. There are all sorts of magazine articles about these other guys, but nothing about her,” he’d said then. “Graphic designers … all recognize her work and recognize it as being good. But she just went unnoticed, which is true of all the women of her generation. There are no magazine articles about any of them.”

Even after years of searching, he’d come up empty. Then something changed.

“I got an email not long after your article came out from one of Janet’s nieces,” Russem told me this week, adding that Halverson’s niece Susan lives a little more than 10 miles away from him. “She’d found your piece online.”

“That is something I never expected to happen,” says Russem about connecting with a family member so near. “Somehow we caught her at just the right time.”

Halverson’s niece told him that the designer had died in early 2018, having spent the last few years of her life battling Alzheimer’s disease. Russem invited Susan and her husband to come see what he’d collected.

“They came to the store. Unfortunately, the show had just closed. So we didn’t get to look at the show, but I pulled out some of the books and we talked about them … Janet was Susan’s aunt, not ‘a famous graphic designer,’ so I learned about her as a person, not necessarily what she thought about design,” he says.

I asked Russem how they’d described Halverson. She could be challenging in certain circumstances, he was told, but she could also be a charmer.

“She was smart and funny. She skipped grades in school, which explains how she graduated from college at age 19 – that was something I’d always found weird. She hung out with artists and writers and she lived the life of an artist. And then when she was no longer designing,” he told me. “She switched to painting.”

Was there anything he learned about her work? Apparently, Russem says, Halverson loathed her design for the ’70s blockbuster novel “The Thorn Birds” – the publisher had insisted on a naturalistic illustration – and never wanted to see it again.

Halverson’s niece remembered seeing her aunt’s designs in bookstores as a child. How did she and her husband respond to an entire exhibit devoted to the work?

“They were kind of surprised by all this, even though they had known from googling her that people were interested,” says Russem, who then poses his own question. “Why were people interested? There was just something special about her work – and then to know this work was made by a woman at a time when women weren’t getting any attention made her story even more special.”

Despite the belief that Halverson’s materials, papers and letters did not survive, it’s possible there will be more to unravel, more to learn. A library sciences student has already reached out to Russem about Halverson’s work, he says.

And for Russem, connecting with Halverson’s family was a powerful experience on its own, whatever comes next.

“Oh my gosh, I was ecstatic, because I’d hoped that this would provide all the missing answers,” says Russem. “It didn’t, which I’m almost glad for because then it would mean this was all done and over.”

See more of Russem’s collection of Halverson’s designs at The People’s Graphic Design Archive or visit Katherine Small Gallery.

Jenny Erpenbeck, International Booker Prize winner, in Southern California

This week, the writer Jenny Erpenbeck won the International Booker Prize for her novel, “Kairos.” Translator Michael Hofmann shares the prize with her.

Just a few days prior, I ventured out to the Wende Museum in Culver City to see Erpenbeck in conversation with Louise Steinman. It was a blustery day and a community event in the park nearby added to the festivities (and the dearth of parking), but it was a pleasure to return to the unusual museum, which is a “art museum, cultural center, and archive of the Cold War.”

Held outside, the discussion was a little hard to hear in some spots, but it was being recorded (I reached out to the museum to find out if it would be made available to the public but hadn’t heard back as I wrote this). Erpenbeck, as she began to read from “Kairos,” joked that Southern California was good for her: “I don’t need my glasses. I become younger here.”

Afterward, I was able to chat with the author for a few minutes as the book signing got underway, mentioning that I’d been introduced to her work by Jean Gillingwators who runs Blackbird Press in Upland and who has great, eclectic taste in books (so I may have picked up a copy for her along with my own from Village Well, which was the event vendor).

And in keeping with the event’s small world feeling, I also ran into Laura Silverstein and Tom Nissley of the excellent Phinney Books, one of my favorite bookstores in Seattle, who were visiting. (Tom is another Backlisted podcast fan, too.) They were with Krank Press printer Elinor Nissley and jack-of-all-cool-trades Alex MacInnis who made a series of audio programs called Valley of Smoke that I really liked. They’re an accomplished bunch – google Tom’s “Jeopardy” run, for example – but also friendly folks. It made the day even better.

Why am I sharing all this? Possibly as a suggestion that it can be a good idea to go to an in-person author reading and pick up a signed book or three. Or that Southern California had the International Man Booker Prize winner in our midst, and it was pretty terrific.

Julia Hannafin likes the covers of old paperback novels

Julia Hannafin is the author of the novel “Cascade,” published in April by independent press Great Place Books. They have worked as a staff writer on Showtime’s “The L Word: Generation Q” and as an assistant to screenwriter Eric Roth while he was writing the script for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune.” 

Q: How do you decide what to read next?

A mix of friends’ recommendations, Twitter, and following the syllabi of the online classes I’ve taken after college. Rabbit holes of writers I admire.

Q: Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?

I was a big reader as a kid and don’t remember the first. But I loved Gabrielle Zevin’s “Elsewhere” and her vision of an afterlife. I read the Tamora Pierce series on Alanna’s journey to becoming a knight cover to cover. And my middle school English teacher made us memorize poems and perform them, which introduced me to e.e. cummings, who showed me I could do whatever I wanted with nouns and verbs.

Q: What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that stayed with you from a recent reading?

I’m thinking about what Hanif Abdurraqib said in a recent interview, how in a desire to love someone in a big way, we can rush to love the imagined person, not the actual. Also, from Maya Binyam’s “Hangman”: “I tried to go home — home was inside of me.” And from Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” “If you can’t fix it you got a stand it. … I been looking at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?”

Q: Do you have any favorite book covers?

I love small, ‘70s and ‘80s style paperbacks — graphic and bright and simple. I also love the Clarice Lispector series of books where her portrait comes together in four parts.

Q: Do you have a favorite book or books?

“Things We Lost in The Fire” by Mariana Enríquez, “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson, “The Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler, “To The Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf.

Q: Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?

José Saramago’s “Blindness.”

Q: What’s something about your book that no one knows?

I think part of my writing this book was an attempt to understand my mom Dawn better, whose father, my grandfather, died from a heart attack and the disease of alcoholism. She was pregnant with me when he died.

More books, authors and bestsellers

The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

• • •

Band(member) on the run

A disgraced K-pop star hides in Southern California. ‘The Band’ tells the story. READ MORE

• • •

Lush life

A ’90s pop star, Miki Berenyi tells her own story ahead of LA show. READ MORE

• • •

‘Blue’ Clues

Hari Kunzru’s “Blue Ruin” examines love and relationships during lockdown. READ MORE

• • •

Avian calling

Amy Tan hopes “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” makes you a conservationist. READ MORE

• • •

Book pitch

Why Los Angeles Dodgers great Clayton Kershaw agreed to a new biography. READ MORE

Next on ‘Bookish’

Check out the next event with Alex Espinoza and Mike Madrid

June 21 at 5 p.m. Sign up for free now.

• • •

Have you read anything you’d like to share with other readers? Email epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

“I like the film quite a bit, and I appreciate the fact that it is not my novel. Cord Jefferson mined my novel and took what he needed to make his film,” Everett says. “And that’s what he’s supposed to do.”

Just don’t expect to see Everett, who is not known for seeking the spotlight, appearing at the Hollywood event in the future.

“We did go, and there’s no need to ever go again,” he laughs, adding that he had a “fine” time. “The attention to the work is nice, but … it was hard to sit through. But at least in between during the commercial breaks, you can wander outside.”

One of the nation’s most acclaimed novelists as well as the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett possesses a work ethic that is legendary: He’s published more than 30 books, and his most recent novels — “Dr. No,” “The Trees” and “Telephone” — have landed on various shortlists including for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the NBCC Award for Fiction and more. (And he still finds time to paint, fish and play guitar.)

When we meet up on Zoom to discuss his new novel, “James,” Everett is dressed casually and seated in his South Pasadena home office surrounded by books, assorted gear and stringed instruments. In the book, which may be his best yet, the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is narrated by the enslaved character Jim rather than Huck Finn.

In Everett’s version, Jim — or, as the character writes when he puts pencil to paper, “James” — reveals himself to be a richer, more complex character: He’s a considerate and loving parent, a teacher and thinker, a builder and fixer of most anything, and a self-taught reader and writer (through his surreptitious visits to Judge Thatcher’s library). He is also a determined man wary of the ways in which slavery not only robs the enslaved of their physical freedom and personal safety, but also aims to stifle intellectual and emotional freedom.

Throughout our conversation, Everett provided thoughtful, wryly humorous responses as we discussed the novel, Twain, “The Andy Griffith Show” and more. (And full disclosure: While this was our first-ever conversation, our spouses were once employed at the same college and know each other.)

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Was ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ a book you had strong feelings about? What drew you to writing your own version?

A. Well, you know, it has an iconic stature in the literary culture. It’s a novel we know even if we don’t know it. I read it as a little kid in an abridged version, which didn’t do anything for me.

I love Twain. I didn’t like ‘Tom Sawyer’ at all, but I loved ‘Roughing It,’ I loved ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ and there was another one that was just crazy, ‘The Mysterious Stranger,’ that no one talks about, ‘The Diaries of Adam and Eve.’ Hilarious stuff.

And so, much of my humor was shaped by Twain, and then when I was older, I did read the unabridged “Huck Finn” and even as a teenager, the depiction of Jim, naively on my part, is problematic. It’s not until I was a little more mature and understood Twain and his position in the culture that I could understand that depiction. Maybe not excuse it completely, but understand it.

Q. Can you talk a little more about that?

A. The novel really is America wandering through this landscape, trying to figure itself out. That’s what Huck is. Huck is the quintessential adolescent American. And I don’t mean 12-year-old American; I mean, 12-year-old America, that young country trying to come to grips with race. And so it really is an important text.

It’s the first novel where it’s about a person who is subjected to slavery and not about slavery. And so with that in my head, I just wondered if anyone had written it from Jim’s point of view. Since then, I found out that there is a short story — I still haven’t seen it – about Jim after the novel. But I was shocked to find out that no one had written one — and then I realized I hadn’t thought of it either, so I couldn’t really blame anybody.

Q. One of the most striking things about the character Jim is how you evoke his concern for his family, for others, and for Huck.

A. Even in “Huck Finn,” the only positive father figure — well, maybe Judge Thatcher, peripherally — that Huck has is Jim. I suppose in some readings it can be reduced to “companion,” but the only positive male role model for him is Jim.

Q. People — like Tom Sawyer, Pap or other adults in his life — are often telling Huck things that aren’t true, but Jim, who is narrating and relating his own story, is possibly the only person telling the truth.

A. I hadn’t thought about that so much, but I like that take on it. For Jim, there’s something at stake in his being able to explore ideas in a literary way. At the other end of that, for him, is a freedom that he can’t physically enjoy.

Q. Can you talk about the elements you introduced to the story and what you decided to leave out?

A. Well, since in the novel, Jim and Huck are separated a lot of the time, those were easy. And since it’s from Jim’s point of view, the dangers inherent in any of those scenes where they are together are different, as well as that it’s through the eyes of an adult rather than a child.

This is not a complaint at all about Twain, but I’m thinking less to entertain than I am to interrogate. And so when I have a chance to work with [con men characters] the duke and the dauphin, my mission is different from Twain’s.

Q. Your novel is affecting, harrowing and, it has to be said, often extremely funny. How did you navigate all those elements?

A. I’m pathologically ironic, and I think any humor that I employ is a result of that irony. I would be a terrible comedian. I’m no good at making up jokes, but just observing an absurd world.

Do you remember “The Andy Griffith Show”? They can wear on you if watch them, but one of the things that I found great about that show — and I found out later that Griffith worked hard on this — is that there’s not a single joke in it. It’s all story-generated — all the humor is story-generated, except for Don Knotts’ physical humor. That was kind of an object lesson to see that.

Q. Jim has hallucinations in which he debates the philosophers Locke and Voltaire. What made you decide to do that?

A. Well, again, irony: The Declaration of Independence, being penned by the gnostic Thomas Jefferson, a figure of the Enlightenment like Voltaire and Locke who can espouse equality among men but yet find ways to rationalize slavery.

Q. You’ve mentioned that you have a tradition where you will write a book in the place you first started it. Where did you start this book and write it?

A. I was at the coffee table. Yeah, that’s pretty much where it happened.

Q. Earlier, you said you don’t remember your books, and I wonder if that’s similar to a reader’s experience — how we can be invested in a book only to find later that it’s hard to recall details of what happened in the story. Is that like what you’re describing?

A. I think that’s probably close to it. I know that sometimes when people remind me of things in my novels, it takes me a while to catch up.

Sometimes it’ll be vivid, other times it’ll be completely new, and I kind of like that. I especially like when they have ideas about what it means that I never thought of. I immediately take credit for it: “This is a great idea; of course, I meant that.” [laughs]

Q. Is that disorienting?

A. Oh, no. It’s just fascinating. People see their own worlds; the work doesn’t exist without a reader and meaning can’t happen without a reader. I wasn’t writing it to convince myself of anything. Lord knows why I was writing it, but there it is.

Q. So after you’ve written it, you no longer need to try to control it.

A. I can’t control it, so why worry about it? I suppose I could go hang out in front of bookstores and explain things to the six people who leave with my book. [laughs]

Q. If you do, please call me. That sounds great.

A. Anything I say about one of my works can be completely disregarded.

Erik Pedersen is a reporter with the Orange County Register.

First-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson, who adapted Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure” to make the film “American Fiction,” won for best adapted screenplay and delivered a rousing acceptance speech that was one of the evening’s highlights.

“I like the film quite a bit, and I appreciate the fact that it is not my novel. Cord Jefferson mined my novel and took what he needed to make his film,” says Everett. “And that’s what he’s supposed to do.”

Just don’t expect to see Everett, who is not known for seeking the spotlight, appearing at the Hollywood event in the future.

“We did go, and there’s no need to ever go again,” he laughs, adding that he had a “fine” time. “The attention to the work is nice, but … it was hard to sit through. But at least in between during the commercial breaks, you can wander outside.”

One of the nation’s most acclaimed novelists as well as the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett’s work ethic is legendary: He’s published more than 30 books, and his most recent novels — “Dr. No,” “The Trees,” and “Telephone” — have landed on various shortlists including for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the NBCC Award for Fiction and more. (And he still finds time to paint, fish and play guitar.)

When we meet up on Zoom to discuss his just-published new novel, “James,” Everett is dressed casually and seated in his South Pasadena home office surrounded by books, assorted gear and stringed instruments. In the book, which may be his best yet, the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is narrated by the enslaved character Jim rather than Huck Finn.

In Everett’s version, Jim — or as the character writes when he puts pencil to paper, “James” — reveals himself to be a richer, more complex character: He’s a considerate and loving parent, a teacher and thinker, a builder and fixer of most anything and a self-taught reader and writer (through his surreptitious visits to Judge Thatcher’s library). He is also a determined man wary of the ways in which slavery not only robs the enslaved of their physical freedom and personal safety, but also how the barbaric practice aims to stifle intellectual and emotional freedom, too.

Throughout our conversation, Everett provided thoughtful, wryly humorous responses as we discussed the novel, Twain, “The Andy Griffith Show” and more. (And full disclosure: While this was our first-ever conversation, our spouses were once employed at the same college and know each other.)

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Was ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ a book you had strong feelings about? What drew you to writing your own version?

Well, you know, it has an iconic stature in the literary culture. It’s a novel we know even if we don’t know it. I read it as a little kid in an abridged version, which didn’t do anything for me. 

I love Twain. I didn’t like ‘Tom Sawyer’ at all, but I loved ‘Roughing It,’ I loved ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ and there was another one that was just crazy, ‘The Mysterious Stranger,’ that no one talks about, ‘The Diaries of Adam and Eve.’ Hilarious stuff.

And so, much of my humor was shaped by Twain, and then when I was older, I did read the unabridged ‘Huck Finn’ and even as a teenager, the depiction of Jim, naively on my part, is problematic. It’s not until I was a little more mature and understood Twain and his position in the culture that I could understand that depiction. Maybe not excuse it completely, but understand it.

Q. Can you talk a little more about that?

The novel really is America wandering through this landscape, trying to figure itself out. That’s what Huck is. Huck is the quintessential adolescent American. And I don’t mean 12-year-old American; I mean, 12-year-old America, that young country trying to come to grips with race. And so it really is an important text. 

It’s the first novel where it’s about a person who is subjected to slavery and not about slavery. And so with that in my head, I just wondered if anyone had written it from Jim’s point of view. Since then, I found out that there is a short story — I still haven’t seen it – about Jim after the novel. But I was shocked to find out that no one had written one — and then I realized I hadn’t thought of it either, so I couldn’t really blame anybody. 

Q. One of the most striking things about the character Jim is how you evoke his concern for his family, for others, and for Huck.

Even in ‘Huck Finn,’ the only positive father figure — well, maybe Judge Thatcher, peripherally — that Huck has is Jim. I suppose in some readings it can be reduced to ‘companion,’ but the only positive male role model for him is Jim.

Q. People — like Tom Sawyer, Pap or other adults in his life — are often telling Huck things that aren’t true, but Jim, who is narrating and relating his own story, is possibly the only person telling the truth. 

I hadn’t thought about that so much, but I like that take on it. For Jim, there’s something at stake in his being able to explore ideas in a literary way. At the other end of that, for him, is a freedom that he can’t physically enjoy.

Q. Can you talk about the elements you introduced to the story and what you decided to leave out?

Well, since in the novel, Jim and Huck are separated a lot of the time, those were easy. And since it’s from Jim’s point of view, the dangers inherent in any of those scenes where they are together are different, as well as that it’s through the eyes of an adult rather than a child.

This is not a complaint at all about Twain, but I’m thinking less to entertain than I am to interrogate. And so when I have a chance to work with [con men characters] the duke and the dauphin, my mission is different from Twain’s.

Q. Your novel is affecting, harrowing and, it has to be said, often extremely funny. How did you navigate all those elements?

I’m pathologically ironic, and I think any humor that I employ is a result of that irony. I would be a terrible comedian. I’m no good at making up jokes, but just observing an absurd world.

Do you remember “The Andy Griffith Show”? They can wear on you if watch them, but one of the things that I found great about that show — and I found out later that Griffith worked hard on this — is that there’s not a single joke in it. It’s all story-generated — all the humor is story-generated, except for Don Knotts’ physical humor. That was kind of an object lesson to see that.

Q. Jim has hallucinations in which he debates the philosophers Locke and Voltaire. What made you decide to do that?

Well, again, irony: The Declaration of Independence, being penned by the gnostic Thomas Jefferson, a figure of the Enlightenment like Voltaire and Locke who can espouse equality among men but yet find ways to rationalize slavery.

Q. You’ve mentioned that you have a tradition where you will write a book in the place you first started it. Where did you start this book and write it?

I was at the coffee table. Yeah, that’s pretty much where it happened.

Q. Earlier, you said you don’t remember your books, and I wonder if that’s similar to a reader’s experience — how we can be invested in a book only to find later that it’s hard to recall details of what happened in the story. Is that like what you’re describing?I think that’s probably close to it. I know that sometimes when people remind me of things in my novels, it takes me a while to catch up. Sometimes it’ll be vivid, other times it’ll be completely new, and I kind of like that. I especially like when they have ideas about what it means that I never thought of. I immediately take credit for it: “This is a great idea; of course, I meant that.” [laughs]

Q. Is that disorienting?

Oh, no. It’s just fascinating. People see their own worlds; the work doesn’t exist without a reader and meaning can’t happen without a reader. I wasn’t writing it to convince myself of anything. Lord knows why I was writing it, but there it is.

Q. So after you’ve written it, you no longer need to try to control it.

I can’t control it, so why worry about it? I suppose I could go hang out in front of bookstores and explain things to the six people who leave with my book. [laughs]

Q. If you do, please call me. That sounds great.

Anything I say about one of my works can be completely disregarded.

As Sheila Heti discusses her new book, “Alphabetical Diaries,” during a Zoom call from her home in Toronto, her dog Feldman can be seen onscreen in the background, his head resting on the arm of the couch, watching her and waiting to go for a walk. Four thousand miles away in Southern California, my own dog is doing the same thing. 

“The man’s best friend thing? When I used to hear that I’d think, I guess that’s just what people say. But when you have a dog, you’re like, Oh, it’s actually just the truth; they’re your best friend in this way that no human could ever be. Like, who would ever be sitting there like this?” says Heti about Feldman, who occasionally emits a mournful sigh during our conversation.

The author of acclaimed books that include “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour,” “How Should a Person Be?” and more, Heti created her latest book, which arrives in stores Feb. 6, by extracting lines from 10 years of her diaries and arranging them in alphabetical, rather than chronological or contextual, order to create a unique and compelling reading experience.

“It really did take me a decade to figure out,” she says. “I started to see that, with certain kinds of edits, I was starting to create a world the same way there is one in a novel.

“I was able to see this as a separate fictional world in which a person is living and thinking and moving rather than earlier in the process when it just felt like it was my diaries,” she says.  

So is it a novel or a diary or memoir? “At one point, I wanted to call it a memoir, but I think it’s closest to a novel because I don’t feel like it’s confessional,” she says. “I feel like it’s a portrait of a person.”

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and to reduce how much we talked about our dogs.

Q. Why did you decide to alphabetize your diary in the first place?

I don’t know honestly, I just remember one day I was putting the sentences into Excel and alphabetizing them. I can come up with all sorts of reasons after the fact, but I honestly don’t know what the spark of that idea was.

Q. You got a book idea while using an Excel spreadsheet?

I use Excel a lot. [laughs] I use it to keep track of how many words I’ve written in a day or how many words I’ve cut or just tracking progress. Yeah, I like it. I like Excel very much.

Q. These are actual diary entries. Were you thinking, I have all this writing already – maybe I could put it to use?

Yeah, I’d just finished “How Should a Person Be?” and it was such a huge project – like seven years writing – that I knew was going to be a long time before I had anything else to work on, before I had a lot of material to edit, which is my favorite part of the process. It was like, ‘I have a lot of writing; maybe I can just start working because I like working and I suddenly had nothing to work on. So I think I was like, ‘Here’s this archive – what happens if I start playing with it?’ 

‘How Should a Person Be?’ was sort of about my life, but this was about my life in a much more real way because ‘How Should a Person Be?’ was this fiction whereas with this, once I pulled all the words together, there was no fiction. It was at first just a diary.

Q. The people and names you mention are fictionalized?

I didn’t write any [new] sentences, but I made composite characters out of the sentences … they were like archetypes of the people that I did encounter over the 10 years. But nobody who was in my life would be able to track any of the characters because they are recombined from sentences about lots of different people turned into one character.

Q. I can imagine that could have been awkward if someone said, Hey, is this me?

I didn’t want anyone to know what I thought about them! [laughs] That was a real puzzle – how would I publish this and not reveal that? And that was the solution.

Q. Typically, people put locks on their diaries and guard them. What’s it like publishing yours as a book for people to read?

I published it in the New York Times last year. I wasn’t scared publishing this book, but I was really scared publishing those excerpts in the Times – they were in a slightly different form, but that was the first time it was really available to such a large audience. And I was really scared. I did think, what kind of person is coming across in these? I couldn’t really tell. 

I don’t feel like anyone can judge me for my fiction because those are characters. But this is not a character so much, you know? I was nervous to have friends and my boyfriend read it and I’m just thinking, ‘Am I revealing a self that they don’t know? Am I revealing a self that they’re not going to like?’ None of that seemed to happen, but it was a real fear.

Q. One of the compelling elements of “Alphabetical Diaries” is that the reader starts to build a narrative out of all of these individual lines from your life. 

I come from theater. To me, it’s like theater – the audience and the actors, all in a room together, make something. That’s what I think I always want to keep from the world of the theater that I love so much – you make something in tandem with other people who are there with you in the present. 

Books are less like that. But there’s a way I’m trying to, I think, make books like that, where you feel like you’re creating a moment with the reader rather than just, ‘Well, here’s the thing I created and now you can experience it.’ 

Q. You edited out 90% of your diaries to get to its final form. Were there things you left in that you weren’t sure whether you wanted to? 

I really had to resist that impulse. There were a lot of things where I felt embarrassed. And I just thought, Well, you have to have a better reason for cutting it than that. There’s a kind of discipline in it, like, it’s just a sentence, you know?

Q. As well as being confessional or confiding, diaries can be where we demand self-improvement, saying things like, “Start eating kale!” or “Make more money!” You call these “injunctions” – why do people use that voice when writing to themselves?

That is one of the diary voices, for sure. I think a diary is a place where you organize yourself, where you try and get your thoughts in order and try to get yourself in order … and put all the pieces of yourself in some coherent form. I think a lot of those injunctions are about that.

At least for me, when I write in my diary, there’s some kind of fantasy of like, I’m going to put everything in its place and then afterward I’ll be able to live. I think it does work for like a day … and then it’s revealed as the fantasy it was.

Q. I read the book, and I also listened to the audiobook read by Kate Berlant, which is fantastic. I loved how much she brought to the work, making each line burst with feeling and emotion. How did she come to narrate the book? 

Kate’s a friend of mine and I just thought she’d be perfect. I saw her one-woman show in New York. I love her voice. She’s so intelligent. I just felt like she would just bring the perfect sensibility to it. And she absolutely did. I showed her a draft of it years ago. So she’s also known about the project for a very long time, which is fun. It’s kind of like a one-woman show or something listening to it. 

Q. You recently co-wrote a story with a chatbot for The New Yorker. People tend to be afraid of AI rather than wanting to work with it.

I understand people who don’t know anything about it feeling like that and I understand people who know a ton about it a feeling like that. It’s not crazy. But for me, I think of it as a tool, a human tool. It’s us in a different form. I find it really fascinating, actually. I like this thing that has access to all of world literature and all of one’s Facebook conversations and all of the Enron emails and just like everything and what comes out of that, because no human can sort of digest that much. So it’s like this new kind of mind, made up of all the text we’ve ever created, or that’s the ambition anyways. I think it’s sort of beautiful and godlike and dumb and wrong and right, and it’s all those things at once.

Q. Going back to the diaries, there are some tough moments when you describe some questionable behavior directed at you. While it could be upsetting, it’s also interesting to note that you chose to include these moments in your book.

Yeah, you always get the last word as a writer. 

From the 1950s to the 1990s, book designer Janet Halverson created covers for an array of authors and titles: Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur,” Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City” and Susan Sontag’s “The Benefactor,” among them.

And it’s her work in the 1960s and 1970s that might be the most indelible – especially her iconic cover design for Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.”

“The world is filled with so much noise,” says Michael Russem, a book designer and owner of Katherine Small Gallery, which is located north of Boston. “So when you see something that is clear and quiet, it pops out. And I think that’s what a lot of Janet’s covers do.”

So who is Janet Halverson? That’s something of a mystery. Not much is known about her aside from her work, says Russem, who, full disclosure, is a friend. So after years of trying to learn more about Halverson, he put together an exhibit, Janet Halverson: An Introduction, at the gallery to show off her book covers.

“She was a book designer. She mostly worked on covers in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and into the ‘90s. She was the art director at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. She worked on all sorts of notable books and notable authors. So she was trusted to do really important books,” says Russem, who adds that she ran in the same circles as celebrated graphic designers Milton Glaser and Paul Rand.

Still, Russem says he repeatedly came up empty when trying to learn more.

“There’s nothing about her anywhere. There are all sorts of magazine articles about these other guys, but nothing about her,” he says. “Graphic designers … all recognize her work and recognize it as being good. But she just went unnoticed, which is true of all the women of her generation. There are no magazine articles about any of them.”

“This is something I’ve been working on for years,” he says. “I wanted to tell a story for myself, and then I knew that people were interested so I wanted to share that story with others.”

Finally, Russem figured, rather than wait any longer, he’d gather what he had and put it up for all to see.

“I wanted to share that story with others because she’s someone that designers have questions about, but we don’t have any answers,” he says. “I don’t know what she thought about anything, and I think that’s a disappointment for me.”

The surprising thing is, Russem believes Halverson may still be alive and living in New Jersey, though his efforts to make contact haven’t paid off.

“I believe she just turned 98 on Monday [Jan. 29]. I don’t know what she’s doing presently,” says Russem.

It’s too soon to say whether the exhibition, which closes on Feb. 17, will stir up fresh interest, but Russem says another website has already picked up his images and writing about her.

“That’s what publishing is: It’s about sharing and getting information out into the world,” he says. “So it’s not my information. It’s for everyone. And I think that is happening, whether or not anything productive comes of it.”

Russem, who designs exhibition catalogs and university press books, has a quiet sense of humor that runs through everything from the store’s outdoor sandwich board messages and Instagram posts to his beautifully printed “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston,” which is as comprehensive as it is concise. (There is only one.)

Even Katherine Small Gallery’s seemingly staid name isn’t exactly what it seems.

“Katherine was my dog,” he says, “and this place is small.”

But Russem is serious about using the space to introduce people to good design.

“It’s a bookstore and gallery dedicated to graphic design, and the shows here are meant to encourage affordable collecting,” he says. “You can come here and not feel guilty about not buying anything in the shows.”

If that sounds like a questionable business plan, that’s by design.

“I’m a book designer, and I have a graphic design bookstore. I make all my money designing books,” he says. “And I lose it all selling books.”

For more information about the exhibit and catalogue, visit the website. 

The bookstore that looms large in Manjula Martin’s mind

Manjula Martin coauthored the award-winning “Fruit Trees for Every Garden” with her father, Orin Martin, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Cut and more. Formerly the managing editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, she’s worked in both the nonprofit and publishing sectors. She lives in West Sonoma County and is the author of “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural Memoir.” She spoke with Michael Schaub and took the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. What are you reading now?

I just started “The Parisian,” a novel by Isabella Hammad. So far it’s gorgeous.

Q. How do you decide what to read next?

Honestly, it’s often whichever one of my holds the local library decides to give me next! Or, I’m guided by the mood of whatever writing project I’m working on—usually over the course of a project I’ll accumulate a small stack of books that are aspirational peers to mine, or books that are instructive in style, topic, or temperament.

Q. Is there a book you’re nervous to read?

I’m usually afraid of reading contemporary novels that are very widely lauded as “the best ever,” because they’re often not.

Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?

I love the cover design and typesetting for poet and essayist Mary Ruefle’s books, which are all published by Wave Books. A particular favorite is “Madness, Rack, and Honey,” which is just a bold type treatment on a white background, with the type pushing against the boundaries of the cover space. It’s so simple, but summons such curiosity in me as a reader.

Q. Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?

Currently on my coffee table: “White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination” by Jess Row, “Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad, “Our Wives Under the Sea” by Julia Armfield, and “Ordinary Notes” by Christina Sharpe. Fellow 2024 releases that I’m looking forward to reading are “Feeding Ghosts,” a haunting graphic memoir by artist Tessa Hulls, and Lauren Markham’s “A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.”

Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

Both my parents are avid readers and lovers of literature. But probably what most shaped my reading life was a place — the used bookstore where I worked in high school (shoutout to Logos Books & Records, in Santa Cruz). It’s no longer around, but it still looms large in my mind as a place where I was encouraged to form my own identity as a reader.

Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share? 

I first read “Moby-Dick” in high school, in an Honors English class. The teacher had us read only one chapter a week (the chapters are short), and in class we dissected at length any and every hint of “symbolism.” We were also assigned to skip all the “whaling bits”—the interstitial chapters about whale anatomy, the whaling industry, and other far-out marine fictions. I hated every moment of the experience, and demoted myself from Honors English after that semester. I didn’t revisit “Moby-Dick” until I was in my thirties, at which point I realized I love it. It’s a truly excellent novel written in smart, funny, audaciously modern English. This is why I am a fan of re-reading books at different times in one’s life. Things change!

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Flannery O’Connor didn’t complete her final novel. So a Pepperdine scholar tried. READ MORE

• • •

Power of ‘Sweetgrass’

How Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ became a phenomenon 10 years on. READ MORE

• • •

The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

• • •

Next on ‘Bookish’

The next installment is Feb. 16, at 5 p.m., as hosts Sandra Tsing Loh and Samantha Dunn talk about upcoming books. Sign up for free now.

• • •

El Monte book event

The Libros Monte Launch Party at C.A.S.A. Zamora is next week, Feb. 10, from noon to 3 p.m. The event will feature readings from El Monte authors including Carribean Fragoza, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Mirlanda Robles, Sesshu Foster and Steve Valenzuela.

As well, attendees will get an introduction to the Libros Monte Lending Library and the opportunity to sign up for a free library card.

Location: Zamora Park, 3820 Penmar Ave., El Monte

For more information, go to South El Monte Arts Posse Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/semartsposse

• • •

Read any books that you want to tell people about? Email epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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I remember watching a roundtable discussion with some former writers for “The Simpsons,” and one of them commented that since it cost the same to draw 50 helicopters as it does to draw Homer on the couch, the writing staff could let their imaginations go wild in a way they couldn’t in other types of TV or film.

That kind of creative freedom is also evident in nonfiction graphic novels we’re focusing on this week (and there’s one fiction book included, too, for those who like their stories made-up). Not only will you find a range of visual styles – some books explode with color and imagery, others stick with clean black & white lines – but the stories unfold in distinctive ways as well.

I’ve been gathering graphic novels to share as we approach the holidays and end of the year. Maybe you need gift ideas for older comics fans, or just want to read something different from your usual format of choice. (A bonus: The nonfiction titles generally have excellent bibliographies, so there are plenty of recommendations for further reading.)

Whatever the case, you’re covered. Read on for some recent books that tell complex, compelling and, yes, even comic book stories.

“Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? Revolution in 1960s Quebec” by Chris Oliveros (Drawn & Quarterly)

I didn’t know anything about the radical 1960s-era Quebec separatist movement known as FLQ, but this book lured me in from the first page. Oliveros, the founder of the Montreal publishing company Drawn + Quarterly, tells the story of passionate, often inept, revolutionaries with intelligence, humor and a focus on the human cost of the conflict. With a compelling narrative and clever, deadpan art – masterfully adjusting perspectives to create a sense of movement even in seemingly static conversations – Oliveros can deliver an emotional gutpunch, too. There’s another volume in the works; I’m looking forward to it.

“Artificial: A Love Story” by Amy Kurzweil (Catapult)

In this mix of memory, family, art and information, New Yorker cartoonist Kurzweil explores connections between herself and her father – the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil who she calls “the most interesting person I’ve ever met, the most determined and also the most generous” in the book’s acknowledgments. Then there’s her late grandfather, Fred, a Jewish musician who escaped Nazi Germany and came to America, and Ray’s desire to create a chatbot based on him. Memory, both human and digital, plays a major part in the book. The illustrations draw you in; the words are pretty great, too.

“Eight Billion Genies” by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne (Image Comics)

Like a thought experiment that keeps unfolding, this 8-comic collection (which is the bonus fictional item of this otherwise nonfiction list) looks at the cascading ramifications suggested by its title: What if 8 billion genies – who look a bit like magical Pillsbury Doughboys – appeared and offered to grant everyone one single wish? The pitfalls that arise from requests for cash, fame or love quickly become apparent, and the characters, who range from the patrons of a Detroit bar to the president of the United States, soon realize the myriad ways other people’s desires impact your own.

“The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock’s Lost Queen” by Gregory Cahill and Kat Baumann (Humanoids)

Raised on a rice farm, Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea found success in the 1960s after audiences heard her at a public concert. Later known as The Queen with the Golden Voice, she’s said to have recorded something like 500 songs during her brief career; many recordings were lost or deliberately destroyed, but the book has a curated playlist of her music. Following Cambodia’s bloody civil war – in which she trained as a paratrooper – it’s believed she was sent to a labor camp and died in the killing fields, one of nearly 2 million murdered, or nearly a quarter of the country’s population, in the genocide orchestrated by Pol Pot.

“I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee” by Tom Scioli (Ten Speed Graphic)

In Scioli’s follow-up to his book about comics legend Jack Kirby, readers zip through the life of Kirby’s sometime partner, sometimes adversary Stanley Lieber, aka, Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee. The story spans decades as the comic business booms, busts and blooms into a behemoth. You might often wish for a little more backstory if you don’t already know Lee’s history beyond his cameos in MCU movies, but as an overview of this towering, sometimes controversial, figure, it’s time well spent.

“Miles Davis and Search for Sound” by Dave Chisholm (Z2 Comics)

This is a terrific book. Basing the text on jazz great Miles Davis’s interviews, essays and biography, Dave Chisholm – who, like Davis, is a trumpeter – wrote, drew, colored and lettered this richly illustrated and researched biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians. Colorful and clever, Chisholm’s work displays an improvisor’s imagination – he inserts a panel of a melting Charlie Parker in the style of Salvador Dali during an aside on surrealism – switching up the look and palette of the panels and pages to best suit the story’s needs.

“This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America” by Navied Mahdavian (Princeton Architectural Press)

Cartoonist Mahdavian and his filmmaker wife Emelie left San Francisco with their dog to live in a tiny house in remote Idaho. The transition was not easy for a variety of reasons. A wonderful storyteller and artist – as well as a reader of Robert Macfarlane – Mahdavian deftly uses a clean, expressive style as he shares moments out in nature, running a movie theater and interacting with the locals. He teases out the humor and stress of this relocation, as well as a sense of what it’s like to be the child of Iranian immigrants in rural America.

“Transitions: A Mother’s Journey” by Elodie Durand (Top Shelf)

“Transitions” follows the journey of university biologist Anne Marbot, a mother whose child comes out as a trans man, Alex. Confused, curious and believing herself committed to her child’s well-being, Anne is unwilling to accept change and alienates Alex with her continued resistance. Grappling with her feelings of loss and more and more at odds with her child, Anne eventually finds her way to a place of understanding. It’s a powerful story, and the book includes nonfiction interludes that explain and enlighten as it goes along.

Have you read any books – and that includes graphic novels – that you want to tell people about? Email me at epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

And now the duo, along with producer Nicky Birch, are approaching the podcast’s 200th episode later this month. When smartphones have no shortage of bad news to deliver, Backlisted’s episodes about ready-to-be-rediscovered titles can feel like a balm to readers and devoted listeners.

“If you enjoy reading, you’ll probably want to hang out with the people we like talking to because the common interest is, fundamentally, shared enthusiasm,” says Miller, an author of several books who cohosts the twice-monthly show with Mitchinson, who is the co-founder of Unbound, the crowdfunded publishing house that originally bankrolled the podcast. “So if you want to hear people who love reading talking about reading in a way they hope communicates that love of reading, join us.”

Miller, who does deep reading and research to prepare for episodes, recalls how he and Mitchinson miscalculated what the gig would entail. “It won’t be that much work because, you know, me and Johnny are both pretty well-read,” he remembers thinking. “How hard can it be?”

“We’ll have read them all,” Mitchinson chimes in, mocking their initial naivete. 

“Very foolish,” Miller laughs, shaking his head in mock shame. “Hubris, in fact! Eight years of paying for that hubris.” 

The opening pages

When we meet up across an ocean and several time zones on Zoom, it’s a lovely Southern California morning here and a dark, chilly Sunday evening in the U.K. where each resides. Mitchinson, who has an impressive beard, a love for English village life and a warm, reassuring manner, is nursing a cold after hosting an Unbound event at the London Literature Festival for its bestseller, “42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams,” that featured appearances by Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran and others. 

Despite this, he and Miller, whose books include the memoir “The Year of Reading Dangerously,” repeatedly postpone their dinners to discuss the show for two hours without complaint or lack of enthusiasm. If you’re a fan of the show, which I am, it was a delight.

The podcast, they tell me, had been Mitchinson’s idea. With experience in bookselling, publishing, and television, he understood that the industry focused all its time, energy and money on the latest thing. 

So he pitched Miller the idea of doing the opposite. 

“I’d been carrying around this idea, ‘Why is it that all the books podcasts are about new books?’” says Mitchinson, who approached Miller, a former bookseller himself, after seeing him do a performance based on “The Year of Reading Dangerously.’

After “several significant lunches,” jokes Miller, they had a plan. A very simple plan.

“I can remember us saying, ‘Well, we don’t want to clutter it up too much. We don’t need a massively sophisticated idea,’” recalls Miller. “Is it just old books?”

Reader, it was just old books.

“One of the delightful surprises of making the show for all this time is that the concept didn’t need to be any higher than that,” says Miller.

“Our listeners are often people who just want to feel there are others out there in the world who feel as passionate as they do about what you can get out of reading,” says Miller. “It’s finding new good stuff to read. It’s really not a high concept.”

Turning 200

If you’re a reader and haven’t listened to the podcast yet, well, you’re fortunate to have nearly 200 episodes ahead of you. The show is made for book lovers by book lovers, and so it has pretty much everything one would want in it: intelligence, humor, and lots of book recommendations. As well, they advocate on behalf of books that may be challenging or require greater effort to get into. 

“We’re both believers that actually most books — nearly all books — have something to recommend them. The idea that ‘Life is too short for bad books’? Hey, guess what? There are no bad books,” says Miller. “‘The book didn’t grab me, quote-unquote?’ Well, no, that’s not the book’s job. It’s your job to grab the book. You’ve got it the wrong way around. You will get out what you put in.”

The spark generated by the two hosts was immediately apparent — the first episode in November 2015 was intended as a test run, but the discussion of J.L. Carr’s “A Month in the Country” went so well they ended up releasing it.

“It wouldn’t work if John and I didn’t have a rapport, and that rapport is just one of those very lucky things. If we’d recorded those 45 minutes and stumbled over one another and not found one another either insightful or amusing, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you today,” says Miller. “We feel very lucky.”

“We had a clear idea  of the kind of books we wanted to talk about,” agrees Mitchinson. “We tried it and it worked, so we kept doing it. We hadn’t researched or focus-grouped what would work.”

“In a sense, we began with the perfect one and we’ve been trying to work our way back ever since,” says Miller.

That philosophy extends to the sister podcast Locklisted, which is a twice-monthly podcast for contributors to the show’s Patreon that they launched during the pandemic. Along with producer Birch, who both Miller and Mitchinson praise as the integral third member of the endeavor, they discuss not only books but music, movies, TV and more.

“I love books, but I don’t just love books,” says Miller. “I love music and it’s such a buzz for me to talk to people and share with them this latest record I found or TV thing I’ve found.”

“For me, Locklisted is always fun … we’re narrowcasting with Locklisted to quite a small, enthusiastic group of people,” says Mitchinson. “The truth is that, when we’re doing our job well, we’re pursuing our own interests. That’s what people want us to do. They want us to find stuff that we like.”

Profiles encouraged

New Backlisted listeners might be shocked to find that the hosts aren’t arguing about the merits of the books or the other’s opinions. They aren’t arguing at all. They listen to each other and their guests and respond with insightful, intelligent comments. 

“One of the things I’m most proud of with Backlisted is that we manage to be funny, I hope, and bring out the humor in the discussions without dumbing down. John and I both have felt for many years, Why should serious discussion preclude enjoyment?” says Miller.

Backlisted has focused on lost classics, lesser-known works by well-known authors, out-of-print gems and occasionally, an idiosyncratic favorite (such as “Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius” by Terrance Dicks, which was a terrific read when I tracked it down). 

The authors they’ve discussed include the well-known — Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler — as well as those less familiar, such as Rosemary Tonks, Lore Segal, Elizabeth Jenkins and many more. 

As well, the guests include authors, educators, publishers and podcasters, such as Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, musician Billy Bragg, librarian and author Nancy Pearl and Weston International Award winner Robert Mcfarlane among them.

The show has even influenced the publishing world, spurring Tonks’ works back into print as well as drumming up interest in books like “All the Devils Are Here” by David Seabrook and “Haunts of the Black Masseur” by Charles Sprawson (not to mention Miller’s enthusiasm for Anita Brookner, which has without a doubt raised the late writer’s profile and sales, and Mitchinson’s regular support for a range of nature writing).

Never-ending stories

But at the heart of it all, the podcast is an enjoyable hour with smart people having an informed conversation about books. And that takes work.

“I don’t think I can just turn up and pontificate on the subject of Kurt Vonnegut without having read more than one book by him. So it’s kind of a mixture of fear and conscientiousness. I don’t want to talk rubbish; I want to know what I’m talking about because if I know what I’m talking about, it will make a better show,” says Miller, who credits Birch’s editing ability for keeping the conversational flow tight.

“It’s sort of a paradox that at times you feel almost overprepared — you’ve read too much — and there’s so much you want to say and so much you want to get in there, but actually, you have to kind of hold back and let go,” Mitchinson says.

Miller says you can feel it when it’s a good episode.

“You know when something happens in the room,” says Miller, recalling the episode devoted to the novel “Riddley Walker” with Max Porter and Una McCormack. “I can remember looking at John and basically going, ‘This is fantastic.’ It wasn’t down to us. It was down to the book, the guests, a live audience on that occasion, all creating something really special in that moment and thinking, ‘Oh, wow, brilliant, and it’s being recorded.’”

“You can’t really force that. All you can do is turn up every couple of weeks and sometimes it just crackles and it happens,” says Miller.

As for the podcast’s milestone 200th episode, they’re working on it.

“How can you sum up 200 episodes of something that you’ve been doing for eight years? Well, we don’t know. But we’ll figure it out,” says Mitchinson, then adds with a smile. “Is it completely pinned down? No, it is not.”

“People say, ‘Hey… do you worry about running out?’” says Mitchinson, incredulous at the question. “Do we worry about running out of great works of literature? Uh, no.”

They’re both clear that they have no plans to stop any time soon. There’s still so much to read and discuss.

“If we stop enjoying it — when it becomes work — we just won’t do it. We’ll figure out something else to do,” says Mitchinson.

“But it hasn’t happened yet,” says Miller.