As a New Yorker subscriber, I carelessly checked the wrong box someplace that plops its non-magazine advertisements in my mailbox. Today's was a doozy, for a weekend appreciating CityCenter in Las Vegas. Maybe it's just me, but the thought of a bunch of erudite cartoon fans, tweedy academics and reedy black-clad artists descending upon Vegas en masse seemed, well, funny. Like a photo in need of a caption.

The idea behind the New Yorker desert adventure is to appreciate the art and architecture. People who sign up for the weekend -- at hotels running $200-plus per night -- are to treat themselves to self-guided tours of works by luminaries Pelli Clarke Pelli, Claes Oldenburg, Daniel Libeskind, Maya Lin, Henry Moore and more. The first 20 people who signed up for the weekend will have Adam Gopnik as their private art tour guide. There's a spa included, because luxury fits the profile, but if you want to check out "Thunder From Down Under,"  you're on your own. 

It's the combination of highbrow New Yorker readers with lowbrow Las Vegas that seems so silly. Sure, Las Vegas isn't all about jello shots, slot machines, Engelbert Humperdinck and strip clubs anymore; it has Cirque du Soleil, lots of art and genuine rock shows. It's got, as CityCenter would remind us, big fancy architecture. And anything that keeps magazines rolling off the presses has got to be good.

But will discussions of the latest pieces by Sy Hersh and Atul Gawande ring across newly lain terraces? Will Susan Orlean's chicken-and-whatnot blog be the talk of the (Vegas) town? Most important, if you're going, will you tell us all about it?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Las Vegas' CityCenter at twilight. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Alias Books, the used-book store on Sawtelle, has decided to open an outpost out east, in Atwater. LAist reports that the Atwater Alias, which will be well stocked with film, literary and art books, will open May 1. Located at 3163 Glendale Blvd., it will be open seven days a week, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Longtime used-book store Brand Bookshop, which hasn't much of a Web presence, carries entertainment, literary and history books, plus torrid paperbacks and a pleasantly random selection of other works. Brand Bookshop, at 231 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, is just 2.5 miles up the street from Alias' new location. Confusingly, in Los Angeles the street is called Glendale Boulevard; once it enters Glendale, it is renamed Brand. 

Anyway, if you're driving, it's just a short hop between the two locations. And while you're parked at Brand, you would be foolish to miss ducking into the Mystery and Imagination Bookshop across the street. Ray Bradbury is known to celebrate his birthday there, among the used collectibles; the store is at 238 N. Brand.

Used-book fans will have plenty to peruse on Brand and Glendale boulevards without ever having to set foot into the Americana.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The 3100 block of Glendale Boulevard in Atwater, where Alias Books will open in May, during a 2007 street festival. Credit: Atwatervillagenewbie via Flickr

Just in case you missed it: President Obama made a surprise stop at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City this week. While this picture showed him shopping in the current affairs section, what he wound up buying -- with cash -- were children's books. He picked up "Journey to the River Sea" by Eva Ibbotson and "The Secret of Zoom" by Lynne Jonell for his daughters, and a pop-up Star Wars book for White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs' son.

Obama went to Prairie Lights to make a point about small businesses and healthcare, but it's the book part that I think is more fun.

And in case a photo of the president purchasing the books isn't enough book-buying fun for you, there's a video below.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: President Obama buys books at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa, on Tuesday. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

On Thursday, the L.A. Public Library board of commissioners voted to cut back hours at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles and at eight regional libraries, which had previously been open longer than branch libraries. On Sundays, all libraries will be closed. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the regional libraries will open later, and on Wednesday and Monday evenings, they and the Central Library will close at 6 p.m. instead of 8 p.m.

The popular ALOUD series, which brings authors to Los Angeles to read and discuss their work, is frequently held on Wednesday nights at the Central Library. At first, it looked as though the closure would affect upcoming events with Amy Wilentz, Sebastian Younger and others.

But ALOUD curator Louise Steinman tells Jacket Copy that is not the case; ALOUD will continue even as the main library is closed. The Taper Auditorium, where the conversations with writers take place, can be accessed separately from the library's main entrance. People coming to the ALOUD series on Wednesday nights will be asked to use a formerly shuttered entrance on 5th Street.

As for evening events at other libraries, LAPL public information director Peter Persic says, "we're having to reschedule the ones that were scheduled on the nights and days that we're going to be closed." He recommends checking with the librarians at the individual branch libraries for more information.

The library continues to face budget pressures; a hiring freeze means the department is suffering from a 20% vacancy rate, and layoffs are pending. Maeve Reston reports, "City Librarian Martín J. Gómez told City Council members Wednesday that if those cuts advance, he may only be able to keep the city’s libraries open five days a week."

There are still a few Sundays left for readers to enjoy the library; the truncated hours will begin on April 11th.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The center lobby of downtown's Central Library. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

The website AppAdvice.com has gotten a peek at the ibookstore Apple will launch with its iPad: Kathryn Stockett's bestselling "The Help" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" by Seth Grahame-Smith are both listed at $9.99.

Of "the 32 eBooks featured in the New York Times’ Bestsellers section, 27, including the entire top 10 are priced at $9.99," writes AppAdvice's Alexander Vaughn. The highest price he saw in the demo was $12.99.

Does this mean that the ebook pricing war has been settled? Will $9.99 be the rule? When the iPad was announced in January, Jobs said that the prices would "be the same" as Amazon's. And those seen in the ibookstore screenshot are -- each one matches Amazon's Kindle price.

But of course, there's more to it than that.

In the photos captured by AppAdvice, we see the top four books in fiction and nonfiction. Except the ranking numbers are a bit hinky for bestsellers -- in fiction, we see numbers 2, 3, 5 and 6 (the top seller, and No. 4, are missing). Nonfiction is even weirder, displaying numbers 1, 11, 12 and 15.

Why would Apple leave out ranked books in what AppAdvice describes as a "not-so-NDA-complying preview"? What they have included are books from just two of the big six publishers: Penguin and Hachette. Both have already signed on to sell books through Apple's ibookstore.

For the demo, it appears Apple used the New York Times bestseller list to rank its books. Looking at the fiction list, the absent books are easy to spot. The N.Y. Times No. 1 fiction bestseller -- which is missing from the Apple screenshot -- is Jodi Picoult's "House Rules." That novel is not yet available as an ebook -- and the the hardcover costs considerably more -- it retails for $28. The missing No. 4 bestseller is "Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Backlash" from LucasBooks -- a division of Random House. Of the big six publishers, Random House is understood to be the last to have not yet entered into an agreement with Apple.

Rather than showing us the future, AppAdvice is showing us a snapshot of the present moment -- a moment in which publishers, Apple and Amazon are in the midst of negotiations. Those negotiations are likely to continue right up until the iPad release on April 3, if not beyond.

These prices represent nothing more than what might happen if the ibookstore opened today. Chances are the future will be slightly different.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Apple iBookstore demo. Credit: Apple

In "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama," David Remnick has done a tremendous job at capturing the president, writes reviewer Douglas Brinkley. Remnick, whose day job is editing the New Yorker magazine, has written a "brilliantly constructed, flawlessly written biography."

"The Bridge" is a towering monument to Obama's hyper-professionalism when it comes to the art of politics. The president is an unflappable Zen master with a belly full of audacity. Hard work, endurance and civility are inherent in his personality. His greatest strength is that the opposition always underestimates him....

How exactly did Obama become America's first black president? Remnick tells the astounding story of Obama's rise to greatness through the prism of the civil rights movement. When John Lewis marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, getting badly beaten by police for promoting equal voting rights for African Americans, he was Moses opening the door for the up-and-coming Joshua generation. As Lewis himself put it last year: "Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."

Read the complete review here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Barack Obama with books by GOP leaders at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City. Credit: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press

The Center for Fiction goes to the backlist for its Clifton Fadiman Medal, which is awarded to a living author for a work at least 10 years old that "deserves renewed notice." This year's winner, selected by Jane Smiley, is "Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid.

The book was Kincaid's first novel -- her debut was a short story collection. When it hit shelves in 1985, it was praised by L.A. Times book columnist Elaine Kendall.

The narrator grew up in the capital city of St. John's, hardly a metropolis by mainland standards but cosmopolitan compared to the tiny farming and fishing villages hugging the shore. St. John's had electricity, supermarkets, an amazing number of modern banks, the deep-water harbor, and by the end of the '60s, an international airport; amenities putting it a decade ahead of the rural villages. In the period covered by the novel, the colonial legacy was still intact; schools, government, economy and manners British through and through. Annie's father was a skilled carpenter; her mother had come from the equally small but lush island of Dominica.

As an only child, Annie was indulged, adored and meticulously instructed in proper behavior -- Victorian behavior. Change comes slowly to the Leeward Islands and even now, 18th- and 19th-Century words and phrases linger in Antiguan English, lending it a quaint stateliness. Traces of that formality appear in Kincaid's prose, giving the story a timeless quality, adding substance and weight to the smallest incident and detail....

[Eventually] Annie becomes rebellious and defiant. She learns to lie and to steal.... she longs "to be in a place where nobody knew a thing about me and liked me for just that reason." Convincing her parents she wants to study nursing in England, she leaves Antigua, stage by stage, first in her mind, then in her heart; finally to the dock and the boat that will take her to Barbados and ultimately to Southampton. "My heart swelled with great gladness as the words 'I shall never see this again' spilled out inside me. But then, just as quickly, my heart shriveled up and the words 'I shall never see this again' stabbed at me." Thousands of first novelists have described those same emotions, but reading "Annie John," you can almost believe Kincaid invented ambivalence. 

"Annie John" went on to be nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction (which was won that year by Louise Erdrich for "Love Medicine.") In being honored by the Center for Fiction, Kincaid will receive the Clifton Fadiman Medal and $5,000 at a ceremony in New York on April 14.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

There are people out there who know why Jenni Farley goes by "J-Woww" and understand how a show based on people in New Jersey is, for its second season, being shot in Miami. The answers, I'm afraid, elude me. But I can report that Farly, with costar Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and co-writer Marc Shaprio, are coming out with a book, "Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore."

Publishers Weekly reports that the book will "explain how to balance work, love, and partying, while properly taking care of hair, nails, and skin -- as well as everything else that goes into living an authentic Jersey Shore lifestyle." It is scheduled for a summer release to coincide with the show's second season.

St. Martin's Press scored the deal, telling PW that because 4.8 million viewers watched the finale of Season 1, they expect the book to be "wildly popular."

Even a TV ignoramus like me expects this won't be the last literary thing we hear from "Jersey Shore."  Because really, what's a "Jersey Shore" library without books by Snookie or the Situation?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Thanks to the Ministry of Gossip blog for finding this shot of Jenni "J-Woww" Farley celebrating her 25th birthday at Moon nightclub at the Palms Casino Resort on Feb. 27 in Las Vegas. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images.

The National Black Writers Conference begins Thursday in New York, where its panels, readings and events will continue through Sunday. Organized by the Center for Black Literature at the City University of New York's Medgar Evers College, the conference is now in its 10 year.

Panels include The Impact of Hip Hop and Popular Culture in the Literature of Black Writers, The Black Writer as Literary Activist and Shifting Identities: The Black Writer in the African Diaspora. Authors Edwidge Danticat, Chris Abani, Tayari Jones, Colson Whitehead and Victor LaValle are among those scheduled to participate.

And while literary conferences aren't known for their musical highlights, the Friday night off-site event -- featuring Talib Kweli, Gil Scott-Heron and Gary Bartz -- promises to raise the bar. A lot.

There will be no music at Long Beach's second annual Black Authors Festival on April 3. It's smaller in scope -- it will be held at the Mark Twain neighborhood library, and take place during a single afternoon. It's in celebration of Long Beach's Black Authors' Day and will kick off National Library Month.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Edwidge Danticat in 1998. Credit: Colin Braley / Reuters

National Book Award winning poet Ai died unexpectedly of natural causes in Oklahoma on Saturday. She was 62.

Born Florence Anthony in Texas in 1947 of mixed racial heritage -- said to include Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche -- she legally changed her name to Ai, Japanese for "love." She was raised in Tuscon and earned an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine in 1971.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and 1985, and the 1999 National Book Award for her poetry collection "Vice." She was a recipient of the $50,000 United States Artists grant in 2009. From 1999 until her death, she was a professor at Oklahoma State University.

In its bio of Ai, the Poetry Foundation writes:

Aiming her poetic barbs directly at prejudices and societal ills of all types, Ai has been outspoken on the subject of race, saying "People whose concept of themselves is largely dependent on their racial identity and superiority feel threatened by a multiracial person. The insistence that one must align oneself with this or that race is basically racist. And the notion that without a racial identity a person can’t have any identity perpetuates racism…I wish I could say that race isn’t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one’s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend. If this transcendence were less complex, less individual, it would lose its holiness."

A new collection of poetry by Ai, "No Surrender," is set to be published by W.W. Norton this fall. Today, friends and family are remembering Ai at the Palmer Marler Funeral Home in Stillwater, Oklahoma; an Oklahoma State University scholarship is being set up in her name.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Charlie M.P. Sirait, courtesy Oklahoma State University

Looks like the economic downturn is about to hit L.A.'s libraries. The Board of Library Commissioners will vote Thursday on a proposed plan to close libraries on Sundays and curtail weekday hours. Maeve Reston reports:

Under the proposal, which would take effect in mid-April, all of the city’s libraries would also close two hours earlier -- 6 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. -- on Mondays and Wednesdays. The eight regional libraries -- Arroyo Seco, Exposition Park, Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood, Mid-Valley, North Hollywood, San Pedro, West Valley and West Los Angeles -- would open at noon rather than 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What the early closures might mean for the ALOUD reading series and other evening programs is not yet clear. Yet librarians seem to have made their peace with the idea of the reduction in hours; what concerns them most are additional cuts that might be coming at the behest of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Reston writes:

With the city facing a $485-million budget gap next fiscal year, the city's libraries could face far more drastic cuts. Twenty librarians, 20 library clerks and 60 messenger clerks are on the list of the first 1,000 job cuts authorized by city leaders this year.

Librarians and other library supporters plan to attend the L.A. City Council meeting Wednesday to speak up against the drastic cuts they may face.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Central Library history department. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Historian Tony Judt is, Tim Rutten writes, "a scholar of remarkable breadth and erudition and one of the West's foremost and most outspoken public intellectuals. That alone would be enough to make his new book, "Ill Fares the Land," something that merits attention.

That Judt composed the book while suffering from the pain and paralysis of ALS makes it particularly remarkable. Diagnosed with ALS -- Lou Gehrig's Disease -- at around age 60, Judt, a professor at NYU, has continued writing as the disease progressed. He breathes with the aid of a machine, and, apart from some marginal movement, is, he wrote in a January essay for the New York Review of Books, "effectively quadriplegic." Yet:

...this disease has its enabling dimension: thanks to my inability to take notes or prepare them, my memory --already quite good -- has improved considerably, with the help of techniques adapted from the "memory palace" so intriguingly depicted by Jonathan Spence. But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably -- as it now appears to me -- by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

"Ill Fares the Land" combines Judt's personal essays such as this with his historian's eye for analysis. Grounding his argument in a reading of Austrian economists and their (mis)interpretation, he cautions: 

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

Rutten finds the book, "a deeply learned, deeply humane heart's cry for the rediscovery of the language and values" that would enable, at Judt's urging, a new discussion of justice and equality.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Archive photo of Tony Judt. Credit: Penguin Press.

Pictory magazine takes something incredibly simple -- a photo and a caption -- and makes it art. Like the radio show "This American Life," each issue has a theme -- and with a good theme, a single large-format photo and caption really become a story. Like in these two examples from the Feb. 17 issue, "The One Who Got Away."

Krasivaya: “pretty” in Russian. It was never hard to take a good photo of Lidia during our four years together -- she smiled often, and she loved the camera. It was much harder to acknowledge that we were on different paths. But I wouldn’t change a thing; we both grew into beautiful beings. -- Jonah Pauline

To the Five Boroughs. The minute I stepped off the bus and into Washington Heights, we were no longer just close friends. We ran down the streets at night, drank wine in the park, took in musicals, and marvelled at museums. The city was alive all around us; I had never been so happy. This magical week turned into months of distance. Things had been easier when we were friends. I chastised myself: I never should have visited, and I never should have gone back. Sometimes you fall in love with a city instead of the person in it. -- Johanna Fulk

Pictory has been around since December 2009, and editor/designer/curator Laura Brunow Miner has run enough solicitations and themes to put up a new set of a dozen or more photo stories every few weeks. There are features on food that make the mouth water, and neighborhood secrets -- like this used bookstore -- revealed.

As fun as those are, they tend toward the literal. It's when the photos and captions are trying to express an idea or emotion that they really become stories; some of the most interesting stories are in the issues on returning home and growing old. Pictory magazine's big photos and well-told stories emphasize the storyteller's point of view; the focus quiets the Web's noise.

It's enough to make the storyteller pick up a camera, or the photographer try to fix the right words. Upcoming themes include portraits of London, Danger, and -- just in time for Mother's Day -- "Sorry, Mom."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Top, copyright Jonah Pauline. Bottom, copyright Johanna Fulk. Both used with permission of Pictory Magazine.

Publishers Weekly's final tally of 2009 books sales has a few surprises. Who would have guessed that California author Lisa See was selling as many books as E.L. Doctorow and Margaret Atwood put together? Or that political tomes from Sarah Palin, Edward Kennedy and Glenn Beck have replaced the slimmer South Beach Diet and self-help books that used to rule the nonfiction list?

It takes until March to get the tally together because booksellers can ship unsold books back to publishers. Those returns have now been subtracted, so these are supposed to be pretty good real numbers for 2009. The business of actual sales -- and shipping, sales and returns -- is a touchy one in publishing, and some companies provide these sales figures to Publishers Weekly on a confidential basis, for ranking purposes only. It would be nice if we had hard stats, but this is about as close as we're going to get.

Not surprisingly, Dan Brown topped the fiction bestseller list with "The Lost Symbol," his "Da Vinci Code" follow-up. "The Lost Symbol" sold 5.5 million hardcover copies -- short of its predecessor, but about five times more than each of the other books in the top 10. Janet Evanovich, Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer -- all usual subjects -- have bestselling spots. Michael Crichton makes his first posthumous appearance with "The Pirate Latitudes," while Patricia Cornwell, very much alive, has two books in the top 10. 

So does John Grisham -- but in a twist, he's got one legal thriller, "The Associate," plus his debut collection of short stories, "Ford County." Common wisdom says that short stories don't sell, so Grisham's powerful showing -- "Ford County" was the No. 5 bestselling hardcover fiction book of 2009 -- indicates either that common wisdom is due for revision, or that John Grisham can do whatever he likes, regardless.

In nonfiction, Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" outsold Edward Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" three-to-one. While Palin undertook a high-profile tour to promote the book -- Kennedy, who died weeks before his book's release, could not -- it's clear that the appetite for all things Palin extended to book buyers. Faith (in books by Mitch Albom and Joel Osteen) and sports (memoirs from Joe Torre and Andre Agassi) also performed well.

This is the last year that PW's list will not include ebooks. How might those sales have affected the rankings? Would Palin be even more popular? Would some classic -- say, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" -- make a surprise appearance? This year, the number of hardcover books selling more than 100,000 in both fiction and nonfiction was down. Would ebooks make up the difference? Sadly, we'll have to wait a year to find out.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Letters from Virginia Woolf's set, being opened to the public for the first time, cast new light on the Bloomsbury group of, as one wrote, "dirty intellectuals." The newly opened archive, at Cambridge University, consists of two collections of letters, the Guardian reports.

The two collections belonged to the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the diarist and writer Frances Partridge, once described by fellow group member Clive Bell as having "the best legs in Bloomsbury." Lehmann and Partridge became friends at Cambridge University, later getting to know the group of intellectuals that also included Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and JM Keynes.

Of particular note are those letters by and pertaining to Woolf. On April 3, 1941, when Woolf was missing, yet had not been declared dead, Bell wrote to Partridge:

I'm not sure whether the Times will by now have announced that Virginia is missing. I'm afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday. She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa [Woolf and Bell]. Her stick and footprints were found by the edge of the river. For some days, of course, we hoped against hope that she had wandered crazily away and might be discovered in a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is abandoned; only, as the body has not been found, she cannot be considered dead legally.

This is an intimate look at what it was like for friends and family of Woolf in the weeks between her disappearance and when her body was finally discovered.

Aside from the letters directly relating to Woolf, there is much more about Bloomsbury in the archive -- it includes more than 1,000 pages of letters and 30 photo albums.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Virginia Woolf. Credit: Associated Press

David Shields, the author of "Reality Hunger," couldn't help but notice the buzz when a new biography of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, above, said he invented some of his nonfiction. It's the latest in a series of small turmoils about truth and fiction -- James Frey's memoir, Charles Pellegrino's history of World War II -- that Shields has been tracking. "Why does this keep happening over and over and over again?" Shields asks in Off the Shelf. "Have we suddenly become a nation of liars? Of lawyers?"

From the beginning of time, nonfiction writers have invented. In "The History of the Peloponnesian Wars," Thucydides made up the generals' speeches. Thomas DeQuincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" is a heavily fictionalized account of DeQuincey's addiction to and recovery from opium. Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son" recounts page after page of supposedly verbatim dialogue from 50 years earlier. George Orwell's classmates questioned virtually every detail of "Such, Such Were the Joys."...

Nonfiction isn't "true." It's a framing device to foreground contemplation, or at least it is in the nonfiction I love the most -- nonfiction at the highest reaches of literary art. I want to redefine nonfiction upward -- taking nonfiction's limits and reframing them so that nonfiction can be a serious investigation of what's "true," what's knowledge, what's "fact," what's memory, what's self, what's other. I don't want a nonfiction full of "lies." I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

To make his case, Shields recommends 26 shifting, unstable nonfictions. That list is after the jump.

In today's book pages, paranoia takes off. Author Howard Hampton looks at "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History" by David Aaronovitch and "Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia" by Francis Wheen. Aaronovitch does a fine job debunking conspiracy theories, Hampton says, but "his peevish, plodding common sense is hardly a match for the burning near-religiosity that not only makes a Communion wafer of JFK's assassination, but also extends to the overdose death of one-time Kennedy paramour Marilyn Monroe." Wheen, he says, "more effectively captures how conspiracy theories and botched conspiracies such as Watergate entered the collective psyche."

A psychic uneasiness extended into the fiction reviewed this week. Tod Goldberg was impressed by James Hynes' novel "Next," featuring an obsessive 50-year-old who had "an amorphous fear without discernible boundaries."

...at first "Next" seems to be just an exceptionally well-written comic novel about middle age. But with great subtlety and nuance, Hynes begins to move the narrative into deeper, more compelling territory until the reader comes to find that Kevin isn't merely looking for sex, he's looking for a reason for his life, an order to his mistakes, a compelling set of answers to the questions he's avoided addressing: Whom does he love? What does he really fear? What is it all worth? Did he get what he wanted from this life?

Sarah Weinman enjoys Walter Mosley's "Known to Evil," his second Leonid Trotter McGill mystery:

Like the Easy Rawlins novels, Mosley's new detective canvas informs us about what it means to be a man of endless struggle, even knowing that "once you've seen the battlefield, you can't pretend that it doesn't exist."

Ella Taylor finds Lionel Shriver's novel "So Much for That" to be "gleefully mutinous":

Careening giddily among realism, horror and farce, "So Much for That" is an angry black comedy about the heartlessness of (could it be more timely?) the American healthcare system. Shriver ... writes in precise, dynamic prose that reads almost like literary journalism ... if anyone's going to perk up the often-limp niceness of the women's novel it's Shriver, who has no use for earth mothers or noble victims.

Which sounds not unlike the work of Caroline Blackwood; I reviewed her posthumous collection, "Never Breathe a Word":

Most of Blackwood's characters ... inhabit danger zones of keen intelligence, amused manipulation and something else -- self-indulgence, or maybe self-importance. They are sometimes funny, unwittingly revealing and rarely nice. At the core, they're out of sync with underlying societal assumptions, women who are unselfconsciously and dominantly at the center of their worlds.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Illustration: Jason Greenberg / For The Times

The 2010 PEN World Voices literary festival will feature 150 writers from 40 countries. The festival's lineup includes literary fiction heavyweights Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Salman Rushdie, Sherman Alexie, Elias Khoury, Roddy Doyle and Aleksander Hemon; musical icon Patti Smith and filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles.

In a series of panels and conversations around New York, authors will talk about a wide range of topics, including mythology, writing about torture and the future of journalism. There are big-ticket events, including a cabaret featuring Natalie Merchant; proceeds from ticket sales go to support the organization, which promotes the freedom to write around the globe. And many of the festival's events are free.

For the first time in my memory, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and PEN World Voices are not happening on the same days. This year, a literary jet-setter could spend the weekend of April 24 and 25 enjoying the sunny Festival of Books at UCLA, then pop over to New York for PEN World Voices from April 26 to May 2.

Those who can't can still catch a bit of PEN World Voices here on the West coast. Two authors -- Christos Tsiolkas and Asaaf Gavron -- will be appearing at the Festival of Books while they're in the U.S. 

Last year, PEN had a bounty of bloggers chronicling their panels and readings for those who couldn't be in New York.  It was almost too much to keep up with, but it was a nice way to vicariously enjoy the many, many offerings of PEN World Voices. I'm hoping they blog like crazy this year, too, but at the very least we can follow them on Twitter.

Photos: Left, Aleksander Hemon. Credit: Velibor Bozovic / Riverhead Books . Right: Melvin Van Peebles. Credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders / HBO.

Was Amazon's removal of "buy" buttons of MacMillan's titles in January just a practice run? Two reports this week -- in subscription-only Publishers Marketplace and the New York Times -- say that Amazon is threatening to stop selling books by publishers who do not meet their terms for e-book sales.

The impetus for the conflict is Apple's iBookstore. Amazon currently dominates in the e-book sales marketplace, but when the iPad is released in April and Apple begins selling e-books, the company may become a major player. That in itself wouldn't be a big deal, except that the two e-retailers have different sales models -- and each is pushing publishers to adhere to just one.

Amazon follows a tradition wholesale/retail model that allows it to set the price for the end consumer. They've set that price point low -- a new book might sell for $10 on the Kindle while the hardcover costs $25 -- and this has made many Kindle readers happy. But publishers have said that the low e-book price is unsustainable.

Apple will use an "agency model," as it has in its iTunes store; the owner of the work keeps 70% of the retail price, and Apple, the "agency," takes 30%. This model has its own problems -- it doesn't quite match up with the contracts authors have signed with publishers -- but publishers like that it allows them more flexibility in pricing. Five major publishing houses have signed on with Apple -- Random House is the only holdout remaining among the big six.

As the launch of Apple's new e-book store opens, Amazon is pushing to renegotiate contracts, according to the New York Times. Smaller publishers are likely to really feel the squeeze. And authors can do little more than sit on the sidelines and hope that their books wind up for sale in both places.

Well, they can do a little more: the Authors Guild's watchdog tool, Who Moved My Buy Button, which launched at the tail end of Amazon's showdown with MacMillan, may have a new life. Authors can sign up to receive updates in the event that Amazon stops selling their books.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

The Orange Prize for Fiction, a $45,000 award presented annually to a female writer, announced the long list of those in the running for the 2010 prize this week. It includes bestseller Barbara Kingsolver for "The Lacuna," Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning "Wolf Hall" and two women who will be at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Attica Locke and Laila Lalami.

Locke is a finalist for the L.A. Times book prize in mystery for her debut novel, "Black Water Rising." Lalami, an occasional L.A. Times contributor, is nominated for "Secret Son," her second book and first novel.

Years ago I sat with Lalami at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, back when she was writing mostly for academia and her blog, Moorishgirl, and it's a thrill to see her work receive this recognition.

But this year's Orange Prize longlist is not without controversy. Author Daisy Goodwin, chair of the judging panel, went public with her complaints about the selection. It wasn't the process that was so bad: it was the product -- too much "misery literature." She told the Independent:

There was very little wit, and no jokes. If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists.

The misery memoir has transformed into misery literature. There were a large number of books that started with a rape, enough to make me think ‘Enough.’ Call me old fashioned but I like a bit of foreplay in my reading... I turned my face against them....

The pleasure of reading counts for something. I don’t think editors think enough about this pleasure [when they publish a book]. The reader gets forgotten, and the absorption and pleasure of reading.

The 15 books that made the longlist, apparently, provide enough of the kind of pleasure the judges hoped to find. The complete list is after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg