A little French girl and her schoolmates will be making their presence known in Southern California this spring: Madeline and her friends are a theme of artwork for the 16th annual Festival of Books, taking place April 30-May 1 on the USC campus. Madeline is the beloved character introduced by Ludwig Bemelmans in 1939, the smallest of her compatriot schoolgirls who tread in two straight lines through a series of children's books, including "Madeline" and "Madeline's Rescue."

Bemelmans' grandson John Bemelmans Marciano has brought Madeline and her friends to a new generation of readers. He grew up surrounded by Madeline, in many ways. "The character was essentially on my mother, and also my grandmother," who lived with his family, Marciano told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview. He also had pictures from the book "Madeline in London" hanging on the walls of his childhood room.

He never met his grandfather, but he uses the same materials Bemelmans did, including gouache and "pens that you have to dip in ink." Ludwig Bemelmans started with a pencil sketch and then did an ink drawing over that -- as does Marciano.

"Madeline at the White House," released in January, was based on an idea of Ludwig's that was generated by his friendship with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. On Madeline's White House visit, she doesn't get to meet Malia and Sasha, but she does get to join in an Easter egg hunt.

Marciano joins well-known picture-book artists David Shannon ("No, David!") and Eric Carle ("The Hungry Caterpillar") in providing artwork for the Festival of Books. His Madeline drawings include the Tommy Trojan statue -- "It's a great statue, and I love drawing statues," Marciano says -- because 2011 is the first year the L.A. Times’ Festival of Books will take place on the campus of USC. Marciano will be there, signing Madeline posters, book bags and everything else she and her friends manage to climb onto.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: 2011 Festival of Books artwork. Credit: John Bemelmans Marciano

In Sunday’s Arts & Books, book critic David L. Ulin talks to Maxine Hong Kingston about her poetic memoir “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” Kingston has been an iconic figure in California letters since the appearance of her first book, “The Woman Warrior,” in 1976; she is also the author of “China Men,” “Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” “To Be the Poet” and “The Fifth Book of Peace.” Here is some more of the conversation.

David L. Ulin: “I Love a Broad Margin in My Life” returns to material you’ve written about previously, particularly in “The Woman Warrior.” Have you ever considered going back and updating any of your earlier works?

Maxine Hong Kingston: I have found things that I could have done better in “The Woman Warrior.” But then I thought: Let the work of one’s youth just stand.

DLU: What would you have done better?

MHK: After I went to China, I saw that the villages there look like pueblos, like any adobe village you could find in Africa or South America. When I wrote the book, I pictured farmhouses the way we have them in the U.S., so there would be a farmhouse surrounded by fields, and then at a distance another farmhouse with its fields. I didn’t realize that all the people lived together in a pueblo and that their common fields were all out there. Everything that one does, in your house, affects the people on the other side of the wall. So I would have written about the villages better. That is a mistake in imagining the setting.

DLU: There’s a fluid sense of time in this book, highlighted by your realization that time is different in China because the Chinese language has no past tense. Was this part of the design, to have language and content mirror one another?

MHK: It was a surprise. Serendipity. I was trying to organize the book. First, I thought, I’ll organize time. Later, I’ll organize space. When I realized that Chinese doesn’t have verb tenses, it explained how easy it is in Buddhism or Chinese mysticism to be in the present moment. And to understand that eternity and the present are one. This is a concept I wrestle with philosophically, and in meditation I work so hard to be in the present moment. Then I learn that they have it in their very language.

DLU: “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life” is a memoir, but it’s written in the form of a book-length poem. What’s your sense of the relationship between poetry and memoir? Why construct the book in this way?

MHK: I think it’s interesting that poetry is nonfiction. I’ve mostly worked with nonfiction. “Tripmaster Monkey” is the only book of fiction, and I could feel the difference as I was working on it. “Tripmaster Monkey” is about people I made up and then put into situations that I also made up. It was so satisfying to do that because I could say at this point I need an exciting scene, at this point I need a climax, and then I will create it. That’s so different from nonfiction, where I am interested in something that’s happened in real life, but it may not have an exciting culmination, so I have to make excitement and drama through language and atmosphere. This is what Aristotle advised: Drama comes through action and conflict. And I can do that in fiction. But in nonfiction and poetry, I have to invent something new, and I think the drama comes from language.

DLU: Were you concerned how readers might react to poetry? As a culture, we seem to be scared of it.

MHK: I know. I think about it. My siblings just received this book in the mail. Some of them picked it up and read it right away, and were pleased at how short the lines are. Others were, "I have to stop and think about this." So, yes, I do worry about it.

DLU: The shortness of the lines here feels inviting, as if the page were open in a way.

MHK: Yes. I also feel that...I don’t think I’m writing difficult poetry. There are complete sentences. I don’t use hard words. 

Peggy Orenstein is coming to L.A. with her new book, "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Girlie-Girl Culture." The book examines contemporary culture's pervasive "princessmania" -- what her website calls a "seemingly-retro trend toward the ultra-feminine" -- and a powerful marketing machine that promotes it.

Hey, are those pink mouse ears in the background of the photo above? Indeed they are. Orenstein told the L.A. Times that at the time she was writing her book, there were more than 26,000 individual Disney princess products being marketed to little girls.

And real-life Disney girls like Miley and Selena and Lindsay are also troublesome, Orenstein says: "They actively put themselves out there as role models and then three months later, whammo, they're dancing on the stripper pole or smoking a bong online."

Will sparks fly between this princess protester and Lori Gottlieb when they appear on stage together next week? Gottlieb is the author of 2010's controversial "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough." In the book, she argues against waiting for a Prince Charming, which seems to fit into the anti-princess rubric. But is urging women to grab for Prince Un-Charming any better?

The two women will discuss Orenstein's book -- and maybe stripper poles and adult relationships -- at Writers Bloc on Feb. 8 at the MGM Building in Century City. Tickets are $20.

ALSO: Looking for Mr. Good Enough

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Peggy Orenstein at home in Berkeley. Credit: Allen J. Schaben /  Los Angeles Times

On Monday, the Hairpin paged through an old Janis Joplin bio, revealing what was in the iconic rocker's purse, circa 1970. Amongst the chaos of motel room keys, vintage cigarette holder, makeup, matches and (empty) bottle of Southern Comfort, there were two books.

The books were "Zelda," the biography of Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, and Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel."

In 1969, L.A. Times writer Robert Hilburn called Joplin rock ’n’ roll’s biggest star. "People seem to have a high sense of drama about me," she told Hilburn backstage at the Hollywood Bowl. "Sure, I could take better care of myself. I suppose I could eat nothing but organic foods, get eight hours of sleep every night, stop smoking. Things like that. Maybe it would add a couple years to my life. But what the hell?"

Though reading "Zelda" might have served as a cautionary tale against a kind of recklessness, Joplin was living her life to excess. In October 1970, just months after that tour where she dumped out the contents of her purse, she was found dead in her motel room in Hollywood.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Janis Joplin in 1970. Credit: Associated Press

Robert Crais' "The Sentry" tops our hardcover fiction bestseller list this week, for the third week in a row. Crais' Los Angeles-centric story interrupts the chokehold Lisbeth Salander has had on the bestseller list; Salander is, of course, the fictional star of the trilogy "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest."

Crais' novel is the third in his Joe Pike series. Reviewer Paula Woods writes:

Being a Joe Pike novel, the action in "The Sentry" is intense and the body count high, but what is more memorable is the manner in which Crais cracks open the door into the enigmatic Pike's emotions and, in the process, explores Pike's experience of love and also the bonds of male friendship. Crais had planned his new book to feature Elvis Cole, but all of that changed, he explained in a recent interview, when he imagined Pike meeting a woman in Venice after he'd saved her uncle from a robbery.

"The way Pike looked at her," Crais told the interviewer, "I knew I had to follow their story."

On the nonfiction list, Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" holds its position at No. 4, for the second week running. To move up the charts, it will have to beat Keith Richards' memoir "Life," the historical biography "Cleopatra" by Stacy Schiff and "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand. That might be tough: "Unbroken" was just chosen by NPR for its February book club.

What's more, "Unbroken" is the story of Louis Zamperini, a Southern California teen troublemaker turned Olympic runner turned World War II flyer and prisoner of war. Can a Tiger Mother be equally tough?

Preview the L.A. Times bestseller list every week here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

 
The Wall Street Journal visits with visionary publisher Benedikt Taschen in his John Lautner-designed house in the hills of Hollywood. Most books, Taschen tells the paper, "are disposable from the beginning." Not his.

Mr. Taschen started out selling comic books when he was in his teens, with his first store called Taschen Comics. Then there was a chance encounter in 1984 with 40,000 remainder copies of a book on Magritte; he bought them for a pittance, sold them for double and began his career publishing his own books with the money made. Today, the company publishes about 100 titles per year.

Mr. Taschen admits he puts too much love and attention into his creations to ever go into the orbit of mass publishing, adding that he wants to make collectibles, not disposables.

One of Taschen's five retail stores, packed wall-to-wall with his signature art and photography books, is in Beverly Hills. In 2010, the recent Taschen publication "Los Angeles: Portrait of a City" won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for art and architecture book. Read the complete article about Benedikt Taschen here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Publisher Benedikt Taschen, right, with Hugh Hefner at Hefner's 2009 book signing. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Can Nevin's Barberry help the Arroyo Seco Branch Library stay beautiful? Opened in Highland Park in 2003, the library's river-rock exterior has been tagged by vandals, and the garden has fallen into disrepair. There aren't library funds available for cleanup, but library supporters -- and a thorny plant -- may be able to help.

Nevin's Barberry, a hardy shrub, will act as the library's natural defender. Eastsider LA reports that "once the plants grow, anyone considering tagging those walls they 'may want to put on a suit of armor,' " according to Trisha Gossett, who has led the project to revitalize the library's exterior.

On Saturday, the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council is calling for volunteers to come out for a morning of weeding, pruning, planting and mulching. A welcome session begins and 8:30 a.m.; gardening activities kick off at 9 a.m. and continue until noon.

Those who arrive early -- anytime from 6:00 to 8:30 a.m. -- will be able to watch the exterior of the Arroyo Seco Branch Library get a power washing. And gardeners who stay for the duration will be treated to lunch.

In addition to the thorny Nevin's Barberry, donated security cameras will also be installed to help keep the library's exterior protected from vandals.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: A barberry illustration by Otto Wilhelm Thomé.

Chase Twichell, a former teacher and publisher who has been writing for more than 30 years, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University.

Twichell, who lives in Keene, N.Y., with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, is being honored for "Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been," her seventh book of poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press last year. Her previous collections include "Dog Language" (2005) "The Snow Watcher” (1998) and “Northern Spy” (1981). The Tufts Award, established at Claremont Graduate University in 1992, honors work by a midcareer poet.

Tiwchell is a former teacher at Princeton who founded Ausable Press in 1999. The company, which focused on publishing poetry books, was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2008.

Atsuro Riley, author of "Romey's Order," was chosen to receive the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

-- Lee Margulies

Photo: Chase Twichell

Westwood's Mystery Bookstore closed its doors Monday, but Book'em Mysteries is still open across town, in South Pasadena. "We're hanging in," says co-owner Mary Riley. "We're not here to make a fortune."

Book'em Mysteries has an extensive stock of colorful paperbacks, including all kinds of mysteries, from cozies to noir. "We really wanted this bookstore to be for readers, not collectors," Riley says. "People that buy books because they want to read them, then might give them to a library or a friend."

 
Trade paperbacks, larger than the classic compact mass-market paperbacks, have become more popular in recent years at the store. The store does stock hardcovers too.

In addition to hundreds of tales of mayhem and murder, Book'Em Mysteries has a kids' section, stocked with children's books that Riley likes -- and she should know: she's a former teacher for kindergarten through third grade.

Photographer Autumn de Wilde will be signing copies of her Death Cab for Cutie photo book, called, appropriately, "Death Cab for Cutie," on Thursday night at Silverlake's Intelligentsia coffeshop.

The book includes more than 200 photos of the band, reminiscences and ephemera. '"It's really important to document these artists long-term," De Wilde told Spin in November, when the book was released. "Certain parts of these artists go away forever if you don't capture them in photos."

De Wilde will be signing "Death Cab for Cutie" (the book, not the band) from 8 to 10 p.m. at Intelligentsia, and Skylight Books will be on site with copies for sale.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Death Cab for Cutie in 2005. Credit: Autumn de Wilde

Rupert Murdoch unveiled his new iPad-only newspaper-like publication, The Daily, Wednesday morning. For 99 cents a week, or $39.99 a year, subscribers can get full-color, interactive, video-enhanced news, opinion, gossip, sports and culture.

In our pages, Dawn Chmielewski explains the media titan's motivations:

Murdoch, distraught over how the free culture of the Internet has ravaged the newspaper business, is determined to find a way to put the ink back in the bottle. He has advocated charging for content, delivered to all sorts of devices including cellphones, computers, tablets and e-readers.

"The old business model based on advertising-only is dead … that's not going to change even in a boom," Murdoch said last year in an interview with the Washington Post. "Critics say people won't pay, but I say they will. But only if you give them something good."

The Guardian says it looks good, but asks, will it find a niche? What I want to know is: what's its books coverage like? I can't download it to my iPhone -- it's iPad only -- so if you've taken a look, let us know what you think.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

The Association of Writing Programs annual conference, known as AWP, kicks off Wednesday in Washington for those who've been able to battle the storms and get there. It's a conference that welcomes professors and graduate students, and undergraduates too, to gather and talk about writing -- teaching writing, studying writing and, in the best of cases, publishing writing.

Like any conference, AWP can be anxiety-making. When I first went in 2007, I was an MFA student, the only one from my program to attend. The swarm of strangers was mediated by some Internet friends, who took me under their collective wing. I came to understand that the conference can be easily navigated, if only you know what you're doing.

Here are my dos and don'ts for AWP. Newbies, this is for you.

1. DO: Drink in the conference hotel bar. Despite the fact that hotel bars are notoriously overpriced, this is where you want to be. The conference hotel bar is where the cooler veterans will gather, the professors and published writers, people who've bumped into each other at this conference in other years and have maybe made a vague plan to do so again. Do you want to talk to them? Of course you do. AWP 2011 has two hotels, so this will be twice the "work."

2. DON'T: Be afraid to approach those writers. I'd met Dan Chaon ("Await Your Reply") only briefly when he'd come to speak at my program, but he was entirely nice when I sort of awkwardly said hi, and he let me stick around while talking to his friends. If a writer you recognize is in the hotel bar, odds are they're open to having a conversation -- otherwise, they'd be somewhere else.

3. DO: Pick out two to five panels you can't miss. This will give a shape to your attendance and your days.

4. DON'T: Worry if you miss some of those panels. Serendipity may put something in your path that is equally important.

5. DO: Talk to people who go to the same panels you do. You're interested in the same authors, wrestling with the same problems, asking the same questions. It may be that no one in your program shares your interest as much as people in other programs -- this is your chance to connect with them.

6. DON'T: Shirk away if one of those people is from Iowa. Yes, it's the Harvard of writing programs, the people who go there are usually totally amazing writers, and they get all kinds of agent attention. But they have their own, very real problems, and we all know that not everyone can go to Iowa.

7. DO: Go to any panel a friend appears on. Even if it's first thing in the morning, even if you are the only one there. Show your support -- you never know when your future panels may be scheduled.

8. DON'T: Let the prospect of an early-morning panel curb your social activities.