Who you know Almond to be is likely as the co-host of the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with “Wild” author Cheryl Strayed, which ran for four years. He’s also authored a dozen books including the New York Times bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” His novel “All the Secrets of the World” has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox.

When he’s not winning a NEA grant in fiction like he did in 2022, or having his short stories anthologized in places like the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica and Best American Mysteries series, he also self-publishes comedic wonders like “Letters from People Who Hate Me.”

Who I know Steve Almond to be is, full disclosure, a dear family friend, the kind where our kids played together when they were little. We also taught writing together at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He first came on my radar, though, decades ago when we were young reporters at competing newspapers in the Southwest. His writing was fantastic, he beat me to stories…and therefore I, well, kind of couldn’t stand him.

More on that below, in our conversation that has only barely been edited for clarity. He joins Bookish, the Southern California News Group’s virtual program, as a guest along with novelist Rene Denfeld on Friday, April 19 at 5 pm. Register for Bookish here, it’s free.

Q. All those years ago when we were working at competing newspapers, could you feel my envy of you? 

SA: A little context would probably help here. Ahem. When you and I were in our early 20s, we worked as rock critics at competing newspapers, you at the Las Cruces Sun-News, and me at the El Paso Times. It is important to acknowledge that I was completely unqualified to be a rock critic and that the reviews I wrote reflected this. I knew nothing about heavy metal or country music, which was 90% of what came through. The highlight of my reviews was generally a description of the lead singer’s hair.

I was unaware that you felt envy towards me, but even if I had known that, I wouldn’t have believed you, Sam, because I did not consider myself an enviable person. I was a self-involved twerp with a deeply regrettable mullet and a closet full of thrift-store wannabe hipster shirts. Two decades later, I wrote about my stint as a rock critic in the pornographic short story “My Life in Heavy Metal.” This was my way of processing the shame. If we had met back then — and I’m sure we never did — I’m absolutely certain I would have made a pass at you, and that it would have been roundly (and soundly) rejected.

Q. Yes, probably. OK, serious question: You’ve been teaching writing for years. At what point did you look around at all the other craft books and say, “I need to write my own”?

SA: I will tell you a secret: I don’t read craft books. Not because I’m some hotshot who doesn’t need them, but because I find them largely futile. Because no matter how eloquently they set out the mechanics of storytelling, they can’t solve the basic crisis of writing, which is that – spoiler alert! – writing is a lonely and doubt-choked pursuit. You sit there trying to make decisions, while simultaneously second-guessing, revising, mistrusting your decisions.

Having said that, I don’t consider “Truth Is the Arrow” to be a craft book. As you note below, it’s really about storytelling as a means of understanding what you’ve lived through. And it’s written not from the perspective of a crafty, know-it-all teacher, but more a writer who has mostly failed and is trying to understand why.

Q. I think each book we write teaches us something. What did this book teach you?

SA: That I am a lot better on the page than in real life. By which I mean: I found myself writing things (about being patient, about being forgiving, etc.) and then thinking about how I behave with my family and being, like: Dude, you are so not living into this noble rap of yours.

Q. When I think of you, I always think of how funny you are, and how much you have made me laugh, both in person and on the page. You write in “Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow” about humor being an evolutionary adaptation. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

SA: I mean that it’s hard to be a human being, because we have these big brains that make us aware of how fragile our lives are, and how much we stand to lose, and that also constantly make us feel guilty for our impulses. We’re just, like, worried and ashamed and angry and sad all the time. And the way we deal with this, without actually killing ourselves, is to make jokes. It’s like this mechanism that allows us to get over ourselves and all our bloated existential woe. Pain becomes the punchline.

Q. I love that you provide a whole section on the standard, cliché questions writing students ask published authors, like “How do I get an agent” and “What’s your writing process like.” Why was that important to include?

SA: Because so many of these questions are really just about unexamined anxieties. “How do I get an agent?” is really just, “Will I ever be good enough?” “What’s your writing process like?” is really just, “Do you have the magic fairy dust that will make me good enough?” It’s important to accept doubt as part of the creative process. But you can’t let that idiot drive.

Q. This book has one of the best titles ever. Yeah so that’s really not a question.

SA: This means so much to me. Because it’s not an easy title to say or understand. You have to work at it. But it’s the phrase I found myself blabbing at students over and over again, because it’s the simplest, most direct way of articulating how storytelling works. You have to want to tell the truth. The more you aim for mercy, the deeper you travel into truth.

Q. What I love about this book so much is that at its heart, it’s really about being a more conscious human. Sorry, didn’t mean to give away the ending! Also, not a question. Gosh I guess I’m really bad at this.

SA: Not at all. The whole point of the book is to be in conversation with the reader. I’d frankly prefer to hear your own reactions and insights, because you’re a born teacher, as well, Sam. Our natural impulse, when we read stuff, is to look for lessons we can share with our students. That’s our muscle memory. And (by the way) I can still remember teaching with you at Esalen, and listening to one of your lectures while I was watching one of my obstreperous children making pottery in that neighboring art studio. And what I remember is how much all the students were laughing, how relaxed they were, and how much wisdom you were slipping them in that unguarded state. That’s something we have in common—a desire to take writing seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

Q. OK, here’s a question: You admittedly struggled to write a novel for years even though you had successful nonfiction books and collections. And then you finally did with “All the Secrets of the World.” Did that book bring you a different sense of accomplishment from all your others?

SA: Oh, hell yes. I had written four unpublishable novels to that point and that monkey on my back felt like King Kong. Then, at a certain point, I just gave up on writing a novel. I was like, “Sam Dunn’s still writing novels. I don’t need to mess with all that.” [Fact check: Sam Dunn is not!] And the moment I stopped putting pressure on myself to “perform” as a novelist, the muse was kind enough to walk Lorena Saenz (the protagonist of “Secrets”) into my head. I never said to myself, “Hey, you’re writing a novel again!” I just chased Lorena into one crisis after another and tried to figure out if and how she might rescue herself.

Q. Final question: What are you writing now?

SA: Mostly, emails to teachers and administrators and the kindly readers of my political column who take time out of their busy schedules to send me hate mail.

We’re not talking about the kind said to haunt houses. Tomlinson’s ghost is the publishing industry’s workhorse – a ghostwriter, the unnamed, well-paid but often hidden scribes hired to do the real writing for those celebrity memoirs or the blockbusters credited to business moguls.

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It’s a world Tomlinson knows intimately: This L.A.-based writer is a well-known “ghost” in publishing circles, having ghostwritten or co-written 21 books, including the New York Times bestseller “Fast Girl,” with Suzy Favor Hamilton, and four other New York Times bestsellers for which she was uncredited. Tomlinson began her career as a journalist and became a popular music critic and columnist for outlets like Spin, Billboard and the Los Angeles Times (hence her social media handle, @duchessofrock).

In her debut novel, “The Last Days of The Midnight Ramblers,” Tomlinson blends her years of experience as a ghost and a music journalist to create a tense drama about a desperate ghostwriter named Mari hired to pen the memoir of a rock ’n roll courtesan who had a front-row seat to life with The Midnight Ramblers, a mythic, epic rock band in the style of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Who. The death of the band’s charismatic leader Mal has only added to their legend. In trying to balance keeping her ghostwriting gig while also digging into the mystery of Mal’s death, Mari falls into a twisted world of fame and power, where nothing is really what it seems.

Tomlinson joins Friday’s episode of Bookish, the Southern California News Group’s free virtual program about authors and the literary life, starting at 5 pm. Register here. In advance of the program, she corresponded over email about the novel and her career. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

Q. Your novel gives the most insightful depictions of the job of ghostwriting I’ve ever seen. It made me curious; you’ve had such a successful career doing it. How did you fall into this specialty, and what kept you in the role through so many books?

It’s very accurate to say I “fell into” this job. In the early aughts, I had wrangled my way into a successful career as a music journalist, mostly for daily newspapers like The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. But after moving to Los Angeles in 2006 and feeling the pains of freelance budget cuts, I knew I needed to expand my writing well.

A friend-of-a-friend was up for a ghosting project for reality TV star Tila Tequila, and it ended up getting passed to me. I found Tila to be professional and was honored to have the chance to publish a book, and we worked with an excellent editor, Brant Rumble, at Scribner (an imprint of Simon & Schuster). So, I had a very positive experience and learned a great deal about book publishing. My agent came to me through that job, and he began finding me other ghosting projects. Like my ghostwriter character, Mari, who was loosely based on me, I found I was particularly well-suited to the work, in terms of the intimacy it requires in the inner life and creative process of clients, and the fast metabolism of the deadlines, which can often involve writing several books in a year. In between ghosting projects, I was able to buy myself time to work on my own fiction, screenplays, and personal essays.

Q. You credit your agent Kirby Kim in the acknowledgments for giving you the idea for Mightnight Ramblers. What’s the deal there? Had you not wanted to write fiction before?

I had wanted to write fiction since I was 16 and took my first creative writing class at the early college Simon’s Rock. I went to journalism school in my 20s as a trade that was an alternative to waitressing. Kirby had read my three earlier novels and didn’t feel he was a good fit to represent them, or that they were right to be my debut. Knowing fiction was my first love, he gave me his blessing to show them to other agents and editors. For a variety of reasons, none of them found a route to publication. In 2016, over drinks in New York, Kirby suggested I should write a thriller about a ghostwriter because he knew all of my crazy, secret stories from the job, which I would never be able to tell unless I fictionalized them.

Like many people, it takes me a while to heed good advice, but I finally saw the wisdom of his words and started writing in 2018. One of the first questions was, what kind of memoir would my ghostwriter pen? And as soon as I decided to set it in my old world – rock ‘n’ roll – the whole book came together.

Q. The (weird) world of publishing has been showing up a lot lately – in the movie “American Fiction” and novels “Yellowface” and “The Other Black Girl.” What for you makes it an interesting backdrop for storytelling? 

I loved all of those stories (and I chose my wonderful audiobook narrator, Helen Laser, in part because I adored her narration of “Yellowface” so much.) Not to make it seem like Kirby is my puppet master, but he and I spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about what makes fiction work, and he had the astute observation that readers (and viewers) love to learn about a whole new world.

While those of us who work in media may be drawn to these stories because they’re deliciously familiar, for readers (who, obviously, also love books), I think it’s an exciting opportunity to learn about all of the Sturm and Drang that can go on behind the scenes. I also happen to adore coming-of-age stories, and I feel like most author characters go through some version of losing their innocence and achieving greater wisdom (or at least perspective on life), while in pursuit of their deepest dream, which is the stuff of great drama.

Q. This is your debut novel but you published an excellent memoir, “Good Girl,” in 2015, and of course, you’ve written many successful books for others. How did writing the novel challenge you?

Not to draw the ire of other writers, but I don’t usually get blocked when I’m writing, even for myself. The years when I literally wouldn’t eat if I didn’t hit my journalism deadlines has given me an ingrained discipline that was very helpful when I faced my own creative work, especially on days when I felt anxious about whether or not it was any good.

I’ve always been drawn to character-driven stories (that’s really what most celebrity memoirs are, isn’t it?). So, that aspect of my novel was the easiest and most satisfying for me to write. I struggled the most with the plotting of the book’s mystery, as this is a new genre for me. I was lucky enough to have an excellent thriller mentor in the form of my friend Steph Cha (“Your House Will Pay”) who lent me books and let me ask questions like: “But how does a person get to the point of murdering someone?” I probably devoted the most revisions (I had 13 drafts in all) to trying to land the pacing, red herrings, and resolution of the book’s mystery, which involves the drowning death of Midnight Ramblers founding member, Mal Walker. Mari’s client Anke was married to him at the time of his death, which becomes a central part of Anke’s memoir.

Q. What’s the pressure like publishing under your own name? 

Because I had wanted to publish a novel for three decades, and I am extremely passionate about the novels I have loved in my own life (from “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt to “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin) I cared deeply about writing something good enough to be in conversation with my favorite writers. While I wanted my book to be a juicy rock ‘n’ roll romp, I also hoped it would do what, for me, is the point of accomplished writing: to explore what it means to be human.

Also, I had to majorly manage my expectations around publication, as almost all of my clients are automatically invited to promote their books in splashy ways like appearing on “Good Morning America” and being featured on the jumbotron in Times Square (a secret dream of mine, for real). So, I had to prepare myself for the fact that my book promotion journey was going to look a little different.

That said, I’m not sure they ever get asked the kind of thoughtful questions about their work that I get to answer about mine, so I’m happy with my own experience of introducing my book to the world.

Q. Without giving too much away, one of the things I loved about “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers” is that our protagonist, Mari, ultimately learns important lessons for her own life in the process of entering this glitzy world of fame and trying to unravel the mystery of what happened with this epic rock band. Certainly, your ghostwriting and music journalist experiences informed the novel – what have you personally taken away from your own rock ‘n roll writing experiences that have influenced your life?

Ooh, this is basically my dream question, so thank you for asking it! I purposely wanted Mari’s clients to be exceptional iconoclasts who could teach her (and through her, the reader) how to lead a remarkable life that allows you to discover who you are and how to live as authentically as possible. My belief that such a life is possible, and is worth seeking out and pursuing, definitely came to me through musicians, writers, and artists I have interviewed, befriended, and come to love through their work.

Culturally, we hold up rock stars for their tendency to rebel against a staid, conventional life. Having grown up unconventionally (in a family that was part of an intentional community in Maine; while getting my college education as a teenager; as part of the punk and alternative rock worlds when I was a young artist and music journalist) maybe I was seeking beacons in a life I was already living. I do think musicians and artists I admire have modeled curiosity, passion, and original thinking, as well as creative discipline.

Q. Last question: What’s next for you, writing-wise? 

I was fortunate enough to sell two novels to Flatiron Books, so I am working with my brilliant and lovely editor Zack Wagman on my next novel, “Occupancy.” It’s a mystery set at an Airbnb in the Pacific Northwest. I’m also continuing to ghostwrite and work on my own original screenplays, and I hope to have the opportunity to adapt “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers” for the screen.

It sounds like the plot of the latest streaming series, but that’s really what happened to the internationally bestselling mystery writer Tess Gerritsen, best known for her police procedural series featuring Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles (which inspired the TNT television series, “Rizzoli & Isles”).

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Originally from San Diego, Gerritsen moved with her husband to a 5,000-person town on the rocky coast of Maine some 33 years ago – and what happened next eventually ended up inspiring her most recent novel, “The Spy Coast.” This novel also launches a whole new series for the author about a group of retired spies who called themselves The Martini Club.

Gerritsen will discuss the book at an in-person event on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Cypress Public Library, 5331 Orange Ave., Cypress 90630. At the event, which is sponsored by the Orange County Library Foundation, attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the book.

Gerritsen also makes a recorded appearance on Friday’s episode of “Bookish,” the virtual program produced by the Southern California News Group that goes live at 5 p.m. via Zoom with fellow guests David Ulin talking about his noir thriller “Thirteen Question Method” and author Sarah Blakely-Cartwright discussing her novel “Alice Sadie Celine.” Go to Bookish to get the link.

Meanwhile, here are some highlights from our forthcoming Bookish interview about the making of “The Spy Coast.” This has been edited for clarity and length.

On discovering her neighbors were spies:

“My husband is a doctor, so he opened up a medical practice. and when he brought in new patients he’d always taken occupational history. The patient would say, ‘I used to work for the government, but I can’t talk about it.’ And after I heard about it that for the third time, it was like, Who are these people? Where did we move to? We got the answer from a real estate agent. She said, ‘Oh, they’re all retired CIA.’

“It turns out it is the worst-kept secret in the state of Maine. We are packed with CIA retirees up here, not just in the mid-coast where I live, but also all over the state. I also found out that two of my neighbors living on the street were retired spies. I found out that my son’s best friend’s parents were married spies. And then there was a period of time where I was having dinner parties, I found out later that every time I’d had a dinner there was a spy at that table.”

On why spies settle in Maine:

“Why are they here? I’ve heard various explanations. One is that this used to be a location of safe houses; the CIA would send people up here to hide away. Another is that it’s far from any nuclear targets. And then I’ve also heard that Mainers, you know, we have a reputation for minding our own business. We won’t pry. And so we’re very respectful of people’s privacy up here. And then finally, you know, there was some CIA activity up here in the late sixties and early seventies. So I think a lot of spies came up here, found the state, loved it and decided, ‘This is where I’m gonna retire to.’”

On how she researched the world of espionage:

“You know it’s tough because [retired spies] can’t, or won’t, talk about it – although I heard that there was one spy up here with Alzheimer’s who wouldn’t shut up about it…

“Well, first of all, I did not want to write a James Bond book where people are running around with guns. I really was more interested in the emotional toll of being in espionage. What is it like to be in a career where you can’t really tell the truth all the time? What do you do? Can you tell the truth to your spouse? Can you really make friends without feeling like there is secondary gain involved? So I wanted to get into the nitty gritty of character for the kind of person who becomes a spy. To get that I went to memoirs. You know there are a number of memoirs written by former secret agents.

On why it took her this long to write about the world of retired spies:

“You know, it is funny that it took me this many years to write this story, but I think it’s because I had to be older to understand what retirees go through.

“I was interested in these people in these silver-haired people I see at the post office, or, you know, at the grocery store. They have ordinary lives. But what do they do now? What do you do after you’ve had an interesting job as a spy – do you have cocktail parties? Do you have book groups?

“I was writing my characters Rizzoli and Isles in their mid-to-late thirties back when I was that age. But now I am retirement age. I’m the age of some of [“The Spy Coast”] characters, and I understand what it’s like to get older, to suddenly be considered over the hill. To be overlooked. Maybe people think, ‘Oh, you’re not as capable as you used to be when you were 35,’ but my spies, they are capable. Maybe maybe they can’t run as fast, and maybe their joints have been replaced. But they haven’t lost their marbles, and that’s what I wanted to get into –  people who really still want to be useful, but are overlooked.”

More than a decade after that book was published, Lauren herself became a kind of Scheherazade in “Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer,” out July 18. But instead of spinning tales to keep a murderous king from spilling the blood of innocent women, she lured another murderous despot – Sam Little, who confessed to murdering 93 women – into telling the stories of those he had already killed, in an effort to save their memory from police cold case files.

By her account, that effort – which over the course of almost five years took her everywhere from maximum security prisons to courthouses and the homes of victims’ bereaved relatives – just about broke her.

“I really never anticipated the emotional depths it would take me to,” Lauren said, speaking via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles.

Named an Amazon Best Book of July 2023, “Behold the Monster” is Lauren’s chronicle of her complicated relationship with Little, who, as she writes, is “someone who is human, but just barely.”

‘The criminal we allowed’

Inspired by the “nonfiction novel” techniques Truman Capote pioneered to write the true crime classic “In Cold Blood,” Lauren creates a cinematically styled mix of gritty reportage and intimate memoir for “Behold the Monster.” She says she aims not to elevate the criminal but to expose the societal inequities that allowed him to get away with his awful crimes for so long.

“Bobby Kennedy famously said every society gets the criminal it deserves, and the law enforcement it demands. As I say in the book, I’m not sure that Sam Little was the criminal we deserved, but it was certainly the criminal we allowed,” Lauren said.

Over more than six decades, Little preyed on marginalized women.

“His rap sheet was over a hundred pages long. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” she said. “The former DA, Beth Silverman, who had prosecuted successfully four or five serial killers in Los Angeles said, ‘I’ve never seen a rap sheet like this.’ It was stunning. And the first time I saw it, I cried. I was like, wait, it’s not just that he was arrested again and again and again and again – not just for petty theft, which he was – but he was arrested for assault and murder.”

There was often a lack of physical evidence, but more than that, juries considered his victims and the eyewitnesses to his crimes not credible.

“It was a criminologist named Steven Egger who came up with the idea that we value our homicides differently based on people’s class. In the case of Sam’s victims specifically, he cherry-picked his victims for being clearly marginalized. People of color, addicted, often prostitutes – people who would be considered unreliable even if they lived. And that was exactly what happened.”

From fiction and memoir to true crime

Recasting herself as a true crime maven initially seemed to me like an unlikely move for Lauren (who, full disclosure, I knew from when our children shared some playdates as preschoolers). Gruesome murder wasn’t the literary terrain she covered: In addition to her breakout memoir, “Some Girls,” her previous books include the contemporary novel “Pretty” and a memoir, “Everything You Ever Wanted,” about the journey she and her husband, Weezer bass player Scott Shriner, went on in adopting a child with special needs from Ethiopia.

But Lauren contends that if you scratch the surface, everything connects.

“I am a bit of a wild child, and plagued with insatiable curiosity. I think in all my work you can see that I’m looking at fringe elements of society, exploring the underbelly and seeing how that reflects upon us as a whole. I think that there are these commonalities, though my books do seem so different,” she said.

The journey to “Behold the Monster” began innocently enough, with an attempt to write a mystery novel.

“I’ve always loved mysteries. I’ve been a true crime fanatic since I was nine years old. I had read every Agatha Christie book by the time I was 12. And, it just occurred to me that, um, why am I not writing a mystery? I love them. When I read to impress, I’ll go read some Dostoyevsky. When I read for myself, I’m going to grab a Michael Connelly off the shelf,” she said. (In fact, Connelly wrote the foreword to “Behold the Monster.”)

Research for that mystery novel led her to an interview with famed LAPD homicide detective Mitzi Roberts about historic LA crimes including the Black Dahlia, for which Roberts is the official custodian. “Mitzi’s passion is cold cases,” Lauren explained.

Toward the tail end of their interview, Roberts mentioned that one of her greatest professional coups was convicting an under-reported serial killer by the name of Samuel Little, who she had brought to justice in 2014.

“I was like, ‘What?’ My antennas went up. I told her, ‘You buried the lede!’ and she said, ‘I’m not the one asking the questions,’” Lauren said with a laugh.

“When Mitzi said to me, ‘I believe he was responsible for many more deaths across the country,’ and that there weren’t resources in local law enforcement to find out more, that sank like a stone in my gut,” said Lauren. “Who knows how many families out there will never have answers? How many women out there will remain forever without their names, Jane Does? Due to my own history of domestic violence, some sex work, and a tough childhood, while it wasn’t so much I could have been one of these women, it was more that I felt a sense of fury at the injustice. I felt motivated by them.”

And, frankly, from a writer’s perspective, Lauren sensed that she just might have struck literary gold.

“It started more as, Wow, here’s a good story, a career-maker of a story. Here’s an underreported serial killer. And, you know, it’s one of my superpowers, to crack anyone. I’m a good conversationalist.”

She quickly went down a rabbit hole to learn everything she could about Little, eventually scoring the first of many interviews with the imprisoned killer.

“Be careful what you ask for in a sense, you know? I had been watching my true crime documentaries for years and years, late at night. I always would sit there with my popcorn, watch those documentaries and say ‘Ask him this’ and ‘Ask him this.” I was finally going to get to do it,” she said.

“It seemed like a wild and audacious thing to try. And then when it succeeded – and this is sort of the story of my life – I said, now what do I do? I mean, really, now he’s confessing, what do I do? It pivoted my entire life. I didn’t think it would turn into my life’s passion. I mean, what grabbed me was the injustice. What kept me in it was this really complicated, and interesting, and destructive, relationship with a pernicious, vicious killer.”

Hurdle after hurdle

Writing a book is hard enough, but in the midst of her research, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger got wind of Lauren’s project and approached her to do a series about her work to track down all of Little’s victims. The result was the 2021 Starz series, “Confronting a Serial Killer.”

And let’s not forget, there was that small complication of a pandemic.

“I mean, my family was falling apart. I had a documentary crew in my house for weeks. That’s in the middle of Covid. We were all stuck. It was awful…you know, there was so much hypervigilance for so long.”

Did she think about giving up? Lauren shakes her head no.

“I had to make it work. I had real contracts to fulfill. I have a performing musician for a husband, which means he didn’t have work for two years. And I can’t leave the house to keep getting the stories [for the book]. And waking up at four in the morning to set up homeschool…I just feel fundamentally changed by the process of that time.”

But finish the book she did, and in a weird twist of fate, Little ended up dying of Covid in prison – essentially dying by suffocation, the same method of death he had used to kill so very many women. Because of their ongoing relationship, he named Lauren his next of kin. She had hoped to donate his brain to science so that researchers at Standford and UCI might be able to gain more understanding about what creates the type of dangerous psychopath that Little grew up to become. But that was not to be.

“I was trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. I was going to do some good with it. But we were in the middle of Covid; there were meat trucks lined up at the coroner’s office. And because I’m not actually a next-of-kin, the paperwork was a legal mess. By the time I got it straightened out, that brain was useless. And now he is in my garage. There’s just a big bag of dirt that used to be a guy. But I’m going to do something really good with it. I just don’t know what.”

Maybe she already has.

Fighting for the voices of the victims

If the real goal was to give voice to women robbed of life by Little, “Behold the Monster” attempts that. But Lauren says that after five years of working on this, she’s just now realized that the true voice she found was her own – as a writer, a journalist, an advocate.

Lauren says she hopes that she has invited “everyone into the work” of learning about the forgotten women by featuring the most comprehensive known list of victims, as well as listing resources for victims of violent crime and resources for reporting crime tips to law enforcement.

“I’m so proud of this book, partially because it almost killed me,” Lauren said. “I do think that there’s a possibility this could bring more visibility to this issue of how we value people and what we expect from our law enforcement. I think we have to insist on the Harry Bosch motto of ‘everybody matters or nobody matters.’ We must fight for the humanity of these women and for their visibility.  And because I am lucky enough to still be above ground and speaking, I’m going be the one to do it.”

Lauren will discuss “Behold the Monster” on Bookish, SCNG’s free virtual program, on Friday, July 21 at 5 p.m. The program also features Eliza Jane Brazier, author of “Girls and Their Horses.” To register, go to Bookish.

Only a bonafide horse girl who knows bell boots from breeches could write a line like that with such authority. It’s clear from the first pages of the delightfully wicked murder mystery “Girls and Their Horses” – set amid the opulence of Rancho Santa Fe’s equestrian community and the tony, cutthroat world of showjumping – that author Eliza Jane Brazier has spent a lot of time in the saddle.

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More than a pulpy page-turner, Brazier infuses “Girls and Their Horses” with cutting insights about class, wealth and privilege – much as she did with her darkly satirical novel, “Good Rich People.” In the new book, she adds another layer of meaning to it all, about the toxicity of parents imposing their own dreams upon their children. The story of what happens when a nouveau riche mom pressures her daughter to take up riding in order to both gain entry into elite old-money circles and fulfill the mom’s own need for acceptance, “Girls and Their Horses” is getting a lot of buzz in places like Oprah Daily, Glamour, Town & Country and the Today show, which called it “the thriller of the summer.”

You could say Brazier, who grew up in the San Diego County’s La Costa, just outside of Rancho Santa Fe, has been researching this novel her whole life. A horse-crazy kid from the get-go, she started riding lessons when she was five years old.

“By the time I was, like, eight, I was a working student, basically. I’m from a family of nine children and [my parents] are not wealthy, so I had to work to be able to have access to horses,” says Brazier on a video call from her home in Norco, a huge carousel horse serving as her backdrop.

By age 18, she’d worked her way up to being the head rider in the training program at her local barn. Then it was time to go to college, followed by marriage and a move to England, where she set about writing young adult novels under the name Eliza Wass. And just like that, almost a decade of her life passed by without horses.

Then the unthinkable happened: Her husband died unexpectedly.

A couple of years passed in a fog of grief, and then she went to a family reunion held at a Northern California dude ranch.

“I got to ride again. And I was like, oh [expletive],” says Brazier with a laugh. “I mean, I feel like it happens to a lot of people who stop riding at a certain age. They come back to it and they go, ‘Why wasn’t I doing this the whole time, why did I stop?’ Because, I mean, my life wasn’t horrible or anything, but it was missing something that whole time. I feel like I had been trying to fill it with other things that were not necessarily healthy or happy things, you know? So that trip was just kind of an eye-opener.”

The experience of riding at the dude ranch motivated her to move back to the U.S. and center her life around horses again. She actually ended up landing the head wrangler gig at that very same dude ranch.

Happy ending? Not exactly.

“It was kind of a disaster,” she says. “The horse part was great, don’t get me wrong.”

Within six weeks she was looking for a new place to land – taking with her the inspiration for her first adult-themed thriller, “If I Disappear,” published in 2021. She secured a position as a trainer at Hayden Clarke Show Jumping in Orange County’s Laguna Hills.

“I started with doing the job that no one wants, the summer camps,” she says with a laugh.

As much as she loved the kids and the horses, working six days a week while commuting to the OC from her parent’s home in San Diego took its toll.

“I was coming to the realization that, ‘You’re never gonna be able to afford to live out here on this salary. So this really isn’t gonna work.’”

That’s when she decided to pull up stakes again and move to Los Angeles with the hope of writing for television. “Which was very optimistic of me!” she laughs again.

Optimistic but not wrong – Brazier’s books are all currently in development. But before Hollywood came knocking, she needed a day job, so once again she turned to horses, this time at the Paddock Riding Club in Atwater Village.

“I taught all the sorts of kids of the rich and famous. And it was from those experiences that I got the idea for this [novel], because you’d see all the different parent-children dynamics. You have these gorgeous women who like come from nothing and always dreamed of having a horse. The kid, you know, could not be less interested. And it was just intriguing, you know, because I don’t think it’s a negative impulse to say, ‘This is my dream of a beautiful life and I’m going to give it to you.’

“But even though I don’t think it’s a negative to want to give your kids the life you never had, it’s also dangerous.”

Those dangers are what Brazier digs into to create the suspenseful read that is “Girls and Their Horses” –  a world of betrayal, jealousies and cruelty, with one exception: Horses. The beautiful and generous creatures form the book’s moral center, its one purely good thing. Or, as one of the characters notes, “Anyone who didn’t believe in magic had never ridden a horse.”

And rather than riding other people’s horses as a trainer, Brazier now has her own magic – she promised herself that if the book was picked up by a publisher, she’d buy her first horse. And she did, a pinto mare named Tennessee, after playwright Tennessee Williams.

“So after quitting the [horse show] industry,” she says with a grin, “I could finally afford a horse.”

The writing process included plenty of starts and stops as he was distracted by other projects, like co-writing “Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion.” That biography, written over two and a half years and with dozens of interviews with current and former members of the iconic Woodland Hills-based band, was published in 2020. He was also working on adapting his 2016 Keith Morris (Circle Jerks and Black Flag) biography, “My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor” into a screenplay.

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But he wanted to get back to this novel.

“I had to pay the bills doing other things and working on other books,” Ruland said during a phone interview from his home in San Diego, just before “Make It Stop” was published by Los Angeles publisher Rare Bird Books last month.

“One thing I didn’t see coming in my life was to be able to make a living off of writing punk rock books,” Ruland, who previously served in the U.S. Navy, continued. “Who knew punk rock would pay better than writing fiction? For me, that’s certainly been the case. But I felt like I had this good idea of these dysfunctional vigilantes and this large cast of characters that are going up against society. I just didn’t feel like the drafts of the novel I was coming up with were living up to the promise of the original idea.”

In his story, these “dysfunctional vigilantes,” known as Make It Stop — a brood of recovering drug, alcohol and sex addicts — work together to break patients out of corrupt Southern California detox and rehab centers that won’t release them until their bills are fully paid. Though a work of imagination, Ruland has some real-life experience to fuel the fiction. He’s been sober for 14 years and there are components in the book, he said, of people he’s known through the long journey of recovery.

“Everything in the book is a bit more ramped up because it takes place in a world that’s just a bit more desperate than it is right now, which is kind of terrifying to think about,” he noted.

He said he wanted to stay rooted in the idea that healthcare in America is very different for women than men and that the country’s most vulnerable citizens are more drastically affected by the current system, as well as in his sensationalized version.

“I didn’t want to get too carried away with my imagination and stray from that reality,” he said. “It’s terrifying because that would happen to our most vulnerable communities — people undergoing a mental health crisis, who are addicted to substances or people who are experiencing homelessness.”

In his previous novel, 2014’s “Forest of Fortune,” Ruland said that he included his personal experiences with addiction and sobriety, but wanted to change course this time around.

He also didn’t want to become known for only writing sober characters.

“I was worried and thought, ‘Am I going to be the sober writer that only writes about sobriety now?’” he said. “I didn’t want to be that guy. I have a lot of interests and passions and I didn’t want my fiction projects to be pigeonholed that way.”

However, when he was the most frustrated with the “Make It Stop” writing process, it was his main character, deeply flawed, but all-around badass Melanie Marsh, that kept him going.

“Melanie and her struggle and the way that kind of mirrors my own, that made me stick with it,” he said. “I felt like I owed it to her to see it through and also to the many friends I lost along the way.”

Ruland said he was motivated to finish the book after completing the “My Damage” screenplay. He said he couldn’t wait to give his novel that same treatment and that doing the screenwriting helped him identify and improve upon the weak spots in the “Make It Stop” story.

While writing “Make It Stop,” Ruland also worked on another punk rock book, “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.” That was published last year and was a deep dive into the history of the Southern California record label that helped launch bands like Black Flag, Descendents and Screaming Trees. As someone who appreciates punk rock music, Ruland has collected more than 75 SST releases and has been diligently writing about each one on his website and sharing his thoughts with his followers through a newsletter.

He said he can’t pick a favorite, though at the moment he’s digging a release by Los Angeles punk rock band Painted Willie, a group founded in 1984 by drummer and filmmaker Dave Markey.

“I am really liking that, but there’s all kinds of weird stuff that has nothing to do with punk rock in the SST catalog,” he said. “There are also a lot of bands that were on SST that went on to become superstars like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and even Soundgarden, their first album was on SST. But there are lesser-known bands, like Blind Idiot God, who went on to have a long career in collaborating with jazz and noise musicians in New York and that SST record just blew me away.”

While Ruland said he’ll continue to write fiction, he’s enjoying his non-fiction career, which allows him to discuss music, art and culture.

“I love when I talk to musicians and other writers, too, and they drop names of artists I’ve never heard before and records and books that are meaningful to them,” he said. “I’ve been exposed to so many great bands that way, by just having these conversations with people I wouldn’t otherwise get to talk to.”

On some reservations, Native American women are murdered at more than 10 times the national average.

Nearly one in three Native American and Alaska Native women will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.

Los Angeles journalist and author Mona Gable – whose articles have been published in The Atlantic, Vogue and The Daily Beast, among others – has long reported on violence against women. She was somewhat aware of the long, troubling problem of unsolved cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

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And in recent years, Gable had started to get in touch with her own Native American heritage, researching the life and culture of her paternal grandmother Naomi Jones, a member of the Chickasaw Nation who had died in childbirth.

In an effort to reclaim some of the heritage that hadn’t been much talked about in her family, Gable says she “was just looking for Native American stories. I felt like my own education was really just wretched in terms of what we learned in California public schools about Native American tribes.”

So when Gable happened upon a news report about the bizarre, unexplained disappearance in North Dakota of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who was 8 months pregnant, her professional expertise and her personal interest collided: This was a story she needed to follow.

The result is “Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many,” published on April 25 by Atria. Gable will be appearing at Vroman’s to discuss the book on May 9.

In this true-crime saga, Gable chronicles the tragic and grotesque events – Savanna’s upstairs neighbors murdered her and tried to steal her infant; her body isn’t discovered for days – while exploring the complex interplay of culture, politics and racism that has entrenched violence against Native women.

She began researching the story over the phone: “I started calling people who were connected to the case, including the two female prosecutors who were really incredible. They were really fighting hard to see that Savanna got justice in the court system,” says Gable.

But quickly, she hit a wall – the people close to Savanna weren’t speaking to the media. “They’re super private and this was just so, so horrific for them,” she says.

Instead, they were busy organizing grassroots efforts that at first centered on the search for the missing Savanna, then on finding justice for her murder.

“They organized, like many Native American families end up having to do, because the police did not find her. They organized all these searches for her in Fargo and tribes from all over the Plains came to help. But also what was really fascinating to me was that the whole community in Fargo – which is a very small town and everybody kind of knows each other – all rallied behind the family, too.”

Gable would get to know the flight schedule to Fargo, North Dakota, very well over the course of four trips. “As soon as I could go to Fargo, I went to Fargo and I started trying to find people to interview about Savanna, who knew the family.”

It wasn’t easy, but eventually, she gained the trust of Savanna’s family and the community.

“I think a lot of it was just being patient, and if people didn’t want to talk to me, I respected that and then I would say, ‘Can I come back to you later?’ If they said yes, then I did that. Also, the prosecutors were very close to the family and they really vouched for me because I spent a lot of time with them. And so that’s really how I got my interview with Savanna’s mother,” she says.

Being on the ground in North Dakota helped imbue the story with details that otherwise would have been impossible to capture and helped her own understanding on many levels. “I felt it immediately when I was there that it was its own unique place and with its own politics, obviously, and culture. I visited Savanna’s reservation that she had grown up on. That was important to me to actually go there and talk to the tribal chief and see what it was like. I just try to be patient, and be empathic.”

Beyond the compelling story, by illuminating the problem of murdered and disappeared Native American women and their communities’ efforts to stop it, “Searching for Savanna” also takes on the true-crime narrative, which critics of the genre have called out for too often being exclusively centered around White victims and White law enforcement.

“I was very aware of that and that’s one reason I wanted to focus on the larger context,” Gable says. “Once I really found out how widespread this violence is and how long it had been going on against Native American women, I really wanted that to be a central theme of the book rather than just, ‘Oh, look at this horrific murder.’ What really motivated me was trying to not just tell Savanna’s story but the larger story of other women and girls, and what Native American advocates are doing – and have been doing – to try and draw attention to this problem.”

And in the process of writing the book, Gable found some of what she had been looking for personally: A deeper intimacy with her part of her family’s story.

“I think it was very affirming to me in the sense that I felt like it was something I really wanted to explore and, and felt good about exploring. In the back of my mind, I always was very wary about walking around saying, ‘Oh, I’m such and such percentage [Native American]’ –  especially when there was all this controversy surrounding Elizabeth Warren and her claiming Native American heritage she turns out not to have.”

Gable says she has “learned a lot” in the process of writing her book, and in fact is preparing to visit the Chickasaw nation of her grandmother, one of the five tribes that were forcibly relocated off their lands to go to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.

“I just feel like I’m educating myself. Several Native American women that I’ve connected with in the process of this have been so welcoming, and all said to me, ‘It’s all about community. You don’t have to be ‘X-percent’ Native American. You don’t have to have grown up on the reservation. We want you to come home.’”

Mona Gable at Vroman’s

When: 7 p.m., May 9

Where: 695 E Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

Information: 626-449-5320, www.vromansbookstore.com/Mona-Gable-Searching-for-Savanna

“At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf,” by Tara Ison

Release Date: February 21, 2023 (IG)

A valley girl born and bred, author Tara Ison’s first novel was a finalist for the LA Times Book Awards. Another made The Oprah Magazine’s “Best Books of Summer List.” This winter we can’t wait to get our hands on her latest: “At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf,” inspired by Ison’s stepmother’s early life, is the story of a 12-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II Vichy, France. When Danielle Marton’s father is killed during the early days of the German occupation, her mother sends her away to hide in a small farming village. Renamed Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the reality of her family and country’s fate with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she’s bitter about being separated from her mother and horrified to milk the cows and pose as a devout Catholic. But as the years pass and the occupation worsens, Danielle finds it easier to distance herself from her former life. By the time she’s 15 and there is talk among the now-divided town, not only has Danielle lost the memories of the family she was forced to leave behind, but also of herself, transforming into a strict Catholic and an anti-Semite. A disturbingly timely story.

Ison will be reading from “At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf,” at Vroman’s in Pasadena at 7 p.m. Feb. 24.

“Empty Theatre: A Novel: or The Lives of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Sisi of Austria (Queen of Hungary), Cousins, in Their Pursuit of Connection and Beauty …” by Jac JemcRelease date: February 21, 2023 (MCD/FSG)If you couldn’t put down Jac Jemc’s acclaimed “My Only Wife” or “False Bingo,” you’ll need to keep your eyes peeled for “Empty Theatre,” which hits shelves this February. If you hadn’t already surmised from the title, Jemc brings us a flamboyant social satire that reimagines the misadventures of iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, who shared a passion for vanity and defiance. A tragicomic tour de force, “Empty Theatre” immerses readers in Ludwig and Sisi’s world ― where the aesthetics of extravagance belie the isolation of its inhabitants. Readers follow two rarified parallel lives and the complex, tenuous bond that linked them, told with empathy, humor and originality. If you were obsessed with Hulu’s “The Great,” you might want to preorder Jac Jemc’s “Empty Theatre.”

“Burst,” by Mary Otis

Release Date: April 4 (Zibby Books) While award-winning author Mary Otis originally hails from Boston, she’s been a literary citizen of Los Angeles for some time. This spring, Otis, known for her short stories, releases her debut novel, “Burst,” which explores the complex and nuanced relationships between mothers and daughters. Viva has grown up managing her mother Charlotte’s impulsive, eccentric and addictive personality. She had no other choice ― it had always been Charlotte and Viva against the world. After discovering an inherent talent for to dance, Viva embraces her passion for the art and chases her dreams with the same intensity that her mother chases the booze. Over the years, Viva’s talent becomes her golden ticket, and she moves away to pursue her destiny, but Charlotte struggles to reconcile her own past as a failed artist and the impact of her addiction. When tragedy strikes, Viva begins to understand the ways a daughter can become her mother, and un-become her.

“The Do-Over,” by Suzanne ParkRelease Date: April 4 (Avon) Korean American writer Suzanne Park was a stand-up comedian before she became a novelist featured on the “best of” lists of  NPR, Marie Claire, The Today Show and more. In April, her latest rom-com “The Do-Over” hits shelves. The protagonist, Lily Lee, is a bestselling author of the “How to Be a Supernova At Work” series, and her editor wants a new book stat ― “How to Land the Perfect Job.” But when Lily scores a job at a top firm, the employer discovers she’s a few college credits shy of actually having her degree. This forces Lily to relive her senior year of college a decade later, complete with frat parties, eating with “dining dollars” and taking a course in which her old college beau is the TA. This is a story about second chances and unexpected outcomes in life and love.

“Searching for Savanna: The murder of a young Native American woman and the violence against the many,” by Mona Gable

Release Date: April 25 (Simon & Schuster)You’ll want to look out for Mona Gable’s  “Searching for Savanna: The Murder of a Young Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many”  this April. A compulsive and revelatory investigation into the disappearance of a 22-year-old pregnant woman, Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, this book dives deep into the shocking reality of sexual and physical violence against Native women and girls in America and the consequences of government inaction. Featuring in-depth interviews, personal accounts and trial analysis, “Searching for Savanna” also illuminates the plight Native American advocates have faced for decades.

“The Last Songbird,” by Daniel Weizmann

Release Date: May 23 (Melville House) 

Daniel Weizmann is an old-school L.A. punk who once went by the name “Shredder” and wrote for Flipside, California Hardcore and L.A. Weekly in the ’80s. These days he’s penning books, and “The Last Songbird,” his gritty, neo-noir detective thriller, is coming to a bookstore near you this May. Failed songwriter and Lyft driver Adam “Addy” Zant, drives around Los Angeles at night plagued by thoughts of his ex and song lyrics he can’t stop writing in his head. The best part of his day is taxiing around his favorite rider — aging folk legend Annie Linden. When Annie is found murdered, Addy is compelled to take to the streets of L.A. and solve the case himself, but there’s an issue: The police consider Addy a suspect.

“An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created,” by Santi Elijah Holley

Release Date: May 23 (Mariner Books) In 2022, Santi Elijah Holley won a National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award presented by the Los Angeles Press Club for his story “Tupac in the Afterlife.” In 2023, he brings us his second book, “An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created.” An illuminating history of the fight for Black liberation in America, as experienced and shaped by the Shakur family, home to the late rapper Tupac and Assata Shakur, the popular author and thinker, living for three decades in Cuban exile. For over 50 years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars and music fans. They have been romanticized and mythologized and hailed as heroes, but also condemned, imprisoned, exiled and killed. But the story of the Shakur family hasn’t been excavated like this before. “An Amerikan Family” is not only family genealogy; it is the story of Black America’s long fight for racial justice.

“Uranians: Stories,” by Theodore McCombs

Release Date: May 30 (Astra House) Theodore McCombs is kind of a big deal in the science fiction scene. His stories have appeared in Guernica The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the anthology “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.” The five speculative stories in McCombs’ collection span several possible worlds, all of which explore the vital role of queerness from surprising vantage points. In “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” a forlorn gay man stands in line at a Berlin rave promising visions of parallel lives across the multiverse. In “Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women,” at the turn of an alternate 20th century, a cop’s wife senses that if you want an execution done right, you may have to do it yourself. In “Uranians,” an expedition of queer artists and scientists and one trans priest board a ship on an interplanetary voyage that requires them to reconcile their relationship with Earth while maintaining their ship’s biome – and keeping each other alive.

All-Night Pharmacy: A Novel” by Ruth Madievsky

Release Date: July 11 (Penguin) Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky now resides in Los Angeles, where she writes poetry and pens the Catapult column “Eldest Immigrant Daughter.” Her debut novel, “All-Night Pharmacy,” follows an unnamed narrator to a bar the night of her high school graduation. She and her rebellious sister Debbie share a bag of ambiguous pills, and the evening turns into a hazy and sensual dumpster fire when Debbie vanishes without a trace. “All-Night Pharmacy” follows the narrator as she works as an emergency room secretary so she can pocket pills to sell on the side and becomes entangled with a psychic Jewish refugee. Throughout the story she grapples with the idea of who a person should be, tries her hand at sobriety and sexual empowerment, and ultimately must choose whether to search for her estranged sister or allow her to remain a relic of the past. Look out for this glowing neon gem, which will grace bookstore shelves in July.

“Behold the Monster,” by Jillian Lauren (foreword by Michael Connelly)

Release Date: July 18 (Sourcebooks) 

Jillian Lauren is the bestselling author of the memoir “Some Girls” who was born in New Jersey but moved to New York City, then jet-setted back and forth from Brunei, where she moonlighted as a call girl for the Prince of Brunei, until she finally settled in Los Angeles, where she shares a home with her two sons and husband, Scott Shriner (the bassist for Weezer).

Whew.

If all of that sounds wild, buckle up for her July release, “Behold the Monster.” Lauren takes readers on a personal and haunting account of her time spent with Samuel Little. What began with penning a letter to a convicted killer led to hundreds of hours of interviews in which Little confessed to 93 murders, often drawing portraits of his victims as he spoke. Lauren, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the LAPD and countless law enforcement officials across America worked tirelessly to connect Little’s confessions and portraits to cold cases, and to bring justice to the victims and closure to their families.

Newport Beach Public Library Foundation 

When you know how to create a good thing, why stop at just one? The Newport Beach Public Library has taken this idea to heart, hosting two vibrant literary series in 2023: The Witte Lectures and Library Live. One focuses on compelling cultural discourse, and the other welcomes gifted storytellers from all literary genres.

Standout events include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum opening the Witte Lectures in February with insight into the rise of authoritarianism, and novelist Min Jin Lee – whose book “Pachinko” is now an Apple TV+ Series – for Library Live in April.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Segerstrom is bringing a roster of iconic writers to Costa Mesa for its new In-Conversation Series. The series began earlier this month with Amy Tan, but you can catch author and comedian Fran Lebowitz on Feb. 6 and author and historian Erik Larson on March 6. All to say, expect sardonic social commentary and best-selling narrative nonfiction at this series, which takes place Monday evenings at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

LiveTalks LA

Live Talks hasn’t locked in 2023 dates yet, but we do know that triple-threat performer Ari Shapiro, the award-winning co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” will be landing to discuss his first book, “The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening,” a memoir-in-essays that drops in March. The series will also host Abraham Verghese, whose last novel, “Cutting for Stone,” spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. His latest, “The Covenant of Water,” will be published in May. And then there is Gretchen Rubin, the thought-provoking observer of human nature and author of “The Happiness Project,” which may have started as a book chronicling Rubin’s pursuit of joy, but morphed into an all-out movement. The writer returns in 2023 with “Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World.”

Writers Bloc

If only we could have made sure you had this guide before Bret Easton Ellis (who rose to fame in the ’80s with “Less Than Zero” and later with the even more disturbing “American Psycho”) was in conversation with “The Flamethrowers” ’ Rachel Kushner. But alas, we missed it. Do not despair, though.

Writers Bloc Presents Peggy Orenstein and Julia Sweeney in conversation Jan. 30 at the New Roads School in Santa Monica. Get your tickets right now if you’re interested in finding out what happens when an author famous for writing about sex, class, power and culture starts shearing sheep during the pandemic. And then talks to a famous former SNL cast member about it.

Coming in February: Legendary journalist Nina Totenberg will discuss her friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

University of California, Riverside  

It’s billed as the most diverse and longest-running free literary festival in California, UCR Writers Week will mark its 46th year in 2023. Running Feb. 13-17, expect to see acclaimed writer Percival Everett and honors for the late Mike Davis, along with thirty-one other authors with events that run online and in-person.

And there’s more literary stuff to love in the county: Home to the Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, UCR launched its 2023 season of the Arts & Letters Lecture Series on Jan. 19 with “The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.” As of this writing, the rest of the lineup is still a mystery, but check the series link to find out who else is coming to the campus. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a student; the series is open to the public.

Skylight Books

There are many wonderful bookstore events in the region – and then there’s Skylight Books. Everyone who’s anyone in the literary publishing world does some kind of book launch at Skylight – the famed bookstore in Los Feliz with a tree growing in the center of it – but when the really big wigs need more space for their fans, the bookstore branches out to places like the Barnsdall Gallery Theater (for Leigh Bardugo) or Dynasty Typewriter (for Lake Bell and Tig Notaro). Sorry to wet your whistle with these names when the events happened last year, but we have it on good authority that 2023 will hold its own delights, so keep an eye on the store’s online calendar for information.

California Writers Club, Orange County

The Orange County Branch of the California Writers Club converges at the Anaheim Packing House on the first Saturday of every month to talk about all things story-related over a nosh and a cup of joe before settling in to listen to a featured speaker. The club has hosted local authors like Gustavo Henandez, who read from his achingly gorgeous poetry collection “Flower Grand First,” and award-winning journalist Joe Donnelly.

All events are free, open to the public and intimate enough to encourage conversation among strangers. So if you want to talk to Amy Wallen, author of “How To Write a Novel in 20 Pies: Sweet and Savory Tips for the Writing Life,” about her most prized serving plates, or snap a selfie with Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Prize First Place Winner Tina Mai, you’ll get your chance. More info here: https://www.calwritersorangecounty.org/

Bookish

Bookish is the Southern California News Group’s own virtual series that began during the pandemic and has since become a fixture. If you’re looking for an hour of curated conversation among famous authors, thinkers and performers that doesn’t require leaving your house or buying a ticket, this one’s for you. Hosted by radio personality, actor and writer Sandra Tsing Loh and SCNG editor Samantha Dunn, Bookish is a free monthly webinar via Zoom.

Join the “Noteworthy” episode – our salute to SoCal authors – on Feb. 4  and meanwhile check out past episodes.

And…festivals aren’t only for music

Southern California is home to some of the most exciting book festivals in the country. Don’t forget these:

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 22 and 23

LitFest Pasadena, May 6 and 7

Orange County Children’s Book Festival, 2023 date TBA

The works of these writers reached beyond the region and resonated across the nation. Whether first-time novelists or longtime published authors, their books did what lasting literature always does: connected, enlightened, entertained and inspired.

This marks the second year of Noteworthy: Call it our salute, as selected by SCNG editors, to Southern California authors whose books stood out to us, for all the reasons above.

Melissa Chadburn

“A Tiny Upward Shove” (FSG)

Stunning, lyrical language weaves together a murder mystery, tragedies of the foster care system, Filipino mythology and a love story in Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, “A Tiny Upward Shove.”

Chadburn, whose works of criticism and reportage have been published in the Paris Review, New York Review of Books and elsewhere, earned wide attention from the literary world with her fresh and compelling fiction debut: It made best book lists from New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Ms. Magazine, Alta, The Millions and many others.

Chadburn, a Ph.D. candidate at USC who lives in San Bernardino County, told SCNG that one of her goals in writing is to “always trouble our ideas of justice.”

“Because I work in so many different genres, whenever I approach a new piece I often find that early part of writing container hunting. That is, finding the right container for the piece. In this case, I wanted to tell a WHOLE story, unbound by the limitations of, say, the both-sidism in journalism. Fiction allowed me to bring in magic and memory.”

John Cho

“Troublemaker” (Little, Brown)

John Cho has been known to audiences for acting roles in “Star Trek” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” among others. But last year he added “successful writer” to his résumé. His middle-grade reader titled “Troublemaker” captured readers’ attention and climbed the ranks of bestseller lists locally, not to mention in the New York Times and IndieBound.

The unrest of 2020 following George Floyd’s murder spurred Cho to create this story, set during he 1992 L.A. uprisings. “Troublemaker” deftly and poignantly tackles racial justice, violence and the ways children navigate a sometimes dangerous and confusing world.

“I thought it would be great to put something on a shelf,” Cho told SCNG’s Peter Larsen. “What excited me was thinking about myself at that age, walking into a library and seeing someone that looked like me on the cover, which never happened to me. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a reason to spend some time at a computer.’ ” Readers are glad he did.

Reyna Grande

“A Ballad of Love and Glory” (Atria Books)

Since her acclaimed 2012 memoir “The Distance Between Us,” L.A.’s Reyna Grande has grown into a leading voice for Mexican Americans and immigrants of every origin. A fierce advocate for Latino literature, Grande is a highly regarded speaker at high schools, colleges and universities across the nation.

The sweeping epic “A Ballad of Love and Glory” is an ambitious addition to her body of work. The Mexican American War of 1846 might be a footnote in many history classes, but in this novel Grande reframes it not as a “war” but an invasion by American land-grabbers, the legacy of which continues to resonate across both nations.

Grande told SCNG it took her more than seven years to write this story. “I kept putting it away because I was so intimidated by it, and I kept thinking that I had bitten off more than I could chew and that I didn’t have it in me to write this book. Once I finished the draft and the revising started, I started feeling more confident that I could do it.” Could she ever.

Tess Gunty

“The Rabbit Hutch” (Knopf)

Winning the National Book Award for your first published work is no small feat – not to mention having it named among the best books of the year by NPR, Time, Oprah Daily and People, along with a host of other accolades.

But that’s exactly what happened for L.A.-based Tess Gunty, author of “The Rabbit Hutch.” Underneath its tableau of strange and compelling characters searching for meaning as their lives intertwine in an apartment building, this novel offers brilliant and biting commentaries on crumbling cities, religion and power dynamics between men and women. It is, in a word, dazzling.

But if Gunty had taken the advice of some well-meaning habitués of the publishing industry, none of that might have happened. “I received a lot of advice from people who told me to try to do something a little safer, a little less risky,” she told SCNG. “That was advice that I found incredibly depressing for a long time because I didn’t know how to not be myself or not be weird.” Thankfully, she kept it weird.

Michelle Huneven

“Search” (Penguin)

Altadena resident Michelle Huneven has garnered many laurels for her writing over the years – a James Beard Foundation award for her food writing, a nod from the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, to name a few.

But in 2022’s “Search,” she combined her elegant prose and gastronomic skill in a totally unique way: It’s a novel written as if it’s the memoir of the main character – with recipes. NPR named it one of the best novels of the year.

The novel’s protagonist is a restaurant critic and sometime churchgoer who is trying to drum up an idea for her next literary project. When she’s recruited by her Unitarian Universalist church to join the search committee for a new pastor, things start to get complicated. The result is an engrossing –and frequently funny – story of small-scale culture wars and human frailty. This book, like all her others, is set in Southern California.

“You know, this is my land, this is my region. I don’t mind being a regional writer,” Huneven told SCNG. “Altadena contains multitudes.”

Rasheed Newson 

“My Government Means to Kill Me” (Macmillan)

Pasadena’s Rasheed Newson made his mark as a TV writer, whose credits include “Bel-Air,” “Narcos” and “The Chi,” but the role of author seems to suit him well, too: In his sometimes humorous, often poignant debut novel, “My Government Means to Kill Me,” Newson explores a young gay man’s experience during the early AIDS epidemic. Even if the New York Times hadn’t named it a Notable Book of 2022, alongside a nod from the New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, we would have given it a shout-out for excellence.

Newson says his book is “a call to action.” He told SCNG, “I wanted to remind everybody, but particularly young people, that a lot of the movements that changed history were started by young people who really didn’t know what they were doing and who were – on paper – in way in over their head. Martin Luther King was impossibly young when that bus boycott began.”

Susan Straight

“Mecca” (Macmillan)

Susan Straight has earned her place as one of California’s literary lions for an impressive body of work that explores the beauty, community and harshness of the Inland Empire. SCNG’s reviewer called Straight’s 2022 novel “Mecca” “stunning, absolutely breathtaking. She can move you to tears, and then return you to laughter all in the same paragraph.” Others agreed: “Mecca” was named one of the year’s best books by both The Washington Post and NPR. Plus, it was among the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choices and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Interconnected short stories told from various points of view weave together in “Mecca.” As our reviewer noted, “The people we encounter in these stories are not the ones commonly held up as representative of Southern California. There are no agents or ingenues; no screenwriters moonlighting as servers or valet attendants.”

“Southern California is this huge, sprawling space,” Straight told SCNG, “but for my characters, there are all of these connections that come through geography and family.”

Laura Warrell

“Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm” (Pantheon)

L.A. writer Laura Warrell hit the big time with her first published novel, “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm,” about a philandering jazz musician named Circus Palmer and the women in his orbit. SCNG’s reviewer noted, “Given the current culture of #metoo, polyamor, and political feuds over women’s rights, the topics and situations that the book touches on feel urgent, and the characters are so well-developed and deeply flawed it’s easy to forget that they are fictional.”

Warrell’s debut earned a spot on People magazine’s top 10 books of 2022, and it was a GMA Buzz Pick, one of the Oprah Daily favorite books of the year, and it made NPR’s list of “books we love,” not to mention Kirkus naming it one of the best fiction books of the year and Booklist putting it on its top debut novels of 2022 list. Wait, there’s more: Apple Books named her among its “writers to watch.”

“All of the characters are pretty much inventions of my imagination. But I have been in every character’s position, which may be the reason why I felt so connected to them and was able to give them voice,” Warrell told SCNG. “I wanted to write about these women because I felt that this is one of our shared stories, globally – a man who is a dog, is a player, is a womanizer, whatever you want to call it.”

Antoine Wilson

“Mouth to Mouth” (Simon & Schuster)

“A deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller” is what Kirkus Reviews said of Los Angeles writer Antoine Wilson’s “Mouth to Mouth.” In the novel, two old college acquaintances run into each other in an airport. What happens next is the unspooling of a tense psychological drama that captured readers’ attention – including former president Barack Obama, who named it one of his favorite novels of 2022. It also nabbed a spot on lists for best books of the year by NPR and Time magazine, plus Vogue and Esquire.

Wilson has had success with previous novels including “Panorama City,” but as he told SCNG, “Mouth to Mouth” was in danger of never coming together: “I was working on this for several years, and I was working on another novel at the same time, serially, abandoning them back and forth in a way that was completely a hundred percent sincere. It was driving my wife [Chris, a screenwriter] insane because I was like, ‘I’m done; this doesn’t work. I just am not doing this book. I’m going to do the other book.’ ” We’re glad he stuck it out.

Gabrielle Zevin

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” (Knopf)

“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” author Gabrielle Zevin captured readers’ imaginations with her latest novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” a riveting tale of video game creators in Los Angeles who strike up a friendship over video games. SCNG’s review explained, “Zevin examines teamwork, online and offline identities, the intensity of friend relationships, and how work that is fueled by love can produce transcendent works of art.” The book topped bestseller lists and earned best book of the year kudos from a litany of outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Bookpage and Kirkus. It also was the winner of the Goodreads Choice Award – and let’s not forget that Jimmy Fallon Book Club pick.

As Zevin told SCNG, “Sometimes people are the most loving and best versions of themselves at work or in play or in friendships. I think that a great love story can be a work story, and it can be a friend story, and I wanted to write about that. I’ve always loved books about creative partnerships, stories about work and making art together.”

Have your own Noteworthy favorites? Let us know! Email Premium editor Samantha Dunn at sdunn@scng.com.