In "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," Mike Davis and Jon Wiener track the uprisings, outrages and elections that shaped the city.

Thomson, the author of dozens of books including "The Biographical Dictionary of Film," binges on "Ozark" and Godard but finds "L'Avventura" a drag.

Malla Nunn's "When The Ground is Hard," winner of the 2019 Times Book Prize for young-adult literature, revisits South Africa's toughest years.

The 14 Times book prize winners, including Steph Cha, Namwali Serpell, Marlon James and George Packer, were honored in a virtual ceremony on Twitter.

Nick Capizzi and Jenny Yang founded A Good Used Book in 2018 as an itinerant book-browsing mecca. Now they're surviving on hope and Instagram.

Rishi Reddi's "Passage West" plumbs an important story of Indian immigrant farmers, but isn't quite up to the task as fiction

The author of "Sweetbitter" juggles child care and promoting her new L.A. area memoir, "Stray," reads poetry and takes solace in "The Office."

While guests of Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center are stuck through June, canceled residencies across the U.S. endanger an artistic ecosystem.

Anna Solomon, whose novel "The Book of V." comes out next week, juggles writing, building rafts and book promotion in a void in our latest diary

In 'Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery,' the critic travels to Nordic cities to investigate the society that shaped a global phenomenon.

He's interviewed Neko Case, Jeff Tweedy and Maria Bamford about depression. With his new memoir, "The Hilarious World of Depression," John Moe looks inward.

People are making valid points about Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis, but the president's supporters aren't listening.

Gov. Newsom has taken to calling California a "nation-state" when discussing its efforts to fight the coronavirus. Constitutionally, that's not true.

Laguna Woods residents express dismay at their neighbors' opposition to using a nearby hotel as housing for homeless coronavirus patients.

With social distancing a must, this year's virtual celebration will be long remembered.

Local hotels have repurposed thousands of rooms for use by medical professionals and homeless people during the coronavirus pandemic.

Screening a sample of the population to see who has been infected with COVID-19 and who hasn't is a huge step forward in returning to normal life.

America's optimism may have blinded it to the coronavirus. Now, with suffering a part of our daily life, we have a chance to become a mature nation.

Easing sanctions on Iran, hard hit by the coronavirus, would be a humanitarian act that reminds the world of what America truly is.

Trump can't 'reopen' the economy, but Republican governors can follow his lead. If they do, Newsom must continue to protect Californians.

The Supreme Court is allowing the Republican Party to suppress the vote. This bodes very poorly for democracy in America.

Warning memos were written. Research was funded. But what good is any of this if American leaders fail to act?

This is what happens when we elect a failed-businessman-turned-reality TV star as president.

These are extraordinary times, and Joe Biden has a number of legislators, mayors and governors who could fill an entire Cabinet.

Countless people have applied for unemployment benefits they cannot get. This can create a crisis worse than the coronavirus outbreak.

Trump justifies his actions on coronavirus by saying he's a businessman who doesn't like having a lot of employees. But government is not a business.

Halting funding of the WHO is another in a long line of decisions made by the Trump administration abdicating U.S. leadership on science.

A tent city for homeless veterans? It should not have taken a deadly pandemic for local leaders to come up with that solution.

An LAUSD teacher who once campaigned against Austin Beutner gives the superintendent credit for his leadership during the pandemic.

Ron Reagan, son of the late president, was in an ad for an atheist interest group. He should have just kept his nonbelief to himself.

Free college was common in the U.S. until the 1960s and produced alumni that included Nobel Prize winners and accomplished statesmen.

Clean energy wants a level playing field with fossil fuels and nuclear power. It needs government funding for that to happen.

Dr. Anthony Fauci deserves something like combat pay for guiding the nation with his scientific expertise while also doing enough not to get fired.

It's insane to think life can return to normal soon when we haven't even figured out how to get enough milk and toilet paper into stores.

Some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks have been linked to religious services, and the public's health trumps every other right.

People who blame the president for failing to prepare the country ignore an important fact: We didn't want to believe America was vulnerable to COVID-19.

Bears, deer and other animals are roaming freely in areas once packed by Yosemite tourists. It appears the coronavirus is teaching us something about humans.

A program for one-time assistance to undocumented workers affected by the pandemic is a start, but California must do much more.

A reader says it's nice to know she wasn't the only one who was apparently duped after she bought packages of toilet paper on the Amazon Marketplace.

The president might not like to work, but the people who think and act for him are very effective at their jobs.

The Postal Service is as important to the United States as its language and its highways. Losing it would forever change the country for the worse.

Protesters violating every rule on fighting COVID-19, with the support of the president, show how badly we need competent leadership.

When doctors are given N95 masks but the nurses who frequently come into contact with sick patients do not, you know something's wrong.

Participants in the Stanford study self-selected, among other flaws. Its results do not reveal anything meaningful about the coronavirus.

Calls to close streets to automobiles show the demand for exercise. Too bad all local trails have been closed to hikers.

We're still divided into red state and blue states. Of course we aren't coming together with a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic raging on.

No Democratic candidates called for social distancing before Super Tuesday, and now the left is Monday-morning quarterbacking the president.

Governments across the U.S. have simply not saved enough to deal with coronavirus-induced budget shortfalls. They need to start taxing the rich more.

We need local reporting now more than ever, but things don't look good after the folding of three community newspapers in Southern California.

Even when he was being impeached, Trump still had a job to do. Nothing justifies his failure to take early action against the coronavirus.