Los Angeles magazine called it 'aggressively mediocre,' but its simple food and family-style seating reminded me of my Queens childhood.

This weekend we're excited to launch a new cooking newsletter to help you keep up with all the great stuff coming from our kitchen team, led by Genevieve Ko and Ben Mims.

Revolutionario North African Tacos has become a food bank feeding Asian American and African American seniors and L.A.'s skid row.

Andrea Bartz's novel, "The Herd," is a mystery wrapped around a parody of The Wing

Steph Cha doesn't expect much in the way of good crime fiction to spring from the coronavirus outbreak.

A after visiting every U.S. county in the lower 48, William Least Heat-Moon is the master of the topographical journey. Now 80, he takes another trip through his new novel — into the imperfect history of American democracy.

As are bread and milk, gas and aspirin, alcohol and marijuana, books should be available, with safety precautions in place, at the usual places we buy them in our neighborhoods.

In his new book, Colton Underwood — who was recently diagnosed with coronavirus — talks about being manipulated by producers on "The Bachelor."

In our latest quarantine diary, Charles Finch contemplates Kierkegaard, watches "Love Is Blind," gets the Led out and develops a candle habit.

"Harry Potter" mastermind J.K. Rowling has launched a new website called "Harry Potter at Home" to help distract families from the coronavirus crisis.

In the second installment of the United We Read project, a homebound writer travels a quarantined country through books.

Author James Patterson is donating $500,000 to help indie bookstores across the country. For many L.A. booksellers, that could be a life saver.

Kathy Valentine's hair-raising memoir recounts life before, during and shortly after the Go-Go's ascended to become the darlings of the MTV generation.

Patricia Bosworth, an actor who went on to chronicle lives including Jane Fonda's, Marlon Brando's and her own, died from coronavirus. She was 86.

Cynthia Ozick, essayist and acclaimed novelist, shelters from coronavirus and discusses anti-Semitism, the Spanish flu and longevity.

In his quarantine diary, "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" author Alexander McCall Smith writes lyrics, reads Auden and watches "Brideshead Revisited."

A book club for people who don't like book clubs, founded in 2012 in San Francisco and now boasting six chapters in L.A. County, has moved online.

The best series of books in four categories — including highbrow ('Wolf Hall'), L.A. favorites (Easy Rollins) and epic histories (Taylor Branch).

Author Mark O'Connell visited preppers, paranoiacs and prophets worldwide for "Notes From an Apocalypse." Now he says "the world will go on."

Fanny Singer's stories and recipes, 'Always Home,' show life growing up in the orbit of her mother, farm-to-table chef Alice Waters.

In "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman imagined how the Earth would look if humans vanished. Is the COVID-19 lockdown making that a reality?

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

What crime novelist Laura Lippman is reading and watching in quarantine

Blake Gopnik's definitive 'Warhol' gathers up all the receipts on the blank icon who stormed the barricades of art, only to serve it up to commerce.

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

Nina Renata Aron's memoir, "Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls," doubles as an ennobling history of recovering enablers of addiction.

Walter Thompson-Hernández's "The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America's Urban Heartland" tells a grand story in granular detail.

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

"Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer announced that she is expanding the fantasy franchise with "Midnight Sun," told from vampire heartthrob Edward's perspective.

Colson Whitehead, Ben Moser, Jericho Brown, Anne Boyer and Greg Grandin are the 2020 recipients of Pulitzer Prizes for books.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The study authors are reckless to say we need to "recalibrate" public health approaches because the actual COVID-19 mortality rate might be lower.