How Robert Kolker came to write "Hidden Valley Road," about the Galvin family and the disease that tore through them, with such empathy.

Quarantined in Riverside, novelist Susan Straight watches "Gunsmoke" and "Gentefied" and gives away Judy Blume and National Geographic.

The bestselling crime novelist plans a virtual book tour for his new title, "Broken," as the coronavirus keeps him home in Southern California.

Kathryn Scanlan, taut new story collection, "The Dominant Animal," probes power relationships in uncertain times. She talks about L.A. and COVID-19.

In a virtual meet-up, "Almost Home" author Fanny Singer and mother and famed chef Alice Waters join book club readers April 21 for a kitchen conversation.

Ross Thomas delivered 25 novels populated by colorful, chameleonic characters. Among them: "Briarpatch," now a USA Network series.

Authors like Lionel Shriver, Alexander McCall Smith, Laura Lippman and Steph Cha are under coronavirus quarantine too. Here's what they're reading.

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."

Winners of the L.A. Times Book Prizes will be announced in a special, virtual Twitter ceremony this year because of the global health crisis.

Recipe: Writer turns to Fanny Singer's "Always Home" for comfort chicken during family's Seder.

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.

Sunday is when Tiger Woods made golf history, but Saturday is when he won the 2019 Masters and reestablished himself as golf's king.

Jenn Shapland's "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers" and Mark Doty's "What Is the Grass," about Walt Whitman, are hybrid memoir-biographies.

With libraries closed, L.A. librarians now work from home to help people find free ebooks, music and movies during the coronavirus crisis.

The author of "Nothing to See Here" enjoys BennY RevivaL, furniture-breaking wrestling moves and lots of books in his quarantine diary.

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.

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?

On Tuesday, Simon & Schuster announced it will publish Alex Trebek's memoir, "The Answer Is…: Reflections on My Life," on July 21.

Read "Attack on Titan," "Somali & the Forest Spirit," "Fire Force," "Arte" and more with Mangamo, a new mobile manga subscription service.

The journalist and author of "This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (And Me)" discusses the limits of "fat acceptance."

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

Paulette Jiles delighted with her convention-breaking western romance, 'News of the World.' Her follow-up, 'Simon the Fiddler,' is just old-fashioned.

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.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, winner of the Times Book Prize in history, spent a decade on "They Were Her Property," about women slave owners.

Marlon James, whose novel "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" pioneered queer fantasy, thanks Mary Shelley and "Moby Dick" for predicting our current crisis.

The author of "The Topeka School," winner of the 2019 Times Book Prize for fiction, speaks on poetry, debate, citizenship and crisis homeschooling.

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

Writer turns to guided journal for Michelle Obama's "Becoming" to grapple with anxiety and cabin fever during coronavirus crisis.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama will be reading children's books in a weekly series of videos for Penguin Random House and PBS Kids through May 11.

The journalist has plenty of space in Alabama, but it still gets lonesome. Luckily there's Larry McMurtry, Humphrey Bogart and Jerry Lee Lewis.

What crime novelist Laura Lippman is reading and watching in quarantine

In Rufi Thorpe's novel, a poor, closeted teenager befriends a wealthy girl, until an act of violence lays their class distinctions bare.

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.

We tend to look to the stars in troubled times. "Astro Poets," "You Were Born for This" and "Madame Clairevoyant's Guide to the Stars" teach us how.

"Mrs. America" creator Dahvi Waller on the books to read if you want to know more about the ERA

'Always Home' author Fanny Singer worries more about running out of garlic than toilet paper.

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.

The author of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" lives that perfect, self-improving quarantine life (or maybe gets drunk and watches British reality TV).

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

Emily St. John Mandel chronicles a global pandemic and financial crisis in her novels, 'Station Eleven' and 'The Glass Hotel.'

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

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

The journalist ("The Looming Tower") and playwright ("My Trip to Al Qaeda") discusses his frightening and eerily prescient novel, "The End of October."

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

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

Earlier this week, Bookshop.org hit $1 million in earnings that will go to bookstores endangered by the coronavirus outbreak.