THE BOND OF BOOKS ENDURES. HELLO, FESTIVAL
What a strange and what a perfect time to reconnect with writers of our favorite books. Readers have spent a year at home, reveling in their favorite homebound activity but also longing to browse the cramped aisles of bookstores, pack into open mikes, rekindle a book club — attend a festival. As spring reasserts itself, along with hope that the final wave of COVID infection is behind us, we arrive at the cusp of one last virtual L.A. Times Festival of Books.
The writers included in this spring issue, all on festival panels or nominated for Times Book Prizes, have felt much the same way. The five L.A. poets featured here have been forced to teach and read online, celebrating street life in print rather than on foot. The importance of place is a major theme in a conversation among the finalists for the Book Prize in mystery, a roundtable that also tackles representation and writing against genre expectations. Debut authors — Carribean Fragoza, Douglas Stuart and Deesha Philyaw among them — have broken through to attention and acclaim despite canceled book tours and despite bucking societal expectations. Or maybe because of those things? Historian Martha S. Jones, author of “Vanguard,” about America’s transformational Black female activists, was relieved to skip all the “planes and trains and automobiles” and reach students directly via Zoom.
Sometimes the best way to handle the grief and frustration of any year (but especially 2020) is to read books that find new ways of expressing it — like the poems in Victoria Chang’s “Obit,” which transmute her losses into verses crafted as obituaries. Or the sidewinding stories of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, taking a funhouse mirror to the fronts put up by struggling Angelenos. Other writers have found refuge in going to extremes — Stephen Graham Jones by using horror tropes to dramatize the moral stakes of living as a Native American, Yusef Salaam by channeling his years of wrongful incarceration into an inspiring YA novel and Allan Wolf by documenting the terrors of the Donner Party.
These fascinating writers make up only a slice of the more than 100 guests slated to appear at the festival. (Find them all at events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks). But they are all experts in forging connections across books, the oldest virtual medium of them all. Read their stories and their books, sign up to see them online — and next year line up to meet them, maybe even shake their hands, in real life.