Lit 101

After Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey was gunned down in 2007 on the orders of Yusuf Bey IV, a former colleague at the Oakland Tribune, Thomas Peele, was appointed lead reporter for the Chauncey Bailey Project. This unique investigative coalition played a major part in helping bring Bey to justice for trying to stop the publication of an unflattering story about the You Black Muslim Bakery.

Tomorrow, Peele takes it a step further with the release of the book Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash and the Assassination of a Journalist. Over the weekend, Tribune reporter Tammerline Drummond previewed this new work:

Peele takes us to Chicago and Detroit to the heart of the Nation of Islam and to Los Angeles where a police shooting at a mosque convinced Santa Barbara hairdresser Joseph Stephens to join the Black Muslim movement. Stephens who would later rename himself Yusuf Bey, opened Your Black Muslim Bakery in 1971.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

If you haven’t yet heard of the Scotty Bowers Hollywood memoir Full Service, you soon will. Scheduled for publication on Valentine’s Day, it’s all about his experiences as a gigolo in post-World War II Hollywood with such Golden Age brand names as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

What’s somewhat unusual is that leading up to the February 14 publication date, and even before, Bowers had refused all interview requests. But he has finally connected with a reporter, The Guardian‘s Joanna Walters. Now 88 (and still living in LA), Bowers evidently decided that the book and interview needed to finally be put to paper, before he might no longer have the chance:

In the interview, Bowers said he’d kept quiet before because he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. He declared that he was talking now simply because “I’m not getting any younger and all my famous ‘tricks’ are dead. The truth can’t hurt them any more.”

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Jaime Stryker‘s new romance novel Two Spirit Ranch sounds at first plot-glance like pretty standard genre fare. A successful female lawyer flees Manhattan for the quieter confines of Montana, where she meets and falls in love with a local sheriff.

But the heroine of this one  is actually a transgendered female. The title of LA based Stryker’s book is derived from an old Native American belief that some tribe members could assume the identity of the opposite sex and “still be accepted and respected by their community.” From the book’s official website:

“Popular art reflects culture, and the past year brought trans issues to the forefront,” says Stryker. “It was simply time for a romance that also touched upon gender issues.”

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24 executive producer Howard Gordon just saw his new show Homeland win a Golden Globe award for “Best Drama.” But that success doesn’t seem to have satisfied him a whole lot. Not only has he started producing a sci-fi show for NBC called Awake, he’s got a new novel out called Hard Target. LA Weekly caught up with Gordon in the 30 to 40 seconds he wasn’t producing something.

Howard Gordon: I would say that my greater stress, and that was specific to me, was trying to do both and maintain my day job and find the time to write a novel. The first one, I did at least most of it, or half of it, during the writer’s strike. Because I got a two-book deal out of it, I had to sort of make a deadline.

In my business, when you write a pilot, you don’t even know whether the pilot will get shot, let alone they pick up the series. In this case, I happened to have two shows. It was a perfect storm in the be careful what you wish for department. I had both Homeland and Awake that got picked up and the contract for Hard Target that was due. It was a challenge.

LA Weekly: Did you develop any tricks to managing your time?

The only trick is to get as little sleep as possible.

No kidding.

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Dodgers Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Clayton Kershaw can add a new line to his resume–author. Kershaw and his wife Ellen have a new book out called “Arise: Live Out Your Faith and Dreams on Whatever Field You Find Yourself,” detailing Kershaw’s baseball career and the couple’s efforts to build an orphanage in Zambia.

“I guess the book is about baseball. It’s about Africa. It’s about Ellen and I,” Kershaw told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune at an Azusa book signing over the weekend.

FYI all you heathen Dodger fans out there, Kershaw is apparently a pretty religious guy.  So be forewarned if you plan on buying the book. As one customer review put it on Amazon, Arise covers the ABC’s: Africa; baseball; and Christ.

The burst of rave reviews directed at The Orphan Master’s Son is just the beginning. It seems almost certain that by this time next year, author Adam Johnson will be in the running for some major literary awards.

An associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University, Johnson took the tour package to the Hermit Kingdom in 2007 and then continued doing research. After also reading a few bellwether non-fiction books including Barbara Demick‘s Nothing to Envy, he crafted a very clever inside-NK narrative. His new book is split into two sections, one sharing the titular peasant’s point of view and the other as seen from the small, privileged class end of things.

In an LA Times profile piece, the San Francisco-based Johnson explained a fascinating discovery he made during the writing of his second novel:

The author soon realized that the master narratives of Western literature–that each of us is the central character in a unique private drama, overcoming obstacles as we strive toward self-realization—had little bearing on people who can’t be the authors of their own life stories, which are largely dictated by the state… Johnson said he came to see that in North Korea there is only one central character, Kim Jong-il, and before that his father, Kim Il Sung, “and then there are 23 million secondary characters.”

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FishbowlLA was the first media outlet to report about the wonderful Tumblr blog powered by Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Steven Rea. Under the self-explanatory title Rides a Bike, he posts vintage shots of Tinseltown movie stars on two wheels.

Much media coverage followed and now there is a companion book from Angel City Press, publishing in the third week of February. The 160-page tome–which has added the word “Hollywood” to the title–contains 125 different images, some of which were generously provided by collector Howie Cohen, whose family used to run a group of bike shops that serviced the studios.

Rea will be signing copies at Vroman’s in Pasadena and Book Soup in West Hollywood during his upcoming media tour. He tells FishbowlLA that although it’s hard for him to pick favorites from the book, a couple of images immediately come to mind. One of Rita Hayworth with Glenn Ford, and another that is more tragically tinged.

“The photo of Susan Peters is beautiful,” he says. “She’s stopped on her bike on the Palisades in Santa Monica. She was Oscar-nominated for Random Harvest and being groomed by MGM for stardom, but then had a terrible accident.”

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In the wake of 2011 book Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People, Philadelphia Weekly reporter William C. Smith recently caught up with the author, Dwayne Booth. The latter currently lives in Narbeth, Pennsylvania.

From 2003 to 2010, Booth–a.k.a. Mr. Fish–was a regular contributor to the pages of LA Weekly. In December 2005, as a commentary on the incendiary Danish cartoon controversy, he drew up an illustration of prophet Muhammed wearing a bombshell turban. The LA Times rejected the drawing, but LA Weekly said yes. Or so Booth thought.

After telling everyone at a San Diego cartoonist group event to pick up a copy of that week’s issue, the cartoonist discovered to his semi-dismay that the cartoon was not in the paper:

As Booth later learned, his Mohammed cartoon was pulled in a last-minute “stop the presses” order from the paper’s owner, Village Voice Media Group… The experience confirmed Booth’s longheld views on the media, free speech and dissent. “My being censored didn’t surprise me entirely, nor did it alter my expectations from those who control the mass media of this country. I’ve had cartoons about Bush, the U.S. military, Israel and the Pope pulled, too.”

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More than a year after the passing of Stephen J. Cannell, it’s somewhat eery to listen to the prolific TV writer-producer and novelist talk about his latest book Vigilante, released on December 6. But thanks to HollywoodOutbreak.com, which had a friendly relationship with Cannell and spoke to him last not long before his death in September 2010, there is a December 29 audio posting that allows for just that.

Cannell’s last in a long series of novels featuring LAPD Detective Shane Scully and partner Sumner Hitchens has been garnering solid reviews. At the center of this one is a slippery ex-cop, Nixon Nash, named after Tricky Dick in his native Florida and now anchoring the syndicated reality show hit Vigilante TV. A show that has its own full-time staff of qualified crime scene investigators.

What’s most amazing about the way Cannell describes Nash is that it sounds, from the outset, like he is talking about a real, living person. Not some fictitious protagonist.

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At least that’s the prediction offered by co-owners Stan Madson and Phil Thompson in an LA Times article marking the closure of their West Hollywood Melrose Avenue sanctuary. After 41 years in business, just west of celebrated Entourage hang Urth Caffé, the New Age crossroads closed its doors at 5:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.

According to the article, the number of items sold daily at the Bodhi Tree had diminished in the past two decades by roughly 90%. But the seventy-ish owners tell reporter Teresa Watanabe that they weren’t that interested in embracing new retail paradigms:

The store could have added more non-book items, such as yoga clothing. It could have set up a live-streaming capacity to expand the audience for Bodhi Tree speakers — who have included Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, world religion author Huston Smith, medium James Van Praagh and spiritual teachers Marianne Williamson, Carolyn Myss and Deepak Chopra. But, Madson said, he wasn’t quite comfortable or interested in evolving.

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