The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) dedicated an entire week of essays to Joan Didion and her new memoir Blue Nights. Six writers shared their thoughts about the new book; one essay was published each day this week.

The group includes LARB senior fiction editor Matthew Specktor, Take One Candle Light a Room author Susan Straight, literary journalism professor Amy Wilentz, Cool Shades author Amy Emphron and LA Times columnist Meghan Daum. The last piece, written by Los Angeles Without a Map novelist Richard Rayner, will be published tomorrow.

LARB editor-in-chief Tom Lutz gave this statement in the release: “Didion is an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life. In 1976 she wrote that ‘[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.’ That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates the essays we’re featuring this week.”

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Did the prosperity of the last 20 years make American novelists soft? On Tuesday April 14 at 7pm, critic Walter Benn Michaels, The Wire creator and journalist David Simon (pictured), author Susan Straight, and novelist-critic Dale Peck will debate that question at the New York Public Library.

Co-sponsored by Bookforum, the literary conversation will debate what “The Death of Boom Culture” means for American authors. General admission tickets are $25, and $15 for library donors, seniors, and students with valid identification.

Here’s more from the release: “Among the ills afflicting the American novel at the height of boom culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues, was a curatorial obsession with past oppressions–from slavery to the Holocaust to memoir-style accounts of family abuse. Writers should now be asking less about what it meant to oppose the Holocaust, he contends, and more about what it means to support free trade.”