BLACKBURN AND SWEETZER

The Taschen warehouse sale runs June 21st-23rd at its Beverly Hills store (354 N. Beverly Drive), which means awesome books - the kind you like guests to see on your coffee table and bookshelf, the kind you can peruse for hours - at up to 75% off.

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Thursday, June 21st from 7:00PM-3:00AM is Late Night at LACMA, which is free. There will be DJs (a bunch, including Ima Robot); film (Hairspray, space documentary In the Shadow of the Moon); art (Dan Flavin: A Retrospective); book signings (artist Nick Pugh among them); and munchables (soft tacos, sausages, veggie tostados). You must RSVP though. [...]

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If you’re like me, you wait till it comes out in paperback. Hardcover is present-worthy and usually gets given away (and very much appreciated when I’m the receiver), but paperbacks are what fills most of my literary needs. An impressive journalist-novelist-screenwriter and friend, Deanna Kizis’ second novel, Finishing Touches, has just come out in softcover. [...]

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What the f*ck? Does Harper Collins think that readers have collective memory loss? Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated came out in this paperback edition in 2003 by HP (the hardcover in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin with the same cover art but in black and white); HP just put out Lizzie Post’s How Do You [...]

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Oh god, another how to wrangle a man book, this one by Cindy Lu called The Four Man Plan, very depressing. I wouldn’t be mentioning it at all if there weren’t an event in the ‘hood, at Sugar on La Brea, involving the how-to: signed copies will be given out with every purchase for the [...]

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Because it’s always a party at Family on Fairfax. Take in the Nu-Jazz sounds of Soiled Mattress & the Springs at 7:00PM May 31st - i.e., tonight.

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I’m not a graphic novel head, but I do like reading and looking at cool illustrations, so in that sense, I find graphic novels a very positive thing. I don’t know Cecil Castellucci or Jim Rugg, but Cecil is a young adult writer and I was once a kid and liked to read like crazy [...]

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It’s funny, the author pic of ZZ Packer on the back of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere - needless to say at this point, a phenomenal collection of short stories - is almost stern, but her personality is way closer to the image above. I did a fiction workshop with her a couple years back and she [...]

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