California Literary Review

The best baseball books of 2009 [San Francisco Chronicle]

James Ellroy details his search for love in Playboy: The “L.A. Confidential” author later says he never masturbated on neighbors’ lawns — “That was just hyperbole!” — but he was a dedicated peeper and self-described “perv” during his teenage years. [LA Times]

Book Of A Lifetime: I Shall Bear Witness; To the Bitter End, By Victor Klemperer: This is one of the great masterpieces of the Second World War. Victor Klemperer was a German Jewish professor and, miraculously, one of a handful of Jews who survived the entire war – living, until the last three months, openly in Dresden. [Independent]

Alain de Botton finds glamour and drama in the world of work: What kind of questions should one ask a man who, in times of emotional trauma, turns not to gin and crying but to Epicurus and Schopenhauer for support? [Independent]

John Hope Franklin, Scholar of African-American History, Is Dead at 94: John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94. [NYT]

Fictional characters are signing book deals: From Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout to Lauren Child’s Ruby Redfort and JK Rowling’s Beedle the Bard, characters in books are launching literary careers of their own [Guardian]

Turning men into Page Turners: Publishers need to ‘re-masculate’ books if they want to get more men reading. [Guardian]

Graphic artists condemn plans to ban erotic comics: A coalition of graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned Government plans to introduce a new set of laws policing cartoons of children, arguing that the current broad wording of the legislation could lead to the banning of hundreds of mainstream comic books. [Independent]

Princeton U.P. Author Proposes Marriage in Book Acknowledgements: Everyone at the press kept the proposal a secret and even went to the trouble of extracting that section of the book—which read, “Ania, I love you; will you marry me?”—from the advance galleys that were mailed out to the press. [Publishers Weekly]

In times of trouble, fiction thrives: But as stock markets tank, newspapers go bankrupt, and city services vanish, the humble, bracingly personal act of trying to write fiction – preferably with the support of a writers’ workshop – appears more popular than ever. [Philadelphia Inquirer]