From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a small group of painters in Southern California made the region an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined an “L.A. Look” recognizable to this day; Los Angeles’s architects produced the most influential and winning collection of modernist houses ever built; its designers created America’s most seminal and enduring modern furniture designs; and its musicians mounted the only significant challenge to New York’s jazz supremacy in the past 60 years. A number of penetrating books… [Atlantic]

Anderson’s magnificent film fire bursts with the same kind of destructive energy — and the fascination with the hard, gritty detail of social and industrial processes — that marked Sinclair’s writing at its best. Indeed, Sinclair was not without big-screen ambitions of his own. He flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life, beginning in 1914 with a six-reel silent movie of his most famous novel, “The Jungle” (1906). [NYT]

After a debate that left senior members of the Telegraph’s literary staff with pulled hair, black eyes and, in one case, an infected bite, we this week present our list of the 50 great crime writers of all time. [Telegraph]

Here’s our ultimate comic book mix tape - title it Eight Comic Books You Need to Read Before You Die, or the only slightly less cumbersome Comics for People Who Think They Hate Comics. [SFGate]

The more cynical may say it is a small price to pay for achieving the stature of intellectual celebrity, but Francis Fukuyama took some very hard knocks after the publication of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Some critics took the “end of history” part of the title altogether too literally and had a field day lampooning Fukuyama’s chronological hubris. [First Things]

Tim Jeal’s favourite childhood book was a memoir that turned out to be made up. The possibilities of biography have fascinated him ever since. [Guardian]

It’s hard to remember a first novel that’s had as big a push as Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children.” In addition to landing rapturous press, he’s been blurbed by A.M. Holmes and Jonathan Safran Foer. The novel, which centers on the disappearances of a comics-and-video-game-loving 12-year-old, is being hailed as the first great literary novel set in Las Vegas. Pretty good for a late-blooming author who spent 10 years writing his novel and compares the process to building a bomb in his basement. [LA Times]

Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died on Monday aged 85 was the leading light of the “new novel” in post-war France, as well as a film director and avant-garde critic whose theories were as influential as his novels. [Telegraph]