Cara Black, author of so many delightful Aimee LeDuc novels that take place in Paris, provides an introduction to her delightful main character. Below, Cara reveals Aimee’s unconventional family background, her inventive sense of style, and above all, her compulsion to solve murders in the world’s most beautiful and increasingly complex city.  Come to our event and meet  Cara and Jacqueline Winspear on April 11. The soft apricot light hits the zinc rooftops at sunset, butter smells emanate from the bakery, the Seine gurgles below,…

Peggy Orenstein will chat with Lori Gottlieb on February 8.  She writes the following few paragraphs on the sustaining link between her grandmother and herself. My husband is one of those people who can trace his lineage back for generations. His mother’s parents were born on Shikoku, Japan, the smallest of that country’s main islands. His second cousins still live there, near the family plot where markers for the dead stretch back a full millennium. Our daughter Daisy’s eyes grow wide when we tell her…

By Victoria Pynchon Fifteen years ago when Andrea Grossman was asking herself how she might bring her favorite authors to Los Angeles, I was asking myself why I, a commercial litigator and trial attorney, had so few people in my life with whom I could talk about literature.   The law, it turned out, was more business than profession and not a place where the “life of the mind” held much interest. Fast forward to 2010.  More than 1,000 lovers of literature hear Mel Brooks and…

By Paul Levine I was standing in a circle of Chardonnay sippers at an art show in Santa Monica when the conversation turned to the future of reading. As a novelist, I had skin in the game, so I grabbed a canape, sidled over, and eavesdropped. “I’ll never buy one of those electronic gizmos,” said a heavyset man in his fifties, a humanities professor. “I’d miss the smell of ink on paper, the conjuring of medieval libraries and ancient parchment.” Funny, I don’t recall anyone…