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…