Posts by Live Talks Los Angeles
Questions for Scott Turow from Dave Barry
Dave Barry
We reached Dave Barry who recently spoke at Live Talks Los Angeles, and he had these questions for Scott Turow.
Barry: Which is more fictional: Kindle County, or Chicago?
Turow: At the moment, in the federal courthouse, Rod Blagojevich is on trial for selling every governmental act in his power in exchange for campaign contributions. Rumor has it that in his idle hours, Blago worked the highway toll booths and wouldn’t lift the gate unless a driver chipped in a buck or two for Friends of Rob. In another, courtroom former Police Lieutenant Jon Burge is on trial for torturing confessions out of a bunch of alleged murderers, a few of whom hadn’t killed anyone—or at least not who Burge thought. As always, all of this would seem a little ham-handed in a novel.
Barry: Do you, or do you not, have a spleen, and why?
Turow: That is for me to know and you to find out. Hint: I have chronic hereditary spherocytosis. Google that one, Funny Boy!
Questions for Scott Turow from Amy Tan
Amy Tan
We reached Amy Tan, who along with Scott Turow is in the all author rock band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, and asked her for a couple questions for Scott Turow.
Tan: Apart from legal and procedural kind of research, what kind of preparatory work or thinking do you do, .e.g, writing ideas in a journal, googling facts and figures, noting everyday details of life? Do you fall into the common writer trap these days of Googling every little thing and over-researching as you write?
Turow: I don’t over-Google. I always bear in mind Robert Parker’s statement when we did a panel together years ago and someone asked Parker about the research behind the verisimilitude of his work. “I’m just a good typist,” Parker said, meaning, I think, it is, after all, fiction. The most peculiar thing I do in terms of preparation is that I sort of think at the keyboard. For about a year, I get up and just write, discovering characters, settings, histories, dialogue without a particular agenda. Anything that moves me that morning. Eventually something seems to be coming to form.
Tan: What is the question people never ask that you wish they would ask?
Turow: Mr. Turow, what do you have to say about the Swedish Academy’s shocking announcement this morning that you have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Questions for Scott Turow from Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese is author of, most recently, the wonderful book, Cutting for Stone, now in paperback. If you’re looking for a great summer read, we strongly recommend it.
Verghese: Are you someone who plots out the whole book and knows it all, or do you follow a voice and see where it leads you?
Turow: I tend to follow voice and character to see where they lead. Plot and character, especially, seem intertwined so that a character’s nature, as I am discovering it, seems to spell the actions s/he will take. After a year of this kind of exploration, I then tend to have a sense of the overall story arc of a book and can begin a front-to-back draft.
Verghese: Please name a book or two that you reread and keep handy for inspiration or because you admire the craft.
Turow: I’m not sure that it’s that short a list. I find it useful to re-read Hemingway, Bellow and, always, Graham Greene for different reasons: Hemingway to remind myself how simply it can all be; Bellow for the completely opposite reason, that is, to recall how far voice and prose can take you; and Greene for the sheer elegance.
Welcome…
Welcome to the Live Talks Los Angeles blog, and to our website. Make yourself at home and check out the place. Here is where we will update information on our events, interact with our upcoming guests and share additional information about their work, their books, your questions and connect with readers and fans of the spoken and written word and the communities that seek and support them. Enjoy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali in conversation with Val Zavala
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In Conversation
With Val Zavala
May 24, 2010
8 P.M.
Bergamont Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Bldg C-1
Santa Monica, CA
One of today’s most admired and controversial figures, AYAAN HIRSI ALI captured the world’s attention with her memoir Infidel—a #1 bestseller in Europe and a New York Times bestseller for more than a year. She has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine and New Yorker and on 60 Minutes, and has been honored as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Reader’s Digest’s European of the Year. Richard Dawkins calls her a “major hero of our time.”
In her new book, Nomad, Hirsi Ali describes her search for a new life in America while reconciling the complex contradictions of her Islamic past and her Enlightenment beliefs. If Infidel was Hirsi Ali’s intellectual coming-of-age memoir, Nomad is a memoir with a message—and an urgent mission…a combination of her dramatic personal experiences and stories with riveting exhortations and stirring calls to action. She shares her commitment to Western values as she adapts to life in the United States, her renewed contact with members of her family (including her deathbed reconciliation with the father who disowned her), and her work to alert the West to the threats from Islam from inside and outside our societies.
“The West,” she says, “urgently needs to compete with the jihadis—the proponents of ‘holy war’—for the hearts and minds of its own Muslim immigrant populations. It needs to provide education directed at breaking the spell of the infallible Prophet, protect women from the oppressive dictates of the Quran and promote alternative sources of spirituality.”
VAL ZAVALA is an anchor/reporter for KCET’s weekly newsmagazine, SoCal Connected. She has been at KCET since 1987. For the past sixteen years, Zavala was a vital part of the award-winning series Life & Times, serving as an anchor, co-anchor and reporter. Life & Times won 25 L.A. Area Emmys and 30 Golden Mikes. Zavala has covered major issues impacting Southern California politics, education, healthcare, environment, demographics, and growth. She has also profiled dozens of Southern California’s elected officials, activists, artists, and thinkers making a difference in our communities.
Dave Barry in conversation with Jane Smiley
Dave Barry
In Conversation With
Jane Smiley
May 14th, 2010
8 P.M.
Bergamont Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Bldg C-1
Santa Monica, CA
Some people may wonder what this subject has to do with DAVE BARRY, since Dave’s struggled hard against growing up his entire life-but the result is one of the funniest, warmest, most pitch-perfect books ever on that mystifying territory we call “adulthood”.
In hilarious, brand-new pieces, Dave tackles everything from fatherhood, new fatherhood (“Over the next five years, you will spend roughly 45 minutes, total, listening to songs you like, and roughly 127,000 hours to songs exploring topics such as how the horn on the bus goes* [*It goes: ‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’]”), self-image, the battle of the sexes, celebrityhood, technology, parenting styles, certain unmentionable medical procedures (“There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of a vasectomy, except that: THEY CUT A HOLE IN YOUR SCROTUM.”), and much more. It is a book of pure delight from the man one newspaper claimed “could become the most important American humorist since Mark Twain” (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
JANE SMILEY’s new novel is A Private Life. She is author of numerous novels including A Thousand Acres which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, several works of nonfiction as well as many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Allure, The Nation and others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, getting dressed, Barbie, marriage, and many other topics.