Dara Weinberg

It's time for the LAIST prize roundup in the book world. John Banville, in a surprise turn, has won the Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea, beating out favorite Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Barry, and Ali Smith. Apparently the voting was as close as it's ever been. There's a great 3-part interview with Banville at the litblog The Elegant Variation. The Nobel Prize for Literature has not yet been announced...

The LA Weekly's annual Best of LA issue came out Thursday. This year's version, Best of LA 2005: Look Homeward, Angeleno, is edited by theater critic Steven Mikulan and features a compilation of creative nonfiction shorts on Los Angeles. Last year's Seven Deadly Sins version provided a mind-numbing number of recommendations - bars, clubs, restaurants. It was a useful guidebook but overwhelming. Here, Mikulan gives the writers room to expand. Rather than a list...

There's always more gossip than content going around the Internet about author Zadie Smith, whether it's Vogue mis-identifying someone else as her in a photo (the insulting inaccuracy was ridiculed via Maud and the Old Hag) or the Rake raking up her rap preferences. Smith has something that stands above the gossip, though - one of the best writing talents in generations, and now another book to prove it. For the uninitiated (as if!),...

First off, The Stranger's Seattle books department has hit another one out of the park with "Being Savage: Dan Savage's Older Brother Reviews His Younger Brother's New Book." Read it and chuckle in that pleasant feeling of being included in the inner circle. Ben makes comments like "Danny doesn't go far enough, he pulls his punches." This about a man who writes one of the most sexually explicit columns in Internetville? It's funny to...

Kepler's Books, the independent but imperiled bookstore in Menlo Park, will re-open its doors on October 8th. After the abrupt closure of Keplers' over a month ago due to financial troubles, this is a very happy ending to the story. You can read more about the reopening, and the need for volunteers, on our sister site SFist, and at www.savekeplers.com, a community website and action group that sprung up after the beloved institution closed....

Laist's theater pick for this weekend is John Patrick Shanley's haunting Beggars in the House of Plenty, a production of Vs. Theatre Company. Beggars is playing through Oct. 9th at the Victory Theatre Center in Burbank. Shanley won the Tony and the Pulitzer for Doubt in 2005, and it's a great time to look at his earlier works. This one, in its West Coast premiere, still holds up as a theatrical masterpiece. Shanley also...

It's confession time here in Booksville, LAIST. Zadie Smith, author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man and her most recent, On Beauty, will be appearing not once, but twice, this Sunday in Los Angeles: at Dutton's Beverly Hills at 2 pm, and at 826 LA at 6. We have known this for almost a month (we posted about her Booker Prize nomination here) and tried to write a post about it for...

Bart DeLorenzo is the artistic director of the Evidence Room, one of Los Angeles's most unique and adventurous theatres for new works and for avant-garde writers. At the ER, Bart has directed over 20 shows, including No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1999 LA Weekly Award, Best Direction) One Flea Spare, Messalina, Pentecost, Saved, Andromache, Leonce and Lena, and their current show, She Stoops To Comedy. (LAIST reviewed it here.) He has received many awards...

The nominees for the 2004-2005 Ovation Awards have been announced. You can read the full list here. The Ovations are an annual peer-judged awards ceremony for Los Angeles theatre, and are voted on by represesntatives from the member theatre companies of LA Stage Alliance. One of LAIST's favorites, the Antaeus Company, the North Hollywood-based classical theatre ensemble, has two nominations in a very strong field, Ensemble Performance. They are nominated for Mother Courage (read...

Now that novelist Jonathan Lethem has just won a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work, we thought it was finally time to clear up the confusion we've experienced around the 4 Novelist Jonathans who have all achieved literary and popular successes in the past few years. Who wrote the Jeeves pastiche? Whose work is being adapted into a soon-to-be-released movie starring Elijah Wood? Who wrote the post-9/11 novel? Who likes comic books? Who eschewed...