There's a full moon tonight - a strawberry moon. It's the first time a full moon has risen on the June Solstice in almost 70 years.
Yep, it's pretty special so we've brought in our pretty special literary contributor, David Kipen to talk books as he does every full moon. He's the founder of the Libros Schmibros lending library in Boyle Heights.
Kipen's picks:
- "Grace" by Natasha Deon. Deon is a LA-based lawyer who is a graduate of the PEN Emerging Voices program.
"The book takes place during the slavery era. It's a mother and her daughter, the mother of it dies halfway through and it's told from the perspective of her ghost. Which of course inevitably is going to remind people of Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'"
- "Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food" by Patrick Kuh. Kuh is the Los Angeles magazine food critic.
"It's about artisanal cooking, how nobody was talking about it and now nobody shuts up about it. What could have been sort of an over told story he finds little stories around the edges that you had no idea even existed."
- "Multiple choice" by Alejandro Zambra
"By a Chilean author...it takes the form of a multiple choice test!"
- "Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises" by Lesley M. M. Blume
"About the writing of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises'"
- "Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick" by Michael Shelden
"About the writing of Moby Dick, so literature continues to eat itself, apparently."
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.