Carolyn Kellogg
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Carolyn Kellogg: writer & editor, now found in Los Angeles. Latest: lithub.com/the-seven-books-i-took-with-me-when-evacuating-los-angeles/
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Articles by Carolyn Kellogg
Think Burning Man meets the end of the world: This Pulitzer winner's new book is a chaotic trip
It’s a cause for celebration when a great novelist publishes a new book. That said, readers who became fans of Hernan Diaz for his novel “Trust,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, may be disoriented by “Ply,” his latest. Where “Trust” was a sharply controlled exploration of capitalism set in the past, “Ply” is practically the opposite — a sprawling far-future narrative of a life lived on the margins. Few writers have the ambition to make such a drastic shift.
Forget New York, some of the most ambitious literature in America is happening in California
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Forget New York, some of the most ambitious literature in America is happening in California
1 hour ago If one accessory ruled this summer, it wasn’t raffia beach bags or bug-eyed shades. The handheld fan – frantically flapping in festival crowds, whizzing silently on public transport or draped over shoulders as a resourceful, futurist-apocalyptic form of neckwear – is now a summer staple. But what …
If you haven't read double-Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, start with these books
This month, "Cool Machine," a riff on 1980s New York in the form of a tightly plotted crime novel, arrives from Colson Whitehead. It concludes his Harlem trilogy, they say. If you'd told readers two decades ago that Whitehead would become a bestselling crime novelist, they might have thought you were kidding. He started out writing innovative novels with such intellectual and stylistic punch that the MacArthur Foundation gave him a fellowship in 2002.
The Literary Genre That Thrives in Hard Times Original
Los Angeles has had a rough couple of years. Fires have destroyed entire neighborhoods, the Hollywood streaming boom is going bust, ICE raids have torn through neighborhoods, and the city was subjected to an airborne toxic event; the vibes are so bad that a reality-TV villain almost made the mayoral primary. Such crises and anxieties are not exactly new; darkness has always lurked under the bright L.A. sun.
Review: Letting it burn
Books move fast on mystery and thriller shelves, and many novelists will publish a book a year to keep up with demand. S.A. Cosby writes almost that fast, but luckily, his brilliant “King of Ashes,” which came out in 2025, has been recently released in paperback. In it, three siblings are brought together after their father is injured in a car accident, resulting in a coma. So, Roman comes home, Neveah keeps the family crematory going, and Dante, well, he hangs around partying.
S.A. Cosby is the king of Southern noir — and he's coming to town
When the king of Southern noir, S.A. Cosby, sent out his debut novel, “My Darkest Prayer,” it was rejected again and again. “One of the editors said, ‘I just don't believe this level of violence and intensity exists in rural areas,’” Cosby tells me with a laugh. “I was like, I grew up here. If you live in a rural area and it's a Friday, Saturday night, there's not a lot to do but drink and fight and ride around.” He admits he’s exaggerating to some extent. “But Raymond Chandler is exaggerating.
The 15 Best Books of 2025
From left, "Flesh" by David Szalay, "Audition" by Katie Kitamura, "Shadow Ticket" by Thomas Pynchon (Photo illustration by Josep Prat Sorolla / For The Times; book jackets from Scribner, Riverhead and Penguin Press) Books can be a refuge from (waves arms) all this, even when they take you deeper into the darkness of 2025. There is a grace in the relationship between book and reader, with nothing but your eyes and brain and the words on the page.
AN EXPERT SATIRIZES THE 'SUPERHERO'
Los Angeles Times | December 03, 2025 Veteran character actor Tim Blake Nelson, who's no stranger to the MCU, invents a comics-based studio in his latest novel TIM BLAKE NELSON, who plays the Leader in "Incredible Hulk" and "Captain America: Brave New World," draws from his blockbuster experience in "Superhero." Picture 14-year-old Tim Blake Nelson sitting at dinner in Oklahoma, delivering a 25-word book report on Ernest Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea.” The assignment came from his...
Tim Blake Nelson has played the weirdo. His new book satirizes the freaks who run Hollywood
Tim Blake Nelson, shown in his New York loft, channels his Hollywood career in his second novel, "Superhero." (Dutch Doscher / For The Times) Picture 14-year-old Tim Blake Nelson sitting at dinner in Oklahoma, delivering a 25-word book report on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The assignment came from his father; literary discussion was expected to ensue. “I grew up at a dinner table at which frivolous conversation rarely occurred,” Nelson said.
Susan Orlean's writing career would be impossible to replicate today: 'I have always been ready to be lucky'
“I think asking the question ‘who cares?’ is part of any writing project,” Susan Orlean says over coffee on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. In her delightfully written new memoir, “Joyride” — personal stories with a bit of writing advice — she admits that charming people into reading about esoteric subjects is essential to her work. It’s also one of the larger projects of journalism — finding overlooked stories and telling them well.
Susan Orlean’s writing career would be impossible to replicate today: ‘I have always been ready to be lucky’
What if you could unlock a way to make ChatGPT feel less like a generic AI and more like a personal assistant who truly “gets” you? Imagine asking it …
From 'Infinite Jest' to Oprah's Book Club, 1996 changed the (literary) world
Carolyn Kellogg Mon, April 14, 2025 at 10:00 AM UTC 8 min read Computers were ugly hulking gray or beige boxes then, taking up so much desk space. In 1996 I worked at Disney Interactive, my Windows 95 operating system skinned with an “X-Files” theme; when I arrived early, the TV show’s eerie chimes echoed across the empty office. Work was a lot like now, doing things using the computer and answering and sending emails.
Why Merle Oberon, 'Hollywood's first South Asian star,' kept her race a secret
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Why Merle Oberon, 'Hollywood's first South Asian star,' kept her race a secret
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Why Merle Oberon, 'Hollywood's first South Asian star,' kept her race a secret
Golden Age film star Merle Oberon comes alive in a breezy new biography, sparked in part by the 2023 news that she was half Asian, a secret she kept all her life.
Review: Time slips for a revolutionary
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There's potential for nature and redemption tucked into 'empty' spaces
It is easy to love Griffith Park, with its stunning views and iconic observatory. Same goes for Joshua Tree National Park, drawing millions each year with its transcendent desert views and otherworldly flora. But who will care about the abandoned transit lines, the forgotten alleys, the dusty lots behind barbed-wire fences? Christopher Brown, that’s who.
Review: Exploring wealth, power and connection in 'Entitlement'
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Review: A good lawman, lost, in Highway 59
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Review: In 'Liars,' the betrayal is there all along
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Review: Liz Moore urges readers to stay away from the forest
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Review: Nicola Twilley explores how food got cool
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Hollywood's bravest and most foolhardy memoir wasn't written by a movie star
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Hollywood's bravest and most foolhardy memoir wasn't written by a movie star
To see Julia Phillips become the first female producer to win a best picture Oscar is to get a glimpse of the charisma and wit that made her so welcome in Hollywood, in boardrooms and on sets, until she wasn’t. At the 1974 Academy Awards, a streaker had interrupted David Niven introducing presenter Elizabeth Taylor, who stumbled over her lines, then announced “The Sting” as the winner. Phillips took the stage with her (not yet ex-) husband, Michael, and their co-producer Tony Bill.
Tommy Orange was against revisiting Native American history in his new book. Why he changed his mind Original
For Tommy Orange, there was before “There There,” and there was after. Before: He was a struggling writer, teaching in an MFA program. After, the dream: bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize finalist, his book on syllabuses across the country, invited to speak at literary events worldwide. It was a rare and lasting achievement. His new book, “Wandering Stars,” is also a before and after. This much-anticipated novel serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the first.
What Zadie Smith's new Dickensian delight tells us about the Trump base Original
Zadie Smith’s new novel, “The Fraud,” is a Dickensian delight. Not only is it set in 19th century England with a sprawling cast of characters high and low, but Charles Dickens himself makes an appearance, charming everyone except those who envy his success. But there’s more to this brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog than a simple literary romp. At the center of the story is the widow Eliza Touchet, who runs the house of her cousin by marriage, William Ainsworth, a popular novelist.
How Trump's misdeeds inspired a new history of the first mass-media congressional hearing
During the height of Prohibition, people knew they could get booze on the sly: in speakeasies, say, or as “medicine” prescribed by pharmacists. What they didn’t know was that the attorney general of the United States, the nation’s top law enforcer, was making that all possible with illicit liquor deals that lined his pockets. This was perhaps the most startling revelation of progressive firebrand Montana Sen.
Reviewing Cormac McCarthy
A coworker told me about Cormac McCarthy back in the early 1990s — he had great taste in books, and I was quickly a fan. I loved McCarthy’s novels for the way that they got at some essence of the American west, the fierce bleak dry brutality of it. Also, the man can fucking write. As someone who’d moved from the east coast to Los Angeles, totally clueless about the landscape or history or anything else, books were one of the ways that I tried to figure LA out.
Marc Chagall's upstate studio
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Character Studies
The flawed but deeply compelling protagonists of Elizabeth Nunez (Now Lila Knows), Claire Messud (A Dream Life), and Don Lee (The Partition) struggle to form intimate relationships and do what is right. These three authors offer stunning portraits of humanity that challenge stereotypes and resist simplification. Moderated by writer and critic Carolyn Kellogg.
At the Drive-In
Seeing Nope at a drive-in theater: highly recommended. I haven’t been out to the movies since the (ongoing!) pandemic began, but I really wanted to see Jordan Peel’s Nope. Honestly I would have broken my streak and gone indoors, but a friend was Not Into It. Understandably. And luckily it was playing at a Poughkeepsie drive-in theater. The picture above doesn’t do the size of the screen justice.
How does a book critic read?
My shelves are full of books but not one of them told me how to be a book critic. In fact, when I was asked to write my first paying book review, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was doing. I just knew that I loved reading books, had opinions about them — opinions that I shared on my blog at the time, Pinky’s Paperhaus — and that if I held my breath and met my word count, I might not mess up. I might even be asked to do it again.
See you at AWP + kitchenizing
So you can write. But can you write a book review? That’s the panel I’ll be on at AWP in Philadelphia. Thursday, 1:45pm, if you’re attending. Come! The luminaries who’ll be jumping into the conversation are Gabino Iglesias, Walton Muyumba, Vidyan Ravinthriran and me, with Adriana E. Ramírez serving as our sparkling moderator. I realize there’s a martini party scheduled opposite this panel, but try to do both. I will. Patching the holes left by the now-removed drop ceiling.
Two tales of the South
The magnolia tree in my yard in Alabama. Photo by Carolyn Kellogg. In the middle of the Trump administration, I quit my job as books editor at the LA Times and moved to the south. The deep south: Alabama. I was inspired by the Legacy Monument and Museum by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. I was also inspired by all the creative people doing great work across the South, and by progressive people working in the face of overwhelming odds.
Trust and kitchen progress
My kitchen ceiling, partway dismantled. BOOKS I reviewed Domenico Starnone’s Trust for the Boston Globe. This was one of those occasions where I had more to say than could fit into a review, or rather, made sense to fit into a review. First, there’s the Ferrante rumors. I am not part of the massive Elena Ferrante fanbase — I know who she is and assigned reviews of her novels, but I’ve never read the books. Not against, just not swept up in the tidal wave.
Maud Newton's Ancestor Trouble
sure if that's true, but my mother lived across from a Presbyterian church. My father was the kind of person who really gravitated toward the Presbyterian church when my mom started going there because of the idea of predestination. He really liked the idea that our family was chosen by God for success, that he was chosen by God. He liked the idea of God. And he liked the idea of being involved in a community of Christians. It was definitely an upper middle class, wealthy church.
Kitchen a go go
I’m not going to tell you what pieces I’ve recently sent off to editors about books I’ve just read. It’s not a secret, it’s superstition: A piece of writing doesn’t exist until it’s out in the world. As I typed that I realized that it’s not true. A piece of writing exists when you’re writing it. But I did learn that (probably bad) lesson writing for a newspaper: anything could get bumped at any time.
A Year in Reading: Dan Kois
I began the year 2021 reading ambitiously, tearing through galleys and ARCs. I had visions of buckling down and being a critic again: writing a review or two each month, making a best-of list at the end of the year that didn't seem like a weak cousin to Laura's much better, more authoritative list.
Rebecca Carroll Is Still ‘Surviving the White Gaze’
In many ways, Rebecca Carroll had a typical New England girlhood — playing outdoors, taking ballet classes, having crushes on preppy boys. But at the same time, as the only Black girl in town, she was always different. Her excellent memoir, pointedly titled Surviving the White Gaze, tells the story of her youth and learning to define herself for herself. Rebecca was adopted in an arrangement that was unique.
A Year in Reading: Chet'la Sebree
I was so excited to do this, to proudly list all the books I read this year. Then, after sitting down, I realized the list was shorter than I thought. I started to wonder if I should list instead all the books I started and have yet to finish. Apparently, some of the frenetic energy born in the doom-scroll chaos of 2020 is still festering in me.
Reading, house-ing and a present
I’m dreaming of a place that’s sunny and bright. What I’m reading I recently finished Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll, an excellent and complex portrait of her unusual childhood and emergence into herself as a Black woman. Adopted as an infant by kind and creative white parents, she was raised in a New Hampshire town where she was the only Black person.
A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki
I was thinking of calling 2021 a non-year. I turned 40 in February and marked it by gazing at the camellia bushes at a nearby garden, and because I hadn't spent much (or any) time alone since that fateful day in March 2020, the visit was blissful. Still, it wasn't the celebration I had imagined for that milestone birthday. By the end of March, I was fully vaccinated, but, for most of the year, my kids couldn't be-and the youngest, who is two, is still waiting.
A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol
When the pandemic began I worked fiercely on finishing a novel I had started but dropped a few years ago-because that's what I do under stress: I buckle down and write. It's how I cope. Work is my pleasure and my lifeline. So mostly what I read at the beginning of the year were odd books on the first years of American occupation of the Philippines, 1899 to 1905 or so-one of the time-spans in my novel.
How to make an attic library
The attic was a surprise. I moved into my house sight unseen in the middle of the pandemic. Technically, I knew it *had* an attic, but it wasn’t included in the listing photos. It wasn’t until I got into the house — which almost didn’t happen, which is another story — that I realized how big the attic was. It’s vast. It was also really, really dirty. So at first I was stymied — I didn’t know what to do but put a few boxes up there.
Stacey Vanek Smith Wants You to Make More Money
Stacey Vanek Smith is an accomplished public radio journalist whom you can hear every weekday hosting the podcast The Indicator from Planet Money. Her first book, Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace, is a surprising mix of strategies for navigating today’s office and office politics and the ideas of the notorious 16th-century political theorist.
Charlie Jane Anders’ New Book Is Out of This World
In her brilliant short-story collection Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders takes us into distant worlds, far futures, and near presents. There is humor, imagination, science, terror, and love — sometimes all in one story. In 2020, Anders won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s at work on a YA trilogy, has earlier novels optioned by Hollywood, wrote for Y: The Last Man and a She-Hulk comic, and has done too much more to fit here.
Gary Shteyngart's cozy, dystopian, soap-operatic immigrant COVID paradise
Author Gary Shteyngart near his country home, the inspiration — along with COVID — for the great American satirist's latest novel, "Our Country Friends." (Carolyn Kellogg) The fall leaves were turning, the sweater weather brisk, and I was waiting for Gary Shteyngart in front of a popular restaurant in Hudson, N.Y., to talk about his new book, “Our Country Friends.” The novel features a Shteyngart-esque writer, Sasha Senderovsky, his family and friends, a famous Actor, a Hudson Valley compound...
A New Take on Publishing: Giving More Writers Transparency and Power
There are few things as magical as reading a book that fully immerses you in a new world. Poetic and profound prose can evoke emotions that can remain with you for your entire life, transforming how you see the world.
Blurred Realities
A dystopian London, a child caught in the midst of a deadly epidemic, and a grieving taxi driver in a ghostly Washington, D.C. Join the authors of A River Called Time (Courttia Newland), Phase Six (Jim Shepard), and Creatures of Passage (Morowa Yejidé) for a conversation on what draws them to speculative fiction, from world-building to the mechanics that make a story tick. Moderated by Carolyn Kellogg.
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