Taye Diggs, Joyce Carol Oates and more stamp Los Angeles on the literary map

With a sprinkling of celebrity stardust among the literary heavyweights, the LA Times Festival of Books affirmed its reputation as the best of its kind in America

There was a time, not too long ago, when you might have heard people say that Los Angeles was, well, anti-literary. Sure, many writers had at one time or another called the place home – Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion leap to mind. But the likes of Susan Sontag beat a path to the east coast as soon as they could. F Scott Fitzgerald felt ruined by Hollywood, and Dorothy Parker rather hated the place too. Maybe Fran Lebowitz said it best when she wrote: “The chief products of Los Angeles are novelizations, salad, game-show hosts, points, muscle tone, mini-series and rewrites.”

What there is of a literary scene in Los Angeles still resents this lingering bad reputation. Everyone loves it here, or at least they are very performative about loving it here, as they showed this past weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “I’ve gone to many, many books festivals in many, many cities,” the thriller writer and Bosch creator Michael Connelly said on Sunday, settling in for a chat with his Amazon show’s lead, actor Titus Welliver. “And it’s not just because I’m at home: this is the best books festival.”

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