Fiction

The town of Wink, N.M., doesn't appear on any official map, the moon as seen from its streets has a pinkish hue, and very odd things lurk beneath the charm of its old-fashioned façade. The exact nature of those lurking things, human and otherwise, is chronicled by Shirley Jackson Award winner Robert Jackson Bennett in his at times horrifying and yet strangely beautiful new novel "American Elsewhere. " The book remains ambiguous about whether we're reading supernatural fiction, science fiction, or fantasy for a long time but then delivers mind-blowing answers.

When producers of the upcoming science fiction movie "After Earth" wanted to create an image of what the planet might look like 1,000 years in the future, location manager Dow Griffith knew just the place. He immediately thought of the mystical redwood forests in Northern California where his parents had taken him on a camping trip as a child. "I wanted to be able to evoke that sense of what the Earth would be like a thousand years after man has left, and I always felt that these enormous trees would say that in one shot," Griffith said in an interview from his Santa Monica home.

The starting point for Marisa Silver's new novel, "Mary Coin," was a moment of genius that unfolded on a California roadside more than 70 years ago. Just outside the coastal valley town of Nipomo in 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange spotted a migrant farmworker family sitting in a tent off U.S. Highway 101. After a few minutes of conversation, Lange snapped six shots of a mother and her children. The sixth became the defining American photograph of the Great Depression. Silver, a writer with a sharp eye for the visual (she began her artistic career as a filmmaker)

The strangeness and mystery of the Voynich Manuscript has inspired musicians and novelists.  Not surprisingly, the work has also proved a springboard for visual artists, but the remarkable thing about the photographs by Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft now at Thomas Solomon is how they don't just feed off the manuscript's secrets and complications but build upon them to generate something odd, fantastic and mysterious in its own right. The Voynich Manuscript, in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale, dates from the 15th or 16th century.

It was with deep sadness and shock that we, David Viscott's four children, read Nora Zamichow's vicious, sensational article on our recently deceased father in "Talk Was Cheap" (Jan. 26). Clearly, Writing is Cheap. Zamichow's amateur journalism is riddled with countless errors, unfounded suppositions and fiction. Even one of the most basic facts, the date of our father's death, is incorrect. She was supplied with many wonderful anecdotes by members of our family, as well as good friends and business associates, yet she used almost none--and those she did include were distorted and taken completely out of context to suit her. We have spoken to others who took a great deal of their time to be interviewed by Zamichow, and they, too, were as shocked as we were by the article's crass nature.

There are remarkable books whose ingenuity and formal daring put them beyond the range of conventional appraisal. There are also books lamentably difficult to assess because their utter disregard for style, literate narrative exposition and the entertainment quotient requisite in popular fiction seems more a result of artless ignorance than authorial intention. "The Overton Window: A Thriller," a first novel by radio talk-show host and Fox News personality Glenn Beck, squats immovably in that latter category.

THE INCURSION by Dirk Hanson (Little, Brown: $16.95; 288 pp.). Peter Cassidy is just a regular guy in today's world, a 29-year-old solid-state physicist working for a major corporation who got tired of it all and decided he'd rather go fly fishing. So he chucked his job and did just that. But he gets called back.

While "Scandal" fans eagerly await the reportedly "crazy" season finale of the much-buzzed-about ABC drama Thursday night, they can distract themselves with this clip from Wednesday's episode of "Watch What Happens Live. " Tony Goldwyn, in town for ABC's upfront presentation where his series was heavily plugged , stopped by Andy Cohen's tiny, downtown studio for a visit. There he joined Comedy Central's bawdy new female star, Amy Schumer, for a dramatic performance of some "Scandal" fan fiction.  In the slightly PG-13 story, "Flames," from an author by the pen name "Fitz Like a Glove," President Fitzgerald Grant shares a broom-closet rendezvous with his mistress, Olivia Pope (played here by Schumer)

In the new sci-fi movie "Oblivion," Earth's most precious resource is Tom Cruise. But running a close second (spoiler alert) is water. Aliens want it. All of it. This is old hat, science fiction-wise. In "The War of the Worlds," H.G. Wells had Martians coming to Earth to quench their thirst. The extraterrestrial lizards (cleverly disguised as human catalog models) in the 1980s TV series "V" came here to steal our water too - though they wanted it in part to wash down the meal they intended to make of us. In the more recent "Battle: Los Angeles," pillaging Earth's oceans was the only motivation we're given for why aliens were laying waste to humanity.

What it means to be a loving parent, and what that requires, are perplexing questions that get at the heart of some of the more trenchant issues of modern life: how to raise children, who is a good mother, over-medication to make children fit in, how much of the work of raising a child actually requires the parent. Three novelists -- Susan Straight, Mona Simpson and Bronwen Hruska -- considered these questions in their novels, and during a panel discussion Sunday at the L.A. Times Festival of Books at USC. Straight, the mother of three daughters and a teacher at UC Riverside, draws portraits of a beautiful prostitute and her very gifted teenage son in "Between Heaven and Here.

In her long and illustrious career, Jamaica Kincaid has tackled many genres of literature. So best believe her when she says that her 2013 work "See Now Then" is a novel and a work of fiction. Period. That's why, she said in a discussion with Hector Tobar on Sunday at the Festival of Books, "the most irritating thing" about the reaction to the book has been the insinuation that it is really a roman-a-clef, a memoir disguised as a fiction. "I will assert that if I were a white man this would not be the conversation," Kincaid told the audience at the Embassy Room Auditorium, who responded with a round of applause.

Festival of Books What: Rob Roberge is on the panel "Fiction: True Grit" in conversation with Frank Bill, James Greer and Joshua Mohr, moderated by Jim Ruland. Where: Annenberg Auditorium, USC When: 2 p.m. Sunday Price: Free. Tickets are available online. There is a $1 service fee applied to each ticket reserved. Information: latimes.com/festivalofbooks

In "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler wrote that the world inhabited by good crime fiction "is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. " During a conversation tantalizingly titled "What We Can't Tell You" on Saturday, four such authors pulled back the curtain on how they craft compelling mysteries....

Specktor will appear at the Festival of Books on Sunday at noon on the panel "Fiction: Inside Hollywood" with Adam Braver, Alex Espinoza and Nina Revoyr. More information: latimes.com/festivalofbooks Matthew Specktor knows the offices of talent agency CAA - past and present - like his own backyard. That's because, as son of top agent Fred Specktor, they practically were. He ran around in the hallways; he worked in the mail room. And although that it set him down the not unexpected Hollywood producer path, what he really wanted to do was write.

The Pulitzer Prize in fiction, announced Monday, has been awarded to Adam Johnson for his book set in North Korea, "The Orphan Master's Son. " The committee described the book as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart. " Johnson teaches at Stanford; "The Orphan Master's Son" is his third book. Sharon Olds won the poetry award for her collection "Stag's Leap," cited as "a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory and new freedom.