New Novel

With "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown's news Tuesday morning that he would be releasing a new Robert Langdon adventure in May, we thought it wise to check in with the movie prospects for Brown's last Langdon tale, "The Lost Symbol," which resided on the New York Times hard-cover fiction bestseller list for 29 weeks and has 30 million copies in print worldwide. Sony's Columbia Pictures, which released the previous two films, "The DaVinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," owns the option to all of Brown's future projects involving Langdon, including "The Lost Symbol" and the upcoming "Inferno.

A look at some recent and recommended books: FICTION Claire Messud's "The Woman Upstairs" (Random House, $25.95) thrums with the fury of a middle-aged woman whose dormant creative impulses are awakened when she forges a friendship-verging-on-obsession with a charismatic female artist and her family. The result is startling: a psychological and intellectual thriller. James Salter was in his 40s when his best-known novel, "A Sport and a Pastime," was published - in 1967.

It's tempting to call Richard Ford a writer of place. Beginning with his first novel, 1976's "A Piece of My Heart," the 68-year-old author has tended toward the border among landscape, language and character, using setting to help drive his narratives. Think of Frank Bascombe, who in "The Sportswriter," "Independence Day" and "The Lay of the Land" drifts across the bland surfaces of New Jersey, seeking not stimulation but a stasis similar to that of the suburbs where he resides.

Margaret Atwood will roll out her newest book not on land but at sea. The author of more than 40 works of fiction, poetry and essays will preview "MaddAddam" aboard the Queen Mary 2 on an August transatlantic sailing from New York City to England . "MaddAddam," which won't be released until September in the U.S., completes the trilogy that began with "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood. " The book will be sold on board ahead of the British release date, and Atwood will be on hand for book signings during the cruise.

Yasmina Reza, the Tony Award-winning French dramatist whose stage hits include "Art" and "God of Carnage," has a new work out this month but it isn't a play. Reza has published a new novel in France titled "Heureux les Heureux. " The 190-page book follows 18 different characters and is structured as a series of monologues. The title, which can be roughly translated to "Happy Are the Happy," is a quote from Jorge Luis Borges's "Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel. " The novel has received enthusiastic reviews in France.

Will Self joined us from the office of his London publisher, Bloomsbury, to talk about his challenging new novel "Umbrella. " It was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Just released in the U.S. by Grove/Atlantic, "Umbrella" is told in stream-of-consciousness form, following in the footsteps of high modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. While some have called it a masterpiece , its style has put off some readers, who find it too difficult. Does that mean that writing in styles made famous by Joyce and Woolf is somehow still avant-garde, nearly a century later?

Da Chen hit bestseller lists in 1999 with his first book, the memoir "Colors of the Mountain. " That, and its sequel, "Sounds of the River," told of the hardships he experienced while growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Chen had moved to the U.S. when he was 23 to study; he earned a law degree from Columbia University and went to work on Wall Street. After living in New York for many years, he and his family have recently moved to Southern California. Chen will be doing a reading and book-signing Thursday, Dec. 6, at Book Soup at 7 p.m. The book he'll be reading from is his new novel, "My Last Empress," published earlier this year.

In the annals of demonology, William Peter Blatty falls somewhere between St. Augustine and Joss Whedon. He isn't the first person who's ever written about demons and demonic possession, but he has provided us with one of the genre's most memorable novels, 1971's "The Exorcist." There had been disturbing stories before, but nothing -- especially when Blatty teamed up with director William Friedkin for the 1973 screen adaptation -- so terrified audiences about the possibilities of the diabolical in ordinary people's lives.

State of Wonder A Novel Ann Patchett Harper: 368 pp., $26.99 In Ann Patchett's new novel, "State of Wonder," an ordinary woman winds up in increasingly extraordinary circumstances. That woman is Marina Singh, a 42-year-old pharmaceutical researcher who travels to a remote part of the Amazon after receiving news that her colleague Anders has died there. The dutiful daughter of an American mother and an Indian father who divorced when she was young, Singh seems an unlikely choice for a jungle adventure.

Nalo Hopkinson is trying to mess with your mind. The much-lauded writer of science fiction and fantasy sits at one of her favorite Mexican joints, Tio's Tacos, a funky art-strewn restaurant near the campus of UC Riverside, where she has taught creative writing since 2011. Diminutive and bespectacled, she speaks gently and laughs generously as the conversation roams through favorite writers (Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Bucknell, Charles Saunders) and the historical consciousness in her work (writing is "a combination of excavation and imagination")

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books, novelists Marisa Silver (“Mary Coin”) and Rachel Kushner (“The Flamethrowers”) sat down to speak with book critic David Ulin. Silver and Kushner are good friends, and they talked about being “writing buddies” as well as the influence of living in the West on their writing life. Silver's new novel, “Mary Coin,” imagines the life of a woman, living in a California coastal valley town during the Great Depression, who was immortalized in a famous Dorothea Lange photo of a migrant farmworker's  family.

In the late 1960s, Judy Juanita was a college undergraduate in the Bay Area and editor of a Black Panther Party newspaper. Now her new novel, "Virgin Soul" (Viking, $26.95), recounts the story of Geniece, an undergraduate who joins the Panthers. But "Virgin Soul" is not thinly veiled memoir. "This young woman and I are two different people," Juanita says. Unlike many books written by former radicals, "Virgin Soul" isn't aiming to settle old scores. Instead, Juanita - a poet, playwright and academic based in Oakland - has penned a witty and deeply engaging coming-of-age story about ideas and the passions generated by revolution and romantic love.

The literary event series Live Talks Los Angles announced its spring 2013 series Wednesday. The series, founded in 2010, takes place at a number of venues around the city. Speakers this spring include Neil Gaiman, who comes to L.A. -- well, technically, Glendale, at the Alex Theater -- in June to talk about his forthcoming novel "The Ocean at the End of the Lane. " Gaiman can write just about anything, and write it well -- comic books (Sandman), award-winning children's novels ("The Graveyard Book")

Muriel Spark understood better than most novelists the peculiar fascination of hermetic worlds. She set "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in a Scottish girls day school, "The Abbess of Crewe" in a convent run like the C.I.A. and her last novel, "The Finishing School," at a Swiss academy of questionable ethics. Jenny Davidson, a comparative literature professor at Columbia University and fiction writer, has inspired Sparkian comparisons with her new novel, "The Magic Circle," which focuses on a strange subset society all its own - the brainy bubble of Columbia University's Morningside Heights neighborhood.

Innocence A Novel Louis B. Jones Counterpoint: 160 pp., $14.95 paper The plot of Louis B. Jones' new novel seems to promise an antic, postmodern free-for-all: A middle-aged former Episcopalian priest, now employed in Marin County real estate, takes a weekend tour of Sonoma wine country with his new girlfriend. Both have recently undergone surgeries to repair a cleft palate, both are sexually inexperienced, and both are grappling with issues of self-definition and identity.

" Hot Sur " (Hot South), the just-published novel by Colombian author Laura Restrepo, carries a disturbing dedication: "A Javier, que pasa los días de su vida en una cárcel de Estados Unidos" -- To Javier, who spends the days of his life in a U.S. jail. That's a pretty blunt and compelling way of opening a book. But if you're familiar with Restrepo's previous novels, several of which have been published in English -- "Leopard in the Sun," "The Dark Bride," "Delirium" -- you know that she specializes in hooking readers from the first page with dramatic set-ups that could've been lifted from a crime thriller or a telenovela . Then her taut, nuanced, ironic narratives quickly reel you in to confront the starkest and darkest of current realities: warfare, drug violence, desperate urban poverty, the embattled and fragmented modern Self.

On a piano keyboard, which mimics the human vocal range, the middle C is the C closest to the center. That's Joseph Skizzen - the protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited follow-up to his 1995 masterpiece "The Tunnel" - a middle-of-the-road yet slightly off-center academic who wants nothing but "the chance of an unnoticed life. " But it just might be a stand-in for the author. If Gass' body of work were a keyboard, you'd have his debut novel, "Omensetter's Luck" on one end and of "The Tunnel" at the other.

Fame A Novel in Nine Episodes Daniel Kehlmann Pantheon: 192 pp., $24 Daniel Kehlmann's novel "Fame" includes what must be one of the most hackneyed sex scenes I've read this year. It begins with the narrator musing, "I desired her so much I would have given a year of my life. " Once coitus begins he finds that "my existence split into two halves: a before and an after, for all time. " As the ecstasy continues, the lovers become "so entwined that we could be one body or Siamese twins," and, quite mysteriously, "we clutch each other as if we were swimming in the Sargasso Sea. " Despite a little too much writing like that, "Fame" is not a dismissible book.

On a piano keyboard, which mimics the human vocal range, the middle C is the C closest to the center. That's Joseph Skizzen - the protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited follow-up to his 1995 masterpiece "The Tunnel" - a middle-of-the-road yet slightly off-center academic who wants nothing but "the chance of an unnoticed life. " But it just might be a stand-in for the author. If Gass' body of work were a keyboard, you'd have his debut novel, "Omensetter's Luck" on one end and of "The Tunnel" at the other.

Nalo Hopkinson is trying to mess with your mind. The much-lauded writer of science fiction and fantasy sits at one of her favorite Mexican joints, Tio's Tacos, a funky art-strewn restaurant near the campus of UC Riverside, where she has taught creative writing since 2011. Diminutive and bespectacled, she speaks gently and laughs generously as the conversation roams through favorite writers (Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Bucknell, Charles Saunders) and the historical consciousness in her work (writing is "a combination of excavation and imagination")