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“U.S. GOVERNMENT INITIATES OPEN WARFARE AGAINST AMERICAN PEOPLE,” blared one headline. “DAUGHTERS OF CONFEDERACY UNDER ATTACK,” warned another. “DEATH TO ZOG!” urged a third - referring to Zionist Occupation Government. This is not the mainstream media. The articles - racist, anti-Semitic, paranoid and illustrated with an array of swastikas and Ku Klux Klan hoods - were collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which researches extremist movements in the United States.

Mary Thom, an early staffer at Ms. magazine who rose to executive editor and later wrote an insider's history of the groundbreaking, mass-market chronicle of the women's movement, died Friday in a motorcycle crash in Yonkers, N.Y. She was 68. Her death was announced by the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit New York-based organization founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem. Thom was editor-in-chief for the center, which publishes features on women's issues in addition to offering media training and advocacy.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. Edna O'Brien, who retells her provocative life in "Country Girl," represents a classic Irish case. A novelist whose promise found fulfillment in the short-story form, she had to exile herself, like Joyce and Beckett, to become herself. Mad Ireland hurt her into prose the way Auden said it had hurt Yeats into poetry. A lush vocabulary was her revenge on her lush of a father, who remained captive to the bottle even when dry. Sentences, stylishly turned out, perked up the drabness of impecunious circumstances.

It was a fine April day last week that found Elie Wiesel at Chapman University; it was a fine April day too, 58 years earlier, when the gaunt, teenage Wiesel found himself alive and suddenly free to walk out of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the decades since, Wiesel's impassioned writing and speaking have won him a Nobel Peace Prize, and a large place in the public intellectual discourse about the Holocaust and the human condition. They have also brought him to Chapman each spring for the last three years as a distinguished presidential fellow, meeting with students and faculty to keep the significance of the Holocaust green in their minds.

Behind the scenes at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, book critic David Ulin talked to Margaret Atwood about Los Angeles, literature and what it's like to write a serial novel. Atwood, who had been awarded the Innovators Prize at the L.A. Times book awards Friday night, spoke to a full crowd at the festival on Saturday. "For years it was thought of as really a movie town and people didn't read," Atwood said of Los Angeles. "You heard that all the time, but it turns out not to have been true.

Why write in and about Los Angeles? Brighde Mullins offered one pithy answer while moderating a panel on that subject at the Festival of Books on Sunday. Quoting Carson McCullers, Mullins said, "If you're going to write, you better have someplace to be from. " Mullins  then spent the next hour delving deeper into just what living and writing Los Angeles means, with input from William Deverell, Dana Johnson, Laura Pulido and Richard Rayner. Deverell, a historian and the author of "Whitewashed Adobe," said, "One of the attractive and really seductive things about studying Los Angeles and trying to figure it out is the historical velocity with which it developed.

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 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.

Brian Eno fans might have to suffer a bit before they get to hear his new body of work.  According to the Independent , the producer-composer's latest project is two ambient soundtrack and light installations designed to soothe patients in hospitals. The works will make their debut at the new Montefiore Hospital in Hove, England. "77 Million Paintings for Montefiore” is a sound-and-light installation in the hospital's reception area, while "The Quiet Room for Montefiore"  is a custom separate space for patients, staff and guests to escape the sonic and emotional tumult of life in a hospital.

French director François Ozon can usually be counted on for dark irony of the juiciest sort - his 2003 "Swimming Pool" of sexual provocations comes to mind. But the filmmaker has an especially deft touch when a dash of comedy is mixed in. He uses this to delicious effect in his latest, "In the House. " Adapted by Ozon from Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga's "The Boy in the Last Row," the literary conceit upon which this "House" stands required some maneuvering to open up the world of Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer)