Your California lit guide

A shiny new CaliforniaAuthors.com debuted this week with a fresh design and an easy-to-navigate new site.

Kate Cohen and I first launched CaliforniaAuthors in 2002 and we’ve built some nice resources for exploring the Golden State. You’ll find a growing and varied library of book excerpts and essays by California writers; a directory of California novelists, nonfiction writers and poets; and listings pointing to independent bookstores, West Coast Publishers, literary events, book festivals, and more. CaliforniaAuthors also teamed up with Angel City Press to create the remarkable My California anthology, which benefits the California Arts Council and writing programs for children throughout the state. Browse here.

Booked in Westwood

Next weekend is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a sprawling outdoor affair that regularly draws 100,000 book lovers to the UCLA campus every spring. (Who says people in LA don’t read?!)

The festival is great fun. You’ll see throngs of people lined up in the sunshine outside lecture halls, waiting — and obviously excited — to join conversations about current events, current fiction, and the latest offerings from sci-fi masters and chick-lit queens. Poets give impassioned readings under the big tent outside Powell Library. Open-air stages feature celebrated chefs and celebrities touting their children’s books. I love to browse the dozens of booksellers, publishers, museums, non-profit foundations, and retailers who set up shop along UCLA’s grassy plazas.

More than 400 authors appear on Saturday and Sunday (tickets to daytime events are free), so you’ll find plenty of great choices. A festival map is here.

I’ll be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, signing copies of My California: Journeys by Great Writers from 1 to 2 pm with Edward Humes and Veronique de Turenne. Please be sure to stop by the Angel City Press Booth (#332, near Royce Hall) and say hello.

The Open Road

Time magazine’s cover story on the Dalai Lama comes from Santa Barbara author and travel writer extraordinaire Pico Iyer. “As fans of his travel writings know, Pico’s curiosity has led him to nearly every corner of the globe, but he has always found himself returning to the monk in Dharamsala…” writes Time managine editor Richard Stengel.

“Now Pico offers the definitive portrait of His Holiness in this week’s cover story, which is adapted from his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. `Over the years,’ Pico says, `I’ve been struck by how practically he’s adapted his message to the times and the worldwide audience. He’s thought about his positions more deeply and more rigorously than anyone I’ve ever met.’ ” Read “A Monk’s Struggle” here. 

Knopf releases The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama this week. (More stories: Philadelphia Inquirer , Fresh Air, and The New Yorker.) Pico will be discussing his new book on April 26 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA and May 19 at the Santa Barbara Arts and Lecture Series. ”I do see this as a travel book,” he says in an interview with World Hum, “and when I think of travel, and any of the travel books I’ve written, the real meaning of them is trying to see the world through different eyes. It’s a journey into a different perspective for me. “

Pico, a contributor to the My California anthology, also penned a wonderful passage about his favorite drive through the Santa Barbara hills for my book Great Escapes: Southern California.