West Hollywood Book Fair
by Amelia G : January 18th, 2008
The West Hollywood Book Fair has received a California Park and Recreation Society Award of Excellence for three years in a row now. The Fair deserves it for throwing such a successful literary event year-after-year in the somewhat arid soil of Los Angeles.
The West Hollywood Book Fair features panels, workshops, performances, and exhibitor booths including local bookstores, small presses, literary non-profits, literary journals and arts organizations. My favorite part of the Fair was getting to see authors I know speak and discover authors I didn’t know.
The panel discussions and such were sectioned off into various niche pavilions. The pavilions of most interest to me were the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion, the Comics/Sci Fi/Horror Pavilion, and the delightfully-named Queer, Hot, and Avant Garde Pavilion. I missed the LA Noir: Crime Fiction Close to Home panel I wanted to go to in the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion. I was mostly interested because the brilliant Gary Phillips was scheduled to be speaking. I adore his gritty crime novels with characters so vibrant and real and frequently badass you want them to succeed, even as you note the ways they may destroy themselves. He co-edited a pretty cool cocaine anthology too. I’d like to give some really great reason why I missed this particular panel, like maybe traffic was so congested from the hugeness of the event that it took a while to find parking. But, let’s face it, a reading even in Los Angeles, even an awfully big one, is going to lay on tons of free parking and the location for this event is a really easy location to drive to. It was just the whole getting up that early in …
