Growing up in England in the 1980s and ’90s instilled in me a Pavlovian reaction to the scene of a horse-drawn carriage crunching up the gravel driveway of a stately home, scored to a rousing string orchestra. Even before my mother had time to identify the house in question, before the protagonists had descended into the circle of uniformed flunkies, and before Judy Dench or Helena Bonham Carter or Emma Thompson had exchanged a word with Anthony Hopkins or Daniel Day-Lewis or some lesser Redgrav

Woolf points out over and over again that what makes men men is their power, and what makes women women is their lack of it: financially, culturally, and physically.

The L.A. Times Book Festival, held over the weekend of April 21-22, is an annual celebration of reading and literary culture in a town often stereotyped as not exactly bookish. But Hollywood runs on stories, so this year the festival debuted a new strand of programming, Newstory, to lead visitors “beyond the book” and showcase innovations in a variety of media.

It lurks underground like an iceberg, a “giant force capable of sinking ships” — or of upending comfortable assumptions about our civilized, sanitized cities.

JUST AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning on April 18, 1906, what came to be known as the San Francisco earthquake trembled down the coast from southern Oregon to Los Angeles and inland as far as Nevada. “Rumors of great disaster from an earthquake in San Francisco, but know nothing of real facts,” President Roosevelt wrote anxiously to the Governor of California, eager for some solid ground to stand upon. There was no reply.

What makes someone a bad mother? If you ask the guys who made The Hangover—and really, why wouldn’t you? it’s doing shots, falling off bar stools, taking down the bossy PTA president and going out in public with your kid’s spaghetti lunch dripping down your blouse.

What would Helen Gurley Brown, determined fabricator of her own life story, have made of Enter Helen, a new biography by Brooke Hauser that takes an affectionate but unvarnished look at her long tenure as editor of Cosmopolitan magazine? She’d have loved it, declared Barbara Hustedt Crook, one of HGB’s original Cosmo staffers, at an event last night to celebrate the book and its subject, at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena. “She never liked a puff piece – and she liked a zippy read.”

Recently, the New York Times published a sobering story on the alumni of the 2009 season of The Biggest Loser. A study showed that almost all of those who had publicly lost hundreds of pounds on the show’s punishing diet and exercise regime had gained nearly all of it back, unless they made staying slim the focus of every waking moment. Their resting metabolism, it turned out, had been broken down to a murmur by the weight loss.

A little girl wearing fairy wings twirled in a photo booth rigged up next to the New Releases table. Across town, a bookseller set cans of beer, donated from a local brewery, to chill in a tub of ice. Balloons tied to chalk boards proclaimed Saturday, May 2 Independent Bookstore Day: the first national celebration of this surprisingly buoyant industry. On Twitter and Instagram, shoppers showed off their literary hauls so enthusiastically that for a few hours the hashtag #Bookstoreday was trendin

In 1921, the New York chapter of the Panhellenic Conference, the national network of college sororities, turned its attention to an urgent local problem: the lack of affordable housing for graduates moving to the city in search of jobs. The chapter’s 3,000 members voted to take direct action to alleviate the situation by creating a unique shared living experiment, a sorority “residence and clubhouse” in the heart of the city.

Caught between victory and loss, Britain ended up with no single, central World War I monument but a series of monuments, rituals, and ceremonies to respond to the war. These evolved in a strikingly ad hoc way, as ministers, religious leaders, poets, journalists, and ordinary citizens weighed in—among them Percy FitzPatrick, a prominent South African author and politician.

Virginia Woolf’s life, and her writing, were deeply, indelibly marked by World War I. But before Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, before the war was even over, she and her husband Leonard worked side by side to produce a physical memorial to Leonard’s youngest brother Cecil, killed in 1917 at the battle of Cambrai just after he turned 30.

The pleasure of the advice column is at odds with its premise. It makes no practical sense to write to a newspaper for advice on an urgent problem, given the days and weeks that will elapse between the questioner sending a letter and the columnist publishing a response. But the draw of the advice column is not really about the questioner getting a timely answer; it’s about readers’ voyeurism and moral theorizing.

A Very English Scandal, the new three-part series from writer Russell T. Davies and director Stephen Frears, is a wild tale of politics, ambition, sex, mental illness, attempted murder, and virulent homophobia. It’s also pretty much a true story.

When you’ve made it in New York City, how do you make sure the world knows it? There is only so much desirable Manhattan ground to build on, and mansions are a lot of work. The rest of the city is pressing not only uptown but up into the sky, and you’ve spent a fortune not to live in anyone else’s shadow. So up you must go, as well. But into what?