The 30th anniversary of the LA Times Festival of Books was held April 26th and 27th on the University of Southern California campus. With over 550 authors in attendance and spanning almost the entirety of the campus, the LA Times FOB is the largest book fair in California. The Festival  is a free event with two days full of panels with authors, poets, songwriters, and even chefs! Any sort of storytelling media is embraced at the FOB. They have stages for Young Adult books, Children’s books, Comedians, and a Cooking Stage. The campus is organized by booths in colored sections, based on genre, so you can easily find where you want to be in this festival! 

My personal favorite thing to do was attend the panels. My favorite panel was “When the Familiar Turns Fantastical: Masters of Sci-fi and Fantasy Genres.”  Authors V.E. Schwab, Veronica Roth, Lev Grossman, and Amanda Lee Koe came together to discuss all things Sci-Fi and fantasy. As true masters of their crafts, they gave new writers advice and also spoke about inspirations for their books and promoted their new works. When asked by moderator Maryelizabeth Yturralde about the passage of time in stories and revisiting worlds that have had stories already told in them. They spoke about writing about mythology that has been told years before them and making it into their own. V.E. Schwab spoke about revisiting a world she had created before with her new spin-off sequel. “Worlds don’t have a beginning or an end we get to chose as the author where to start and you can rewind and start sooner you could fast forward and start later and you would get a different point of view, you would get a different point of a person’s life” Her newest book is a sequel to her hit trilogy ‘The Shades of Magic’ called “The Fragile Threads of Power” and she delved into how and why she wanted to come back to this world she’s created and what more she has to tell about this world. “I wrote the Shades of Magic trilogy and I chose that time in which to begin, I gave it a mythos, I gave it its own history, its own backstory, I chose its characters and I gave them their backstories, and then I was wondering, okay, but I built a world, multiple worlds, I built magical systems, these things and these people are constantly evolving, what happens if I let time roll forward,… I wanted to write a second series that could explore, could not only be a sequel for those characters from the first series but something for which the original series, Shades of Magic, becomes the prequel for the new characters. So I’m just kind of interested in the way that my characters and my settings and my mythos get to evolve and rot or change for the better.”

Veronica Roth has a new book out called When Amongst Crows that is full of Slavic folklore. She spoke about understanding and getting to know her Polish roots while diving into the folklore she was writing about. “If you were trying to get to know what Slavic identity is like, the folklore is illuminating, it’s pretty brutal, a lot of the folklore is about something unfair happens to a person in life, they perish, and then something even more unfair happens to them afterward…it’s a little harsh but that’s reality” she says her book is in the Frankenstein tradition of ‘who is the real monster?’ described to me as a combination of The Witcher and Wizard of OZ.

I stopped by another panel, “That Was a Close One: Young Adult Thrillers”. Authors, Marie Lu, Marisha Pessl, and K. Ancrum spoke with moderator Kayla Cagan about writing thrillers for a young adult audience and what it means for a book to be ‘Young Adult’ instead of Adult. Marie Lu said that Young adult caters, of course, to a younger audience but also gives a sense of urgency that adult books don’t have. Typical of how a young adult sees the world as constant and immediate, so do young adult books. 

Most of the authors at the FOB were promoting a new recent release or an upcoming release. The ones that I’m most interested in are:

Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E Schwab, which she has said is her biggest and scariest release of her career. Knowing how amazing her other works are, I am very excited for this release. 

When Amongst Crows by Veronica Roth is getting a sequel called To Clutch a Razor. Slavic folklore in Chicago and written by a literary genius like Roth, I am excited to see where this series goes. 

The corruption of Hollis Brown is by K. Ancrum. She says it’s a ghost possession story where he falls in love with the ghost possessing him but the corruption is not the way you think it would be. A blue collar worker in a small town finds himself on a mission to lay the ghost in his body to rest.

Maire Lu’s Stars and Smoke series is about a popstar/spy and the love story he has with his bodyguard/fellow spy. Book two of this series is out but Lu says she wrote them to be a series but fully able to read on its own. Both books have a beginning and an end and are great to read together or apart. 

Blue Graffiti by Calahan Skogman is a romance taking place in a backwater town in Wisconsin. A Wisconsin native himself, Skogman delivers a heartfelt story that many can relate to. 

The Festival of Books has a little of something for everyone no matter what kind of stories you prefer. There were even reporters from the Times there speaking about hot topics in current society and indie bands with amazing music! I encourage you to take a weekend next year and go see everything the festival has to offer. Next year’s dates are April 18th -19th, 2026. Make sure to check the website early to see which of your favorite authors will be there!