Henry

This year’s winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been revealed, celebrating the best books of the year. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of the award-winning books for your reading pleasure. The winners were announced at ceremony on Friday.

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes 2012 Winners:

Biography: Robert A. Caro / The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson(Knopf)
Current Interest

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her eras most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like and When Harry Met Sally, died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71. The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said. In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation werent expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of

Children are pulled in many directions today; at least, their attention is. They are occupied by MP3 players, gaming systems, computers, cell phones, handheld electronic games and other digital technologies. And yes, children still play old-fashioned board games. They also attend school, compete in team sports, and participate in community and extracurricular activities. With all of these outlets occupying children’s time, how are books faring? With an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 new children’s titles released each year, children’s book publishers are concerned with how their books can compete for young readers’ attention with the thousands of titles already in the market, according to Ron

Rich Gold modestly takes the podium at BookTech West. His keynote task is challenging. The mission? To talk about reading. With this crowd of book publishers and manufacturers, it may have seemed a little like preaching to the converted. Gold is the director of the artists-in-residence program, RED (Research in Experimental Docu-ments) for Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and three years ago, he was asked to choose a research project topic and enact a technological revolution around it. Gold chose reading. Rich in meaning Gold recalls that when he unveiled his chosen quest, his colleagues were a little underwhelmed. A few sarcastically asked,