This Week in Calendar

The following reviews are scheduled:

Kai Maristed reviews “Tell Me Another Morning: An Autobiographical Novel” by Zdena Berger.

Anthony Day reviews “Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America” by Andrew Ferguson.

Tim Rutten reviews “Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard” by Jack Lynch.

Susan Salter Reynolds reviews “The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal” by Jonathan Mooney.

Scott Martelle reviews “Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” by Joan Druett.

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On the Web

This week at latimes.com/books, Ed Park’s Astral Weeks focuses on Kim Stanley Robinson, whose new novel, “Sixty Days and Counting,” completes the trilogy begun with “Forty Signs of Rain” and “Fifty Degrees Below.” Robinson has created a kind of speculative environmental fiction, detailing an alternate present-day Earth that is in very real danger of becoming submerged. The parallels to our own world are obvious and chilling -- which is, Park notes, what the best science fiction always aspires to offer: a visionary sensibility, at times dystopian, that tells us not so much where we are going as where we are. Also on the Web are our expanded bestsellers lists, as well as comprehensive listings of local literary events.