The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

Georges Borchardt is president and co-founder of the New York literary agency Georges Borchardt Inc. The agency represents 200 authors including a number of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners.

T.C. Boyle is the author of more than 20 works of fiction, including The Tortilla Curtain and Talk Talk. His short stories regularly appear in major magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and the Paris Review. Boyle's most recent novel is The Women: A Novel.