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Archive for September 2010

Contributors to the PEN Emerging Voices Anthology hosted by Janet Fitch

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 24th, 2010

Strange Cargo

Nine alumni of the PEN Center USA's Emerging Voices fellowship who have been published in the Emerging Voices anthology Strange Cargo will read from their selected pieces. Janet Fitch (White Oleander), who wrote the anthology's introduction, will introduce the event!

PEN Center USA's Emerging Voices is a literary fellowship program that aims to provide new writers, who lack access, with the tools they will need to launch a professional writing career.  Over the course of the year, each Emerging Voices fellow participates in a professional mentorship hosted Q&A evenings with prominent local authors, a series of Master classes focused on genre, and two public readings.

Janet Fitch is the author of the novels White Oleander and Paint It Black.  Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Los Angeles Noir, Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Black Warrior Review. She teaches creative writing in the MPW program at USC, and is writing a novel set during the Russian Revolution.

Natashia Deón is a 2010 Bread Loaf Scholarship recipient, PEN Emerging Voice Fellow, Highlights Foundation Scholarship recipient, and award-winning screenwriter. She is penning her debut novel, The Spinning Wheel, a dark journey of three outcast women who, on the eve of the Civil War, are fighting the battle of their lives. Deón is a California native, practicing attorney and the first generation of her family to be born outside of East Tallassee, Alabama, since American slavery.

Cara Chow was a 2001 Emerging Voices Fellow. "Fall Dance" will appear in the novel Bitter Melon in Spring 2011, published by Egmont USA. A native of Hong Kong, Cara grew up in the Richmond District of San Francisco, where this story is set. She currently resides in the Los Angeles area with her husband and son.

Davin Malasarn is a writer and microbiologist from Sherman Oaks, California. In 2008, he was an Emerging Voices Fellow, a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest, and first runner-up in Opium Magazine’s 500-Word Memoir Contest. Two of his stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His fiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Night Train and other literary journals, and he is a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Pireeni Sundaralingam was born in Sri Lanka and is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (U. Arkansas Press, 2010).  Her own poetry has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today and The Progressive, as well as anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008). It has been translated into 5 languages and been published in Sweden, Ireland, England, and the U.S. A cognitive scientist, Pireeni has given papers on the connections between the human brain and poetry at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (San Francisco) and Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). She was a PEN Emerging Voice Fellow in 2003.

Monica Carter lives in Los Angeles, California, and is a 2010 Emerging Voices Fellow. Her work will appear in the forthcoming issue of Pale House II. She is the owner and curator of her own website dedicated to international literature, Salonica World Lit. Ms. Carter is working on Eating the Apple, a psychological novel set in Manhattan in the 1930s.

Marytza Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California. She was a 2008 Emerging Voices Fellow and received a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in 2010. She writes about Latinas, voodoo and animals. http://www.marytzakrubio.com/

Sylvia Sukop writes about art, faith, community and other good causes. Her memoir, Difficult Light, is framed by the death of her youngest brother, Alex, within an intentional community of organic farmers in eastern Washington. The memoir grew out of an extensive series of photographs documenting Alex’s life and is in part a meditation on the role of photography in intimacy, loss and memory. A first-generation American raised in rural Pennsylvania, Sylvia is a graduate of Bucknell University and of NYU/International Center of Photography, and a grateful recipient of the 2009 Emerging Voices Fellowship. She co-founded MMIX Los Angeles Writers with her EV cohort in 2009, and is a contributing writer to Flaunt and Exposure magazines and the political blog The Huffington Post.

Denise Uyehara is an award-winning performance artist, writer and playwright whose work has been presented in London, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vancouver and across the United States. She is the recipient of numerous recognitions of excellence which include a mid-career COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and funding from the Asian Cultural Council. She was also a Poets & Writers "Writer on Site" at Beyond Baroque and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her book Maps of City and Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara (Kaya Press) documents her recent works. Uyehara is a frequent lecturer at the University of California, Irvine and a founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls. She was a PEN Emerging Voice Fellow in 1999. http://www.deniseuyehara.com/.

Mehnaz Turner was born in Pakistan and raised in southern California. She was a 2009 Emerging Voices Fellow.  Her poems have appeared in: The Journal of Pakistan Studies, Cahoots Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Asia Writes and An Anthology of California Poets. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection, Tongue-tied: A Memoir in Poems.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 12, 2010.

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James Riley

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 24th, 2010

Half Upon a Time (Aladdin)

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A launch party for local author James Riley and his first book, a middle readers fairy tale mash-up called Half Upon a Time!

Life's no fairy tale for Jack. After all, his father's been missing ever since that incident with the beanstalk and the giant, and his grandfather keeps pushing him to get out and find a princess to rescue. Who'd want to rescue a snobby, entitled princess anyway? Especially one that falls out of the sky wearing a shirt that says "Punk Princess," and still denies she's royalty. In fact, May doesn't even believe in magic. Yeah, what's that about? May does need help though -- a huntsman is chasing her, her grandmother has been kidnapped, and Jack thinks it's all because of the Wicked Queen . . . mostly because May's grandmother might just be the long-lost Snow White. Jack and May's thrillingly hilarious adventure combines all the classic stories -- fractured as a broken magic mirror -- into one epic novel for the ages.

Photo of the author by Maarten de Boer.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 11, 2010,

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Carol Moldaw

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 24th, 2010

So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems by Moldaw (Etruscan Press); Masque by Byrne (Tupelo Press)

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Poet Carol Moldaw will read and sign her recent poetry collection

Carol Moldaw’s most recent book, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems was published in the spring of 2010 by Etruscan Press. She is the author of four other books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through the Window, Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken from the River, as well as a novel, The Widening. Her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. It has also been anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Moldaw lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and daughter. In the spring of 2011 she will be the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 10, 2010.

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Joshua Mohr and Grace Krilanovich

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 20th, 2010

Termite Parade by Mohr; The Orange Eats Creeps by Krilanovich (both published by Two Dollar Radio)

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Joshua Mohr, whose last novel (Some Things That Meant the World to Me) was a staff favorite, and Grace Krilanovich, whose debut novel (The Orange Eats Creeps) is the only one to be excerpted twice in Black Clock, will read from and sign their new novels!

Praise for Termite Parade: "The book is similar to Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment': the most crucial action serves as a portal to and wellspring for the various psychologies of its characters. But Mohr's storytelling is so absorbing that Termite Parade does not read like an analytical rumination; if he is examining the very nature of these characters under a microscope, he at least lets the specimens speak for themselves." --San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for The Orange Eats Creeps: "A 'vampire' novel as Celine might have written, with dashes of Blake and Burroughs: hallucinatory, poetic, passionate, excessive, sexually charged, hardcore in all the best senses of the word. Twilight this is not." --Steve Erickson

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Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be excerpted twice in Black Clock.

Joshua Mohr is the author of the novel Some Things that Meant the World to Me, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and one of Oprah Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009. His second novel, the newly released Termite Parade, has been called "No small achievement" by The New York Times Book Review. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as 7×7, the Bay Guardian, Zyzzyva, The Rumpus, Other Voices, the Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades, among many others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing. Please visit him at joshuamohr.net.
THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 9, 2010.

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John Brandon and Salvador Plascencia

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 11th, 2010

Citrus County (McSweeney's) by Brandon; The People of Paper (McSweeney's hardcover, Houghton Mifflin paperback) by Plascencia

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John Brandon will read from and sign his acclaimed new novel, Citrus County, with special guest Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper!

"With Citrus County John Brandon joins the ranks of writers like Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Mary Robison and Tom Drury, writers whose wild flights feel more likely than a heap of what we’ve come to expect from literature, by calmly reminding us that the world is far more startling than most fiction is.”  —New York Times Book Review (cover review)

John Brandon was raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. During the writing of this book he worked at a Frito-Lay warehouse and a Sysco warehouse. During the revising he was the John & Renee Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at University of Mississippi. His favorite recreational activity is watching college football. His first book was Arkansas, a novel.

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Salvador Plascencia is the author of the novel The People of Paper, which was named a best book of the year by San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, and Boldtype. The novel  has been translated into a dozen languages. His fiction and reviews have appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2010, Poets and Writers named Plascencia one of the Fifty of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 8, 2010.

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Neal Pollack

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 11th, 2010

Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude (Harper Perennial)

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Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind the Pollacks and Alternadad, will discuss and sign his new memoir, Stretch.

"Neal Pollack has a well documented history of putting himself into ridiculous positions, but never so literally… If Eat, Pray, Love had been written by a sweaty, aging, male smartass, then that book might be called Stretch, and Elizabeth Gilbert would be named Neal Pollack." —John Hodgman

Neal Pollack is the author of the bestselling memoir Alternadad and several acclaimed books of satirical fiction, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature and the rock-n-roll novel Never Mind The Pollacks. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, Salon.com, Slate.com, and many other magazines and websites. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 7, 2010.

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Mona Simpson

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 4th, 2010

My Hollywood (Knopf)

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Acclaimed Los Angeles novelist Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here) will read from and sign her long-awaited novel My Hollywood -- her first in ten years!

"Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson's latest is well worth the wait." --Publishers Weekly

Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 2, 2010.

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Rick Moody

Posted in literature, skylight books, los angeles, book stores by skylightbooks on September 4th, 2010

The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown & Co.)

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Rick Moody (The Diviners) will read and sign his sprawling new novel -- an "adaptation" of a (fictional) 1960s pulp horror movie. This one's for readers of Vonnegut and Pynchon, and we know there are a lot of you out there!

"The book is entertaining and often poignant, probing the limits of technology, consciousness, and language in the face of grief." --The New Yorker

"The Four Fingers of Death reads [...] like a 700-page Kurt Vonnegut book." --Time Out New York

Rick Moody is the award-winning author of Black Veil, Demonology, The Diviners, Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Right Livelihoods.

Photo of the author by Thatcher Keats.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 1, 2010.

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