Skylight Books Author Reading Series

All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps (Penguin Press)

Dave Isay, founder of the revolutionary oral history project StoryCorps (as heard on NPR's Morning Edition), will discuss and sign his new collection of tales from the project, All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps.

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including two StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps—both New York Times bestsellers.

Photo of the author by Harvey Wang.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS FEBRUARY 3, 2012.

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Make/shift's five-year-anniversary reading, hosted by co-editors/co-publishers Jessica Hoffmann and Daria Yudacufski, will feature readings by contributors Stephanie Abraham, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Jessica Lawless, Christine Petit, and Fabiola Sandoval.

Make/shift magazine creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there’s exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS NOVEMBER 20, 2011.

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The Flame Alphabet (Knopf)

Ben Marcus (Notable American Women) will read and sign his highly anticipated new novel, The Flame Alphabet.

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.

With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents' sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn't so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.

The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus's position in the first rank of American novelists.

"Language kills in Marcus's audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness . . . Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus's novel twists America's quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience." --Publishers Weekly (Starred review and Pick of the week)

"Echoes of Ballard's insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka's terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes--I mean 'our' world--out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic." --Michael Chabon

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City and Maine.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS FEBRUARY 2, 2012

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Students in the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing program will read from their work. The theme will be "Gluttony and Temperance." The student readers will be Josh Jackson, Breene Murphy, Bryce Glen, Barrington Smith Seetachitt, and Michael Du Plessis. USC faculty member and screenwriting guru Syd Field will also read!

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS, NOVEMBER 18, 2011.

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Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House)

Acclaimed anthropologist and author David Graeber Direct Action) visits Skylight Books to discuss and sign his fascinating new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a timely study of the ancient origins of our system of credit and debt.

Praise for David Graeber: "I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world."  —Maurice Bloch, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics

"A scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist who is a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World." —The New York Times

Praise for Debt: The First 5,000 Years: "[A]n engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative political argument, it's a useful corrective to what passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy."  —Jesse Singal, Boston Globe

"Graeber's book is not just thought-provoking, but also exceedingly timely." — Financial Times (London)

David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People, and Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. He has written for Harper's, The Nation, Mute, and The New Left Review.

THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS FEBRUARY 2, 2012.

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