Skylight Books Podcast Series

JESSICA CHIARELLA reads from her debut novel AND AGAIN with KAROLINA WACLAWIAK

And Again (Touchstone)

Jessica Chiarella’s inventive debut novel And Again marks the launch of a bold new literary voice. In the spirit of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, And Again follows four present-day terminally ill patients who are granted the opportunity to abandon their diseased bodies and adopt healthy replicas through a revolutionary pilot program: “SUBlife.” 

Free of scars, blemishes, and any trace of their diseases, the bodies themselves are perfect, but patients Hannah, David, Connie, and Linda soon discover that the fresh start they’ve been given has its flaws. Without their old bodies, they’ve lost their physical identities—muscle memory, mature taste buds, impulse control. 

Hannah, an artistic prodigy, has to relearn how to hold a brush; David, a Congressman, grapples with his controlling old destructive habits; Connie, an actress whose stunning looks are restored after a protracted illness, tries to navigate an industry obsessed with physical beauty; and Linda, who spent eight years paralyzed after a car accident, now struggles to reconnect with a family that seems to have built a new life without her. The four meet weekly in a Chicago hospital to discuss the challenges of reentering their old lives, careers, and relationships. But when SUBlife comes up for FDA approval, they must all confront the implications their new lives now hold for the future of medicine.

Told in alternating perspectives, And Again deftly combines realist and speculative fiction to explore what it means to start life afresh and to ask the question: how much of our identities rest not just in our minds, but in our hearts and bodies?

Praise for And Again

“In Chiarella’s contemplative first novel, four protagonists give astonishing first-person accounts of their participation in a medical experiment called SUBlife, wherein their disease-ridden bodies have been swapped for freshly minted clones…Chiarella’s entrancing prose and fully fleshed characters should garner widespread, enthusiastic praise.”—Booklist

“Chiarella's engaging writing creates so many haunting moments that readers will find themselves moving quickly through the story, as well as awaiting her next work. This is a novel about what it means to be human, with all the flaws and vulnerabilities that implies, and whether we can ever truly begin again.”—Kirkus 

“And Again was continually haunting me…Jessica Chiarella has so much talent.” —National Book Award Finalist Susan Straight

Jessica Chiarella grew up in the Chicago area and has a master’s in writing and publishing from DePaul University. She is currently a student in the University of California, Riverside’s Creative Writing MFA program.

Karolina Waclawiak received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and The Believer (where she is also an editor). She lives in Los Angeles.

JULIA CLAIBORNE JOHNSON reads from her novel BE FRANK WITH ME

Be Frank with Me (William Morrow & Company)

Be Frank with Me, with its eccentric characters in self-imposed isolation, their grand but sometimes misunderstood gestures, and idiosyncratic approach to coping with the ordinary world, captures the intensity of growing up just a little bit different than everybody else. Or, in Frank’s case, a lot different from everybody else. Already called “magnificently poignant, funny, and wholly original” (Library Journal), Kirkus summed it up as “the curious case of where’d you go, Salinger.” It’s a spot-on description, as Be Frank with Me has the poignant quirks of Haddon, the effervescent spirit of Semple and, at its center, a Salingeresque reclusive literary legend. 

That legend is the enigmatic M.M. “Mimi” Banning, holed up in her Bel Air mansion for the quarter-century since her classic but still-best-selling first novel’s publication. Broke after losing her savings in a Ponzi scheme, Mimi now must write her long-awaited second book. To ensure the timely delivery of her long-anticipated manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi outlines the parametes for an acceptable assistant: No Ivy-Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids. Quiet, discreet, sane.

When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put to work right away—as a full-time companion to Mimi’s son, Frank. The kid, Alice discovers, sees world in a very different—but completely fascinating—way. With little to entertain them but the sound of Mimi typing behind closed doors, Alice and her eccentric companion decide to embark on a series of giddy adventures in the greater world of Los Angeles. To occupy her imagination her downtime, Alice becomes consumed with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and itinerant male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and whether Mimi will ever finish that book.

Full of heart and countless “only-in-Hollywood” moments, but with a deep ring of truth, Be Frank with Me is a captivating and unconventional story of an unusual mother and son, and the intrepid young woman who finds herself irresistibly pulled into their unforgettable world.

Praise for Be Frank with Me

“Johnson’s magnificently poignant, funny, and wholly original debut goes beyond page-turner status. Readers will race to the next sentence. And the next. Her charming, flawed, quietly courageous characters, each wonderfully different, demand a second reading while we impatiently await the author’s second work.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Witty dialogue, irresistible characters, and a touch of mystery make this sweet debut about a quirky Hollywood family an enjoyable page-turner.” —Booklist

“The curious incident of where’d you go, Salinger: clever, sweet.”—Kirkus Reviews

“What a charmer this book is! From the very first page, I fell hard for Frank, an adorable oddball with anamazing brain, a wardrobe to die for, and a lonely fragility that pierced my heart again and again. When I finished, I wished him and his makeshift, off-beat family well—and immediately began missing him.”—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times-bestselling author of Love Walked In and The Precious One

“There’s so much to love about this novel: the hilarious one-liners, the unforgettable characters, the unexpected moments of tenderness and all the funny, sad, poignant twists and turns this story takes. I lost myself in these pages and you will too.”—John Searles, nationally-bestselling author of Help for the Haunted

“Beautifully written, brimming with insight, mystery, and benevolent wit, Julia Johnson had me gripped from the first chapter to the final page of Be Frank with Me.”—Julia Sweeney, author, actress, comedienne

“Be Frank with Me is complex, nuanced, detailed and profound. In other words, funny, in the best, most resonant way. Read it with both eyes because it will delight both the thinky and the feely parts of your brain.” —Dave Foley, comedian and, technically, an actor

“Julia Claiborne Johnson has written an effervescent gem of a novel, expertly balancing on a literary tightrope between lighthearted and heartbreaking. Be Frank with Me is peopled by characters at once utterly unique, and entirely authentic. I may re-read this book just to spend more time with Frank.” —Laura Nicole Diamond, author of Shelter Us

“BE FRANK WITH ME is that rare, hits-me-just-right book I am always hoping to find when browsing: Witty, but never cutesy. Deeply felt, but never sentimental. Peopled with deeply flawed, fully realized characters I cared about. It pulled me in so strongly that I found myself reading in that whole body way that is a rare and luminous pleasure after childhood, so immersed that the phone and the dogs and the kids had to work to pull me out. I loved every minute I spent in Julia Claiborne Johnson’s glass house with her cast of dedicated stone-throwers. This one is special—don’t miss it.”—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times-bestselling author of The Opposite of Everyone

“Julia Claiborne Johnson has struck gold in creating Frank Banning—a one-of-a-kind exasperating, witty and endearing nine-year-old genius who functions as the beating heart of this marvelous book.”—Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members

Julia Claiborne Johnson worked at Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines before marrying and moving to Los Angeles, where she lives with her comedy-writer husband and their two children.

PSEUDONYMOUS BOSCH reads from his new novel BAD LUCK

Bad Luck (Little Brown and Company)

Clay doesn’t believe in dragons. Then again, there was a time when he didn’t believe in magic, either...

Earth Ranch isn’t what it seems. Ostensibly a camp for juvenile delinquents, it’s actually a camp for young magicians. Clay is just getting used to the place when a young castaway, Brett, washes up on the shores of the remote volcanic island that is the camp’s home. Clay offers help and swears secrecy, only to discover that Brett may be a part of a nefarious scheme to capture a dragon rumored to be hidden on the island. Could this dragon be real? Is Brett who he says he is? Can Clay and his friends get to the bottom of the island’s secrets in time to save it from a scorching end? 

Danger, adventure, mischief, mystery, old foes, new friends, and a certain clever narrator make bestselling author Pseudonymous Bosch's sequel to Bad Magic, Bad Luck, completely irresistible. 

Pseudonymous Bosch is the infamously anonymous author of the bestselling Secret Series. Despite rumors to the contrary, his books are not actually written by his pet rabbit, Quiche; the rabbit is merely his typist.

BRIAN EVENSON reads from his collection of stories A COLLAPSE OF HORSES, in conversation with MAGGIE NELSON

A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press)

A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary–the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. Minimalist literary horror, Evenson’s stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and everyday life. 

Praise for Brian Evenson:

“Brian Evenson is one of the treaures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”--Jonathan Lethem

“One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today.”--The Believer

“The bloodfests that sometimes ensue are metaphoric as miniature Francis Bacons. . . [Evenson’s] fiction is repulsive but more ‘moral’ that anything than comes from Bret Ellis or A. M. Homes.”--The Stranger

“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”--George Saunders

Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrativeprecipice,” Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York’s top books. The recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

Maggie Nelson is the author of The Argonauts, as well as an American poet, art critic, lyric essayist and nonfiction author of books such as The Red Parts: A Memoir, The Art of Cruelty, Bluets, and Jane: A Murder. The Art of Cruelty was a 2011 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Jane: A Murderwas a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.

Nelson has taught at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Wesleyan University, and the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute; she currently teaches in the CalArts MFA writing program. She was awarded an Arts Writers grant in 2007 from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2011, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.

ROB ROBERGE discusses his book LIAR with DAVID ULIN

Liar: A Memoir (Crown Publishing)

Indie darling and novelist Rob Roberge makes his major-house debut with Liar: A Memoir, an intense, darkly funny book of addiction and mental illness, relapse, recovery, and the nature of memory. Liar is Roberge’s desperate attempt to document his life when faced with the prospect of forgetting it after years of hard living and too frequent concussions suffered during substance-induced blackouts.

In an effort to preserve his identity (for what is identity if not memories?), Roberge records the most formative moments of his life—ranging from the brutal murder of his childhood girlfriend, to a diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, to singing and playing guitar with his band the Urinals as an opening act for famed indie band Yo La Tengo at The Fillmore in San Francisco. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile are the stories that lie at the heart of who we think we are.

As Liar twists and turns through Roberge’s life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll on its head. Darkly comic and brutally frank, it offers a remarkable portrait of a down-and-out existence scattered across the country, from musicians’ crashpads around Boston, to seedy bars in Florida popular with sideshow freaks, to a painful moment of reckoning in the scorched Wonder Valley desert of California. As Roberge struggles to keep his demons from destroying the good things he has built in his better moments, he is forced to acknowledge the increasingly blurred line between the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves. 

A reflection on memory and an intimate look at recovery and redemption, Liar delves into the complications of the healing process and the challenges faced in trying to rebuild a life, all while Roberge infuses the narrative with candor and humor.Liar is a memoir that will provoke and engage.

Praise for Liar

“Roberge’s writing is both drop-dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart.” —Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild

“Roberge is a modern master of the down-and-out-that-just-got-worse. His stories are dark and thrilling. They take hold of the reader like some bad, bracing dope and don’t let go until you feel the full measure of your own humanity. Prose this carefully wrought and true puts him in the tradition of Bukowski, Hammett, and Denis Johnson.” —Steve Almond

“Roberge is the bard of the rough road, singer of the long haul, both lyrical and ferociously realistic.”—Janet Fitch

“Roberge’s words bring it all back to life for me—the sounds, the sights, the smells, and the tastes. And it’s not always a pretty ride. I like that Roberge never takes the easy way out.” —Steve Wynn, The Dream Syndicate

Rob Roberge is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Cost of Living. He is a core faculty member at UCR/Palm Desert’s MFA program and has taught at several universities, including the University of California’s MFA programs at the main campuses of Riverside, Antioch, and Los Angeles, and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. His work has been featured in Penthouse, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, and his stories have been widely anthologized. Roberge also plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles–based band the Urinals.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. His novel, Ear to the Ground, will be published in April. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

BEN RATLIFF discusses his book EVERY SONG EVER with ALEX ROSS

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

​Since 1996 Ben Ratliff has been writing about music with passion and insight for The New York Times. Over the course of two decades he has been expanding his readers’ horizons and turning them on to new sounds. At the same time, the past 20 years have brought an utterly transformative revolution in the distribution and consumption of those sounds. In 1996—three years before Napster, five years before the first iPod—listeners were largely constrained in what they could hear by their geographical, financial, and historical situations. For many of us today, those constraints have largely disappeared. It has never been so easy to hear so much for so little. Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is Ben Ratliff’s bracing, impassioned response to this unprecedented situation. It is a music appreciation guide for the cloud era.

As Ratliff sees things, there are both negative and positive aspects to the current landscape. Services like Spotify and Pandora can monitor our listening practices, feeding us back more of what we already know we like. At their worst, these services encourage musical comfort-listening, a surrender of agency to algorithms. On the flipside, we’re living in an age of unprecedented access, rendering old categories and hierarchies of taste obsolete. As Ratliff asserts, a huge wealth of music is out there for all of us to experience—all we need to do is listen better than the algorithms are listening to us.

And so, in a series of beautifully composed and originally conceived chapters, Ratliff gives us a refreshingly new framework for engaging with music—one that largely ignores genre categorizations or a composer’s intent and instead places the listener at center stage. Ratliff focuses on various qualities of music that we can listen for, exploring aural attributes like repetition or speed, as well as more subjective emotions and ideas such as sadness or “the perfect moment.” Along the way, Ratliff touches on a dizzying array of music, drawing surprising connections from João Gilberto and Frank Sinatra to Aaliyah and Erik Satie (and that’s just one chapter).

Ratliff has a lot of smart things to say about the changes of the past 20 years, and there is no doubt Every Song Ever will spur debate about our relationship to music, and its role as both culture and commodity. But at its heart, this book is a celebration—of the possibilities for pleasure within music, of the diversity of recorded sound, and of the act of listening at a time when listeners have never had it so good.

Praise for Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“In this insightful guide to contemporary music appreciation, genre limitations are off the table . . . Ratliff’s scholarship shines; there’s a lot to be said for a book on music appreciation that can draw apt parallels between DJ Screw and Bernstein’s rendition of Mahler’s ninth symphony.”—Publishers Weekly

“It’s fascinating how Ratliff can bring a fresh ear to such familiar music . . . and how inviting he makes some little-known music sound . . . [Every Song Ever] makes unlikely connections that will encourage music fans to listen beyond categorical distinctions and comfort zones.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Every Song Ever jumps into the grand adventure of losing yourself in music, at a time when the technology boundaries have blown wide open. Ratliff brilliantly makes connections between the arcane and the everyday, pointing to sounds you’ve never heard—as well as finding new pleasures in music you thought you’d already used up.” —Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape and Turn Around Bright Eyes

“Everyone knows we live in an age when most people can listen to anything, anytime, anywhere. Whether that’s depressing or mind-expanding depends ultimately on what kind of attention we pay. Ben Ratliff has the gifts to help us surf this wave of sonic information, not stand there mumbling at it in a grumpy-grampy way. After all, it’s presumably not going to end until the electrical grid does.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“This is a book about one exemplary listener’s love for how many ways music can mean, set in sentences as forceful and subtle as Elvin Jones. Slayer and Shostakovich, Ali Akbar Khan and the Allman Brothers—none of them are the same once Ben Ratliff’s ears get through with them. And your ears won’t be the same once you get through Every Song Ever.”—Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996. Every Song Ever is his fourth book, followingThe Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). He lives with his wife and two sons in the Bronx.

Alex Ross has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the essay collection Listen to This, and the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.

OBJECT LESSONS reading with EVAN KINDLEY, BRIAN THILL, ARIANA KELLY, and ALISON KINNEY

Object Lessons is an essay and book series published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from sardines to silence, juniper berries to jumper cables. Joining us will be four authors reading from their respective Object Lessons books. 

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Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out in doctor's offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? InQuestionnaire, Evan Kindley investigates the history of “the form as form,” from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. In the process, he uncovers surprising connections between disparate fields (literature and science, psychology and business, journalism and surveillance) and asks fundamental questions about the questions we ask ourselves. 

Evan Kindley is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a visiting assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College. 

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We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood​ explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results. 

Alison Kinney is the author of Hood. Her writing has appeared online at The Paris Review Daily, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, and other publications.

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Waste focuses on those objects that most fundamentally shape our lives, and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, digital detritus, video game graveyards, space garbage, and more. But waste, as the book argues, is not merely the immense field of our discarded objects; it's also the concept we employ in an effort to define and understand our individual relationships to time and desire. Waste is every object, plus time.

Brian Thill is the author of Waste (Bloomsbury), recently named by Jeff VanderMeer in Electric Literature as one of the best books of the year. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, The Guardian, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. He's currently in the early stages of writing his next two books.

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The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/phone-booth-9781628924121/#sthash.AQ4IIoOU....

Ariana Kelly works as a writer and teacher in Los Angeles. She is currently completing a book of essays about health and place.

MARC WEINGARTEN discusses his new book THIRSTY, with NINA REVOYR

Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and the Real Chinatown (Rare Bird Books)

Thirsty is an exploration of Los Angeles’ storied history and its fraught relationship with water. As a city on the make since the early 20th century, Los Angeles’ resources fought hard to keep up with its unchecked growth. The city’s water chief William Mulholland built an aqueduct to grab water over two hundred miles away in Owens Valley, but it wasn’t enough. Where Marc Reiser’s seminal 1986 book Cadillac Desert started, Marc Weingarten’s Thirsty continues. Weingarten delivers a gripping tale of Los Angeles’ epic battles for water, the larger-than life characters that shaped a city’s destiny, and the man-made tragedy that killed four hundred and forever changed the way water would be harnessed and allocated.

Marc Weingarten is the author of Station to Station and The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight; the co-editor of the anthologies Yes is the Answer and Here She Comes Now, and producer of the films God Bless Ozzy Osbourne and The Other One. He lives in Malibu.,CA.

Nina Revoyr is the author of five novels, including The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize;Southland, a Los Angeles Times best seller and “Best Book” of 2003; Wingshooters, which won an Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award and was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”; and most recently, Lost Canyon. Revoyr lives and works in Los Angeles. 

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS reads from her debut novel ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY

All the Birds in the Sky (Tor Books)

From the editor-in-chief of io9.com, a stunning novel about the end of the world--and the beginning of our future.

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families. But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.
A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.

Praise for All the Birds in the Sky

"The very short list of novels that dare to traffic as freely in the uncanny and wondrous as in big ideas, and to create an entire, consistent, myth-ridden alternate world that is still unmistakably our own, all while breaking the reader's heart into the bargain--I think of masterpieces like The Lathe of Heaven; Cloud Atlas; Little, Big—has just been extended by one.”—Michael Chabon

Charlie Jane Anders is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, the extraordinarily popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, the mainstream Choirboy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was subsequently picked up for development into a NBC television series. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones and many other outlets.

JAKE GERHARDT reads from his young adult novel ME & MIRANDA MULLALY

Me & Miranda Mullaly (Viking)

Most of us remember our first crush, but do we ever think about our classmates that may have been crushing on that very same person? Jake Gerhardt’s debut, Me & Miranda Mullaly, tells the hilarious story of three (awkward) races for one (oblivious) girl’s heart. 

There's Sam, the class clown; Duke, the intellectual; and Chollie, the athlete. And the object of their collective affection? The enigmatic Miranda Mullaly—the girl who smiles like she means it, the girl who makes Christmas truly magic when she sings, the girl who...barely realizes her admirers exist! But nothing will stop the guys from doing everything they can to get the girl—not even their inevitable confrontation. Told in alternating perspectives, Me & Miranda Mullaly is a comedy of errors where small misunderstandings lead to big laughs, and beneath the humor, every attempt to win Miranda's favor becomes a compelling look at the larger world of each guy’s life. 

Jake Gerhardt was born and raised in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. He attended Elkins Park Middle School, where he played football and basketball, ran track, performed in the school musical, and was a member of the student council. He also found time to attend many school dances, in constant pursuit of various Miranda Mullalys. Since graduating from West Chester University, he has worked as a teacher, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.

BETTE ADRIAANSE discusses her debut novel RUS LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, with GALLAGHER LAWSON

Rus Like Everyone Else (Unnamed Press)

Rus is a creature of habit. His mother left him an apartment and a debit card, from which he withdraws money everyday to purchase a drink at Starbucks. Until Rus is told by a government agency that his apartment is illegal and that he owes taxes. Lots of taxes. Rus panics and his cash is stolen by a smooth talking Russian submarine captain.  Meanwhile, as Rus capitulates to the demands of society and finds an office job with the help of a micro-managing new girlfriend, the neighborhood's local postal worker surveys the lives of its other residents with an omniscient eye: Mrs. Blue compulsively steals hand creams; a secretary struggles to make conversation (much less human connections); a delivery man desperately seeks to make a name for himself but struggles with his immigrant status; and an aging bachelor, hampered by extreme paranoia, will finally have the chance to meet the Queen (if he can just hold it together long enough). 

With Rus at the head of this lonely ensemble's search for meaning in a complicated and alienating world, debut novelistBette Adriaanse weaves together intersecting lives to create a mini-epic, one that charts a hidden resistance to corporate sameness and artificial relationships.

Praise for Rus Like Everyone Else

"This is a great book. I thought this was the freshest, most unusual writing I'd come across in years. Bette will win awards; but meanwhile continue to write and create and freak me out with her ingenuity and a voice that is unique, a gift."--Marti Leimbach, author of Dying Young and The Man From Saigon 

"Bette Adriaanse has concocted a blend of Rear Window and Under Milk Wood, a world in which various inhabitants of a neighborhood are not only observed but intimately known by a girl with a blonde ponytail whose task is to deliver post. The episodes are brief, short hooks in the narrative to increase the mystery. The whole is elegant and tantalizing."--George Szirtes, T.S. Eliot Prize winning author of Reel 

"In the lives of Rus and the other 'ordinary' characters around him, Bette Adriaanse has created something quite extraordinary. Drawing on the best European traditions of the fabulous and the absurd, she has invented a shimmering narrative world which is entirely her own - hallucinatory, dream-like and utterly real. Told with verve and wit, warmth and deep pathos, Rus Like Everyone Else is a highly original contemporary fable for our times: Adriaanse's is a singular new vision and voice and one we are surely going to hear more of." Jane Draycott, author of The Night Tree 

"Everyday life gets a dose of unruly energy in Adriaanse's debut novel, which follows a cluster of eccentric characters throughout the neighborhood they all share. Adriaanse takes a hard look at the people we see and ignore most days--the postal workers, the secretaries, the strange old men next door--and imagines rich inner lives for them all, creating a book at once rowdy and sympathetic, an absurd panorama that somehow seems truer the stranger it gets. Rus Like Everyone Else isn't like anything else."--Benjamin Rybeck, Marketing Director at Brazos Bookstore

Bette Adriaanse is a writer and a visual artist. She was born in Amsterdam in 1984. Bette graduated from the Image and Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2008 and received her M.A. in creative writing from Oxford University in 2010. She has published fiction in magazines for literature and philosophy, and she exhibits her visual work internationally. Rus Like Everyone Else is her first novel. She lives in London.

Gallagher Lawson is a graduate of U.C. Riverside's Palm Desert M.F.A. program. He has worked as a travel writer and technical writer, and plays classical piano. He lives in Los Angeles. The Paper Man is his first novel. 

FEMINIST PRESS presents THE FEMINIST UTOPIA PROJECT

The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (Feminist Press)

Alexandra Brodsky, editor at Feministing and co-founder of Know Your IX, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, playwright and New York Times bestselling author of My Little Red Book, bring together feminist thinkers, writers, and artists for a groundbreaking anthology that asks: what would a feminist utopia look like? The book features contributions from feminist heroes Janet Mock, Melissa Harris-Perry, Sheila Heti, Jill Soloway, and many more. 

Join us for an evening with five contributors to FUP: Jill Soloway, Abigail Carney, Richard Espinoza, Cindy OK, Yumi Sakugawa, and William Schlesinger.

Jill Soloway is the creator of Amazon Studios' Transparent, which won a Golden Globe for best TV series and an Emmy award for her directing in 2015. Jill won the US Dramatic Directing Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival for her first feature, Afternoon Delight. She is the author of the memoir Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, and the cofounder of Wifey.tv, a video network for women.

Abigail Carney is a writer from Ohio. Her plays have been produced at the Secret Theatre, the Young Playwrights Festival, NYC Fringe, the Yale Playwrights’ Festival, the New School for Drama, and in Sitka, Alaska.

Richard Espinosa is from New Jersey and is currently a student at the Yale School of Art studying graphic design. Richard is the current director of YAMP—the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, a localized narrative-based alumni-led initiative to honor the lives of the deceased students, faculty, and staff affiliated with Yale.

Cindy OK is  a public high school teacher in Los Angeles. Just one year out of college, Ok teaches physics, computer science, and math to roughly two hundred students per day in seven different classes.

Yumi Sakugawa is an Ignatz Award–nominated comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with Youand Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe. Her comics have also appeared in Bitch, the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, the Rumpus, the Believer, and other publications. A graduate of the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in Los Angeles.

William Schlesinger completed a Fulbright fellowship in the politics of HIV/AIDS, immigration, and integration in Germany. In the future, he hopes to pursue an MD/PhD in medical anthropology to combine practicing medicine as a primary care physician while conducting ethnographic research on health inequalities.

ARAM SAROYAN reads from his newest novel STILL NIGHT IN L.A.

Still Night in L.A. (Three Rooms Press)

Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he’s embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town’s modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds.

Praise for Still Night in L.A.

“Aram Saroyan nurses the accelerator in a deceptively laconic way, channeling the faultless ratiocination of Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and Paul Cain (Seven Slayers). Still Night in L.A. keeps still until, at just the right moment, he floors it.”--Barry Gifford, author, Wild at Heart

“Readers of California-dream-correction fiction may have their particular favourites -- Day of the Locust, The Slide Area, I Should Have Stayed Home, My Face for the World To See, The Long Goodbye. Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. brings long experience and practiced narrative craft to earn his place in this line.”--Tom Clark, author, The Exile of Celine

“Still Night in L.A. is a novel where the magic is all in the language, in the evocation of the detective’s incongruously sweet and gentle personality, and in his astoundingly accurate takes on a world where kids have a hard time growing up before they hit middle age, and where the hard thing is not to become a movie star but to get someone to remember your name.”--Gerald Nicosia, author, Home to War: The Untold Story of the Vietnam Veterans Movement

“Still Night in L.A. moves mysteriously through the late American day and ends up inscrutably in the lost hour of the early morning. In between, crazy humans reign supreme. Aram Saroyan’s prose is as elegant as emeralds and ice.”--G. A. Hausman, author, The Mythology of Horses

“Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. cruises the mean streets and trendy brunch boites of Los Angeles, this city of angels and psychopaths. His shamus Michael Shepard is a Marlowe for our digital times.”--Richard Setlowe, author, The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell

"A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking."--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

Aram Saroyan is the author of the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage, as well as many other books of prose and poetry. His Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is featured in the documentary film One Quick Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac at Big Sur and his comments appear in the oral biographies George Being George: George Plimpton’s Life and Salinger. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, painter Gailyn Saroyan.

STEPHANIE FORD presents her new collection of poetry ALL PILGRIM with MELISSA BRODER

All Pilgrim (Four Way Books)

All Pilgrim charts our vanishing into the modern landscape, mapping both the terror and the ecstatic vision of belonging to the world. Tuned to the intermingling of peril, banality, and beauty, each poem could be thought of as a way station: a site not for reverence or relief, but for seeing and pondering the dilemmas in which we find ourselves living. Restless in its search for illumination, the voice in these poems is at turns mordant, vulnerable, and rapturous—hungry for something to sing about, but unable to ignore the signs of crisis.

Praise for All Pilgrims

“Immanence is nothing more or less than the actual condition of things as they address the open mind and appeal to the open heart. In All Pilgrim, Stephanie Ford conducts a truly remarkable concert of immanence, noting musics I'd never thought to hear. These poems belong unmistakably to our moment. Tender to every nuance, yet undeceived, these poems are amazing.”—Donald Revell

“‘To do a sly kindness and do it / without sleeping.’ The poems of All Pilgrim empty me out alongside American freeways scattered with the refuse that bedecks Stephanie Ford’s sorrowful, resolute observations. A harm has been done. The unexpected intelligence of these poems, their fractious yet layered nuances that repeatedly push the possibilities of sense against the sensual, announce a terrific and very new poetry. I honor this work and urge you, Reader, to take part.”—Cate Marvin

Stephanie Ford is the author of All Pilgrim. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tin House, Harvard Review, Fence, and many other journals. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is a long-time resident of Los Angeles, where she currently teaches poetry with Writing Workshops Los Angeles.

Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including the forthcoming Last Sext and Scarecrone. Poems appear in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, et al. Her first book of essays,So Sad Today, will be out in March 2016 from Grand Central. She lives in Venice, CA.

STEVE TOLTZ reads from his new novel QUICKSAND with ANTON MONSTED

Quicksand (Simon & Schuster)

A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends. 

Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship. With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world--including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the "Guardian" First Book Award--Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse.

Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.

Praise for Quicksand:

“Steve Toltz possesses an imagination that knows no limits. His work is mordant, prophetic, and very funny. He is a true original.” —Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum

“Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you almost breathless.  There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest.”—Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names

“Quicksand is one of the smartest, funniest, angriest novels I have ever read. But it's also a surprisingly touching meditation on friendship and family, on art and God, on law-breaking and law enforcement. … A brilliant piece of fiction, from a novelist who so clearly sees the outsized pleasures and terrors of our troubled time.”  —Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England and The Happiest People in the World

“Quicksand crackles with such intensity it made me turn the pages with a harder snap, lean closer, want to gnaw the words.  This is a novel of sneak-attack seriousness, so funny it fools you into letting down your guard—then knocks you upside the head with intense intelligence, probing thought, raw pain. For all the wit and wisdom in this book, all the pleasures contained in its raucous, furious, fearless pursuit of truths, the greatest thrill comes when it strikes you that you’ve never read anything quite like it before, that you just might have stumbled—startlingly, unsettlingly—on something close to genius in the writing of Steve Toltz.”
—Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea

“Steve Toltz is a verbal magician and lunatic storyteller. Every page of this novel bursts with ideas and humor and pathos and incisive riffs that perfectly express the grand absurdities of the irrational universe, along with the smaller ones of a very particular friendship. Quicksand is the work of a writer in full command of his many outsized gifts, not least of which is his humanity.”—Teddy Wayne, Whiting Award-winning author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Steve Toltz was born in Sydney and graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

After working on Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1996, Anton Monsted went on to co-found Luhrmann’s music company, Bazmark Music, and served as Music Supervisor and Executive Music Producer on Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge! He was Executive Producer of Luhrmann’s 2004 campaign for Chanel No.5 starring Nicole Kidman, and was the Co-Producer and Executive Music Supervisor for Luhrmann’s Australia and The Great Gatsby. He is currently Senior Vice President of Music at Twentieth Century Fox, and, notably, has been Steve Toltz's friend since they met in a bowling alley in 1988.