Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Broken Sleep (Other Press)
Spanning 1940s to 2020s America and told with contagious vivacity, Broken Sleep knits the stories of four distinctly memorable characters into an indelible portrait of American culture that is at once sweeping, irreverent, and heartbreaking. When everyman Moses Teumer discovers that he has an aggressive form of leukemia, his search for a donor who can save him sets off a wild chain of events as he discovers that the woman who raised him is not his birth mother. Encompassing a Pynchon-esque saga of rock music, sex, drugs, art, and politics, this novel is an unforgettable examination of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in the name of commandeering our own destinies.
After his diagnosis, Moses is led to his real mother, Salome Savant, a rebellious avant-garde artist who has spent her life in and out of a mental health facility. Salome’s son and Moses’s half-brother is Alchemy Savant, the mercurial front man of the world-renowned rock band The Insatiables. As Moses’s fate intertwines with Salome and Alchemy’s, the shocking secrets of his lineage and his Jewish identity are revealed. As Moses begins to lose his grip on the life he once thought he had, Alchemy abandons music to launch a political campaign to revolutionize 2020s America. Joining these characters is Ambitious Mindswallow, aka Ricky McFinn, who journeys from juvenile delinquency in Queens to being The Insatiables’ bassist and Alchemy’s Sancho Panza, along with an unforgettable constellation of artists, musicians, movie stars, and creatives who populate the twisted terrain of the Teumer and Savant family’s pasts and futures.
As each of Bauman’s characters comes closer to understanding their identity and the truth about their origins, the reader is gripped by this portrait of life lived to the fullest. A colorful and provocative tale that takes the reader from Los Angeles to NYC to London to Brazil, Broken Sleep stuns with its propulsive energy and its hilarious and poignant observations about myth-making, the secrets we keep from one another, and how we come to terms with our pasts.
Praise for Broken Sleep
“Such a pleasure to plunge into this joyous kaleidoscope of a novel, a multi-voiced tumbling chorus of outrageous characters, hidden parenthood, secrets and discoveries, the gritty outré art world of the 1970s, rockers and mad visionaries and a man named Moses who just wants to live his life when illness forces him to open up the closed door of his family’s mysterious past. I haven’t seen a book with such energy and joy and sweeping delights since The World According to Garp. Bauman’s novel is a tour de force.” —Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander
“Consuming multitudes of novels before it and after, Bruce Bauman’s flipbook-epic spectacularly shuffles voice and memory—a careening travelogue on psychic terrains of fate, art, sex, madness, history, philosophy, rock ’n’ roll, the personal political, and laws of identity for which no statute of limitations can exist. This is raging, inspiration-jacked literary insomnia at the deepest hour of our brilliant dreaming.” —Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You and Zeroville
“Broken Sleep is a stunning, original, unpredictable novel, with a mix of wild voices and riveting, driving stories. I love all the characters… The world that Bauman imagines is chilling and vivid, and there is an abundance of wisdom throughout the book, with startling insights on every page. The novel is a brilliant success—brave, wonderfully eccentric, utterly confident and engrossing.” —Joanna Scott, author of De Potter’s Grand Tour
“Broken Sleep is an unabashedly Big Think book that refuses to be categorized. On the surface it’s a roller coaster, jetting forward with ideas/observations on everything from avant-garde art to rock ’n’ roll renown to history and philosophy. Yet beneath the surface it is also a warm-hearted exploration of the deep messiness of families. Of parents, present and absent, and their children. Of siblings and spouses and volitional families of friends and bandmates. It’s a simultaneously poignant and exhilarating ride.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of After
“Broken Sleep could be considered the author’s great American retort to Stephen Dedalus’s declaration in Joyce’s Ulyssesthat ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’...Bauman’s philosophical, humorous, and compelling storytelling ponders many different riddles of exile—personal, political, artistic with an always acute eye and an unfailingly intense empathy.” —Anthony Miller, critic and author
"Bruce Bauman is one of the most engaging and engaged writers and thinkers that I know." —Rebecca Goldstein, author ofPlato at the Googleplex
Bruce Bauman is the author of the novel And the Word Was. Among his awards are a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship in Literature, a Durfee Foundation grant, and a UNESCO/Aschberg Fellowship. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, BOMB, Bookforum, and numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Bauman is an instructor in the CalArts MFA Writing Program and Critical Studies Department and has been Senior Editor of Black Clock literary magazine since its inception in 2003. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Suzan Woodruff.
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Calf (Soft Skull Press)
Mighty, Mighty (Soft Skull Press)
Join us tonight for a fantastic evening from one of our favorite publishers Soft Skull Press!
The year was 1981. The US was entering a deep recession, Russia was our enemy, and John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan shocked the nation. It was also the year author Andrea Kleine learned her close childhood friend had been violently murdered by her socialite mother, Leslie DeVeau. Both events took place in Washington, DC. Hinckley and Deveau were both sent to St. Elizabeth's hospital, guilty by reason of insanity. It was there that they met, and later became lovers. These two real-life, and ultimately converging events inspired Klein's jaw-dropping, spine-tingling novel, CALF. Made up of dual narratives and told over the course of one year, Kleine's account follows a fictionalized John Hinkley in the lead-up to the assassination attempt, and Tammy, older sister to Steffi, the best friend of DeVeau's daughter, Kirin. Part Are You There God, It's Me Margaret and part Taxi Driver, this creepy, unsettling, and absolutely addictive novel shines a light on two terrible events, providing an unflinching depiction of violence, both intimate and sensational.
Praise for Calf
"In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr.'s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan rocked the nation. And Andrea Kleine's gripping novel,Calf will rock readers. This is a wonderfully unsettling book about love, loss, and unlikely connections." -- Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
Wally Rudolph's Mighty, Mighty is a modern day fable set in a crumbling metropolis riddled with urban poverty and violence.
Dirty apartments, tattoo parlors, food kitchens - these are the markers of home for the struggling young adults around Chicago. Stefy is an artist at Ghost Town, the local tattoo shop, trying to provide for her younger sister Amanda and their ailing grandfather. Amanda is hoping for something better, seeking to escape a past riddled with addiction and an abusive relationship with Georgie. When he confronts her one drunken night at a dive bar, the situation turns violent: Amanda barely escapes with her life but Georgie lies dead on the bathroom floor. This one mistake puts the two sisters in the crosshairs of Georgie's father, a twisted, corrupt ex-cop now out for revenge over the murder of his son. His quest for vengeance will make the neighborhoods of Chicago tremble, leaving no one untouched.
Mighty, Mighty is a harsh and realistic look at the struggle of two families desperately trying to get out from under the heavy boot of violence and poverty. Like the works of Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, the novel is a startling and accurate portrait of contemporary urban life.
Andrea Kleine is a writer and performance artist whose work has spanned dance, theater, film, literature, and interdisciplinary projects. She has received five MacDowell Colony fellowships and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship award. Her writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Everyday Genius, NYFA Current, and on her blog, The Dancers Will Win. Calf is her first novel.
Wally Rudolph is the author of the novels Mighty, Mighty (2015) and Four Corners (2014). His fiction has been published in Milk Money, Lines+Stars, The Brooklyner, and others. A graduate of The Second City Conservatory in Chicago, he now resides with his family in Los Angeles. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films and TV shows including Sons of Anarchy, Hawaii 5-0, Street Kings, and Bang Bang.
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Please join us for a special night with three authors from one of our favorite local presses, What Books Press.
Earth Still
Playful and slyly original, Earth Still tells the story of Patricia, a museum curator and the mother of a young son, who falls for a new neighbor, Rennie, in the aftermath of an alien spaceship’s unexplained landing in present day Los Angeles. The presence of the ship, along with the apparent absence of a pilot, precipitates a social crisis, while Patricia’s affair with the mysterious Rennie creates its own tensions. Referencing art house film directors Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, Italian Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti, and classic science fiction movies, Earth Still is a transfiguring love story, a meditation on the interrelationship of science fiction and visual art, and a riveting fantasy about our obsession with aliens.
Annette Leddy is a writer, critic, and curator. In 2009 she was awarded an arts writer grant from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation and in 2013 was a resident at Montalvo Center for the Arts. Currently she is the New York Collector for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Leddy’s fiction has appeared in Quarterly West and Quarry. Four of her short stories were performed as part of the New Short Fiction series in Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn.
--
The Shortest Farewells Are the Best
"The Shortest Farewells Are the Best is a clever and hilarious tour de force. With lines culled from dozens of noir films ranging from the famous to the obscure, Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky have fashioned a brilliant literary collage that is as entertaining as it is thought provoking. I haven’t the foggiest notion of how they came up with the idea for this book, but I’m certainly glad their off-kilter muse paid them a visit."—Tom Hazuka, editor of Flash Fiction Funny
"Never was there a world where people talked like that—precise, salty, bracingly honest—and maybe that’s darn too bad. Meanwhile, we can console ourselves with Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky’s poems composed of come-ons, smack-downs, threats and enticements spoken by actual B-movie actors. These might read like madhouse non sequitors, but crazy funny, or they might resolve themselves into conversations that seem to make darkly paradoxal sense. The wicked fun the two have with this 40s and 50s dialogue proves what some of us have always suspected, Noir is Poetry’s evil twin. Evil, that is, in a good way."—Suzanne Lummis, author of the poetry collection Open 24 Hours
Gail Wronsky is the author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty, a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Award,The Love-talkers, Again the Gemini are in the Orchard, and Dogland. Her translation of Alicia Partnoy's poems Volando Bajito has been published by Red Hen, and she is the coauthor with Molly Bendall of two books of "cowgirl" poetry: Calamity and Belle, A Cowgirl Correspondence and Dear Calamity, Love Belle. Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, a chapbook of poems about India where she lived for several months in 2006, has been published by Hollyridge Press.
Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels: the Loop Trilogy: Loop’s Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, andLoop’s End; Elena of the Stars; Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac; My Mistress Humanity; The Heart of Mars; and the current Coyote O’Donohughe’s History of Texas. He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan. In the fall of 2012 he published his second book of Magic Journalism, West of Eden: A Life in 21st Century Los Angeles. His novel Ten Thousand Heavens was published in 2013 by Whitepoint Press.
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (Ecco Press)
Eileen’s poetry and fiction is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers peer into existent places—notably the East Village, where she lives—but also lifts them into dreams, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.
I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet’s previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine her sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles’ stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide open lens into a radical life.
Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Grant and a 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. She lives in New York.
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Sunday Jan 17, 2016
Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics (Rizzoli International)
“Do you like scary movies?” If your answer is yes, and you are ready to come face-to-face with some of the most terrifying vampires, werewolves, ghouls, zombies, psychos (and other creatures that go bump in the night), you will want to check out Michael Mallory’s Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics. This terrifyingly illustrated volume of the greatest, scariest, and most influential fright films is sure to be become the definitive book on the subject.
Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics chronicles a century’s worth of cinematic terror: from such silent masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to such Golden Era classics as Dracula (1931) and richly colored shockers as House of Wax (1953) to such groundbreaking independent thrillers as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Mallory goes on to spotlight modern horrors from the devilish trio of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen(1976) to the terrifying residences of The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1980). With Alien (1979), we learned that in space no one can hear you scream and no one wanted to go into the water with Jaws (1975). And, how can we forget the likes of Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, and Jigsaw?
Behind-the-scenes anecdotes, trivia, and photos complete the story of these essential motion pictures. Mallory’s tome is not simply a catalog of horror films; it is a study of where the genre came from, how it has progressed, and what motion pictures have contributed to that evolution, set against a backdrop of cultural history. Anyone who has ever loved to be scared by a truly great masterpiece of terror—or even a film that strives for nothing more than to provide the audience with spooky, corny fun—will find Essential Horror Movies a veritable scream!
Michael Mallory is an internationally-recognized authority on film history and animation. He has written six non-fiction books on popular culture subjects, as well as some 600 magazine and newspaper articles. His books include Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, and X-Men: The Characters and Their Universe, and he has contributed to other volumes including Animation Art, The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons, and the Walt’s Peopleseries and co-authored the memoirs of animation legend Iwao Takamoto. Mallory has been interviewed by many news outlets, including E! Entertainment Television, BBC Radio, CBC Radio, The New York Times, TV Guide, and USA Today.
Sunday Jan 10, 2016
Sunday Jan 10, 2016
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed (Abrams Books)
JUST ANNOUNCED: Former editor for Grantland, Chris Ryan will be joining the panel this evening.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed takes readers on a journey that begins in 1979, widely regarded as the moment rap became recognized as part of the cultural and musical landscape, and comes right up to the present. Shea Serrano deftly pays homage to the most important song of each year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music from artists backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles among its major players both personal and professional. Covering East Coast and West Coast, famous rapper feuds, chart toppers, and show stoppers, The Rap Year Book is an in-depth look at the most influential genre of music to come out of the last generation.
Complete with infographics, lyric maps, hilarious and informative footnotes, portraits of the artists, and short essays by other prominent music writers, The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created.
Shea Serrano is an award-winning writer, author, and illustrator. His first book, Bun B’s Rap Coloring and Activity Book, was widely praised, receiving accolades from Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, MTV, and more. Currently, he is a staff writer for Grantland.
Devon Maloney is a journalist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York magazine, WIRED, GQ, Grantland, Vice, Nylon, Out, Billboard, Pitchfork, MTV, the Village Voice and Spin.
Sean Fennessey is a deputy editor at Grantland. He lives in Los Angeles with 10,000 CDs he ignores.
Sunday Dec 20, 2015
Sunday Dec 20, 2015
Eyes Full of Empty (Unnamed Press)
From France’s hottest young crime writer, comes a hardboiled noir with the pace of a Chandler novel and the French Algerian literary legacy of Camus.
Idir is not your typical Parisian detective. The son of an Algerian immigrant who made good, Idir’s middle class upbringing places him at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to his rich friends from university, while his street smarts make him just intimidating enough to handle the secret problems of Paris’s elite. Put another way, Idir knows precisely how much pressure to exert on behalf of his wealthy clients, while keeping things low profile. That is, until Oscar Crumley, a powerful media mogul, hires Idir to find his missing younger half-brother, Thibaut. Sent on a wild goose chase through highs and lows of the Paris underground, Idir must navigate upper crust treachery and entrenched criminal rings to discover the truth. Echoing the headlong impulsiveness of Chandler’s Marlowe, and deftly translated by Edward Gauvin, Eyes Full of Emptyintroduces us to an entirely new kind of Parisian mystery.
Jěrěmie Guez was born in Paris in 1988 and has been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels, Balanceě dans les cordes and Paris la unit, were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respectively. Eyes Full of Empty is the highly anticipated first English translation of Jěrěmie Guez’s work. He lives in Paris.
Edward Gauvin is a prolific translator and the recipient of numerous awards. His work has been featured most recent ly inThe New York Times, Tin House, Best European Fiction 2014, PEN America, Words Without Borders, and Gigantic, among others. He lives in San Jose, CA.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz,and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. His newest novel, Perfidia, is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II.
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Please join us this afternoon as alumni and students in the University of California, Riverside Master of Fine Arts writing program come together and read from their work. Readers include David Campos, Deb Durham, Andy Holt, Ruth Nolan, Nicole Olweean and Alex Ratanapratum.
David Campos is the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press 2015), winner of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Huizache, The Packinghouse Review, Verdad, and Miramar, among other journals and magazines. He is a Canto Mundo Fellow and lives in Fresno, California.
Deb Durham immigrated to California from the untamed cornfields of Southern Indiana for the sole purpose of writing nonfiction creatively. Her abiding obsessions include teen romance novels of the 1950's and her chihuahua Rockhudson.
Andy Holt was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. As a result, his blood is mostly lemon-lime Gatorade. He is currently working on a crime novel set in the wilds of suburban Florida.
Ruth Nolan, M.F.A., M.A., is a Mojave Desert/Coachella Valley-based author and professor whose writing is grounded in the California desert, where she’s lived for most of her life, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert. She is editor of the critically-acclaimed anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts, published by Heyday Books, Berkeley. She is writing a memoir about her work as a wildland firefighter in the California Desert District and Western U.S. for the BLM and USFS in the 1980’s. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in Rattling Wall, Short Fiction Los Angeles (Red Hen Press 2016), New California Writing (Heyday), Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Sierra Club Desert Report, the Desert Oracle and many other publications. She blogs about life in the desert for KCET Artbound Los Angeles, Inlandia Literary Journeys, and Heyday, and leads writing and
literature seminars at the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park and for many other colleges and organizations. She is a 2014 graduate of the UCR Low Residency Creative Writing and Creative Writing for the Performing Arts program.
Nicole Olweean is a second year poet in UCR's MFA program. She is originally from Michigan, where many of the people and places that inspire her work still remain. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge and Bird's Thumb.
Alex Ratanapratum is a Thai/American poet from Orange County, California. He received his B.A.s from CSULB in English Literature and Creative Writing and is in his second year at UCR. He has been a workshop leader for Cambodia's first literary journal Nou Hach in Phnom Penh, and his poems have been published in Rip Rap, Nou Hach, and The Asian American Literary Review.
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Scrapper (Soho Press)
In Scrapper, Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again.
Praise for Scrapper:
"Scrapper is an offering to the grim phoenix rising out of the ashes of Industrial America—elegy, eulogy, and prophesy. Readers: listen and attend!"—Aaron Gwyn, author of Wynne's War and Dog on the Cross
"Scrapper is a meditative, moody work of art. It's about love and violence, hope and ruin, a kind of superhero story for adults. Matt Bell is truly gifted and his latest offers more proof that he's a writer we should all be reading."—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
"Matt Bell adds his song to the poetry inherent in the image of the abandoned city. Here, in his fierce second novel,Scrapper, Bell mines Detroit, the zone, with Kelly, an unforgettably rendered ruin, an 'unaccomodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal,' who yet amazes with his capacity to love." —Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends
"In the imaginative, mysterious, and beautiful Scrapper, Matt Bell delves into the complexity of ruins: the wider American ruins and the local personal ruins. This is an evocative novel that lingers over what has been abandoned and shows us how the places we inhabit shape who we are and how we are."—Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
"A fearless and harrowing meditation on the ruination and transformation of cities and of people; but amid loss and destruction, Bell finds a strain of piercing hope. This is an extraordinary book."—Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven
"Like the very best novels, Matt Bell's dark and suspenseful Scrapper works on so many levels that it's difficult to describe in just a few words, but what I can tell you is that it's ultimately about love and death, and that people will still be reading it when all of America, not just Detroit, is crumbling under the weight of its mistakes." —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time
Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She lives in Los Angeles.
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
New Slow City: Living Simply in the World's Fastest City (New World Library)
Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village. Downshifting to a two-day workweek, Powers explores the viability of Slow Food and Slow Money, technology fasts and urban sanctuaries. Discovering a colorful cast of New Yorkers attempting to resist the culture of Total Work, Powers offers an inspiring exploration for anyone trying to make urban life more people- and planet-friendly.
Today's event is being co-sponsored by Slow Food LA, CRSP Institute for Urban Ecovillages at Los Angeles Eco-Village, Slow Food USA, and World Policy Institute.
Praise for New Slow City
"All of us sense that we could live better, kinder lives. But Bill Powers has the courage to try to change and then -- ever so artfully, without the slightest wag of a finger -- to show us how."-- Colin Beavan, author of No Impact Man
"The reenchantment of urban life -- so compromised by the accelerated techno-industrial culture -- takes work, and William Powers saves us a lot of time on the learning curve. Hats off, especially to his courage."-- Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face clothing company and the Foundation for Deep Ecology
"In the City That Never Sleeps, in a place whose very definition of success is 'bigger, better, faster, ' Powers attempts to lead a more deliberate life, to paraphrase Thoreau....Will his time spent off the grid in rural North Carolina prepare him for downsizing to a 340-square-foot micro apartment in the heart of Manhattan? With his new bride? Who soon becomes pregnant? Analyzing what it means to 'want what we want, ' Powers turns his ecologically contemplative gaze both inward and outward, to matters both personal and global, to reconnect with those increasingly rare pockets of peace, tranquility, and mindfulness that will allow him to appreciate life at a slower pace and from a simpler vantage point. One need not live in a city to savor Powers' languid, albeit unconventional, advocacy for an unhurried pace."-- Booklist
"Is it possible to live an earth-friendly and spiritually fulfilling life in the middle of the bustle of a big city? William Powers and his wife are the perfect people to find out. I found that the tales of the remarkable people they meet, the challenges they confront, and the beauty and joy they discover nourished a part of my soul that rarely gets fed. Never preachy, always entertaining, and often wise, this is a splendid book for anyone wanting to bring more heart and joy to urban living."-- John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America
"New Slow City tells an inspiring story. At the outset, Powers's goal -- to live slowly and mindfully in frantic Manhattan -- seems quixotic in the extreme. But one should never underestimate a determined idealist. This delightfully provocative book will speak to anyone trying to build a balanced life in our crazy world. I first came to know Powers's work because we coincidentally share the same name. Now I read him to question my own assumptions and reimagine how to live."-- William Powers, New York Times-best-selling author of Hamlet's BlackBerry
"An inspirational quest to slow down, simplify, and find serenity in a supercharged city. William Powers discovers the joy in less stuff, less work, and less speed!"-- Francine Jay, author of The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide
"Powers's message, honed through his experiences living in poor countries like Bolivia, shows that we can live simply, sustainably, and happily. And I know it's real because I stayed with him in his tiny place. But Powers also slows down -- at least as important as scaling down -- and learns to savor the little daily miracles of life. This message may be just what you need to change your own life for the better. Don't miss it!"-- John de Graaf, coauthor of the New York Times bestsellerAffluenza and What's the Economy For, Anyway? and executive director of Take Back Your Time
"Powers places the difficult decisions we face on a daily basis into an equation that should provide us all with an optimistic glimpse of how to slow our lives down. Read New Slow City and watch as its insights pepper your daily decisions while you navigate the folly of the fast life."-- Richard McCarthy, executive director of Slow Food USA
William Powers has worked for two decades in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and North America. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the community components of a project in the Bolivian Amazon that won a 2003 prize for environmental innovation from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and on NPR’s Fresh Air. Powers has worked at the World Bank and holds international relations degrees from Brown and Georgetown. A third-generation New Yorker, Powers has also spent two decades exploring the American culture of speed and its alternatives in some fifty countries around the world. He has covered the subject in his four books and written about it in the Washington Post and the Atlantic. Powers is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and an adjunct faculty member at New York University. His website is www.williampowersbooks.com.
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Wednesday Dec 09, 2015
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (University of California Press)
In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city’s built environment, a meditation on the author’s relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking. Exploring Los Angeles through the soles of his feet, Ulin gets at the experience of its street life, drawing from urban theory, pop culture, and literature. For readers interested in the culture of Los Angeles, this book offers a pointed look beneath the surface in order to see, and engage with, the city on its own terms.
"Sidewalking is a profound and poetic book. It is a meditation not only on the strange and marvelous nature of Los Angeles but also on the nature of history, memory, and community itself. This is nonfiction writing at its very best."—Susan Orlean, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller The Orchid Thief
“Sidewalking will cement David Ulin’s already well-deserved reputation. Like a good, long walk, his book is an exercise in patience, observation, and reflection. At the end of the journey, you feel you’ve been someplace—and you feel illuminated and enlightened."
—Héctor Tobar, author of the New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free
"An inspiring challenge to engage with urban life, Sidewalking raises unprejudiced questions about city and 'city'—the built environment and the individual’s own experience of it. L.A.'s famous sprawl and very human neighborhoods, its uneasy meld of public and private spaces, its legendary gridlock, its organic and artificial environments, all feature in what is no less than the teasing out of a new and nuanced interpretation of the nature of 'urbanity’ itself."
—Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander
"I see this book as a benign remake of [the movie] Falling Down. In this version, Michael Douglas, after abandoning his car, has the good fortune to bump into David Ulin, who not only offers to accompany him on his journey home but also suggests a few extensive detours. In the course of their walking-talk tour, Douglas learns that he has the good fortune to reside in a fascinating city and goes on to live a fulfilled—and inquiring—life."
—Geoff Dyer, author of numerous books, including But Beautiful, winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize
"There are so many lines in this book I’d like to have at my fingertips, so many rational, logical, wholly original arguments for why Los Angeles is deeper and more soulful than it can seem, that I almost wish I could keep it in my pocket for whenever an outsider coughs up the usual hoary insults. As it is, Sidewalking has taken up welcome and necessary residence in my mind. And, to be precise, David Ulin doesn’t argue on behalf of his adopted city. He observes, he challenges, he shows his abiding and complicated love for the place. Which is only right, since when it comes to L.A.’s status as the most surprising and mysterious city in America, there is no argument." —Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
"In this brief but engaging book, the author chronicles his wanderings through the streets and his conversations with friends, entrepreneurs, and officials, and he makes it clear that he has read every book and seen every movie on his subject. Those who know the city will have the advantage, but Ulin casts his net widely, so most readers will enjoy his observations of Los Angeles in literary and popular art as well as his thoughtful personal views."—Kirkus
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Sunday Nov 29, 2015
Sunday Nov 29, 2015
Moon Death Valley National Park (Avalon Publishing)
Los Angeles resident Jenna Blough reveals the must-see sights and best-kept secrets of Death Valley National Park, from the popular Amargosa Range to the remote expanses of the Saline and Eureka Valleys. Blough offers handpicked suggestions for experiencing the full diversity of Death Valley including “Best Hikes,” “Best Scenic Four-Wheel Drives,” and “Hidden Springs and Desert Oases.” Packed with insider tips and advice on topics such as timing a visit and handling the extreme temperatures, Moon Death Valley National Park gives travelers the tools they need to create a more personal and memorable experience.
Jenna Blough grew up on the edge of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, where she was allowed to run wild, instilling a love of the outdoors early on. After her parents dragged her and her sister on a cross-country road trip of epic proportions—visiting American classics like Wall Drug in South Dakota, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and the Petrified Forest in Arizona—she developed an equal appreciation for Wild West roadside attractions, historic sites, and wilderness. Jenna eventually found the California desert to be her geographic soul mate. Drawn by the austere beauty of Death Valley, she is fascinated by its cultural history, ghost towns, native sites, and the Mojave’s shifting landscape. Jenna received an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, an MA in English literature, and an MFA in writing. Moon Death Valley is her first travel book. When she’s not living out of a tent, Jenna resides in Los Angeles with her husband Ryan Jones.
Visit her blog at whentheroadends.com.
Monday Nov 23, 2015
Monday Nov 23, 2015
I Can Give You Anything But Love (Rizzoli ExLibris)
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of the most brilliant critics writing in America today, Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.
With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this his most personal book yet the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
Gary Indiana is a novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, filmmaker, and artist. Hailed by The Guardian as "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche," and by The Observer as "one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last thirty years," he is also the author of a recent memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love.
Monday Nov 16, 2015
Monday Nov 16, 2015
The Mark and the Void (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
Presented in partnership with The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mark and the Void is Murray's newest and funniest novel yet.
What links the Investment Bank of Torabundo, www.myhotswaitress.com (yes, with an "s," don't ask), an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a six-year-old boy with the unfortunate name of Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent?
The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original breakout hit, Skippy Dies. While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But Paul's plan is not what it seems--and neither is Claude's employer, the Investment Bank of Torabundo, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until--well, you can probably guess how that shakes out.
The Mark and the Void is the funniest novel ever written about the recent financial crisis, and a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art and commerce.
Praise for Paul Murray
“Darkly comic . . . thoughtful and entertaining. [Murray’s] creative energy sends the book in many directions . . . but the same may be said of Dickens, with whom [he] also shares wit, sympathy, and a purposeful sense of mischief.”—Kirkus Review (starred review)
“Murray’s 2010 novel Skippy Dies earned the Irishman worldwide acclaim as a writer enviably adept at both raucous humor and bittersweet truth. His new novel, perhaps the funniest thing to come out of the Irish economic collapse, follows Claude, a low-level bank employee who, while his employers drive the country steadily towards ruin, falls in with a struggling novelist intent on making Claude’s life worthy of telling.”—The Millions, “Most Anticipated” Fall 2015 book preview
“Murray’s latest quickly takes off. . . The author displays much of the quick wit of his popular previous novel, but this effort also boasts a more modernist slant, with ever-blurring lines between art imitating life and life imitating art for the characters. The result is another page-turner with smarts, an absurdist riff on our economic follies, one that leaves the impression that it’s not all so far-fetched, after all.”—Publishers Weekly
“Brilliant.”—Ben Paynter, Los Angeles Review of Books
“[Murray] is brilliant at creating a cast of banking types at once hilarious and awful. For long periods, The Mark and the Voidis a boisterous office sitcom, just as Skippy Dies was a knockabout school comedy. But, as with Skippy Dies, his ambitions go well beyond slapstick. There’s no disguising his anger at the banks and politicians who have brought Ireland to this position. But neither is this a simple diatribe. Murray refuses to excuse the Irish people for letting this happen to themselves . . . In Murray’s complicated narrative, not all bankers are bad, just as not all artists are virtuous . . . From the opening page [Murray] advertises a plot that, for all its real-world relevance, is impossible to take seriously. And yet, such is his panache that through the chaos emerges a tale of complex truths and authentic humanity.”—Neil O’Sullivan, The Financial Times
“This is it, at last: a fine work of fiction set in the present day that kicks all those asses that so urgently need to be kicked. Twenty pages in and I wanted to tour the nation’s nine remaining bookshops with Murray and shout from the back: ‘That’s what I’m talking about, people; this is what a real novel should be. Fuck all that ersatz pap you’ve been sold; read this! …The Mark and the Void is the best novel I have reviewed by someone of my own generation writing on this side of the Atlantic. It’s unabashedly intelligent, it’s ingeniously inventive, it’s richly alive in language, thought and character; it’s read-the-whole-page-again funny, and hugely entertaining and philosophically engaged with the great questions and circumstances of our times. It is the answer to the question of what a serious and seriously talented contemporary novelist should be writing.”—Edward Docx, The Guardian, Observer
“Serious and impressive. Fans of Skippy Dies and Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, will not be surprised to hear that it is very funny, its author’s fluency spooling out in joke after joke . . . There is profundity beyond the laughter, not least in the book’s depiction of the bleak emptying-out of a country. . . Murray does an excellent job of exposing the Ponzi schemes and endless recapitalisations of failing institutions as the simple confidence tricks gussied up by gobbledegook that they really are.”—Alex Clark, The Guardian
“It was a tall order for Paul Murray to come up with a follow-up to 2010’s Skippy Dies, a novel which I declared in my review to be the funniest book I had read all year. . . I should not have worried about Murray maintaining form. The Mark and the Void is a hilarious, blade-sharp satire on the banking system featuring vividly drawn characters, and it is, once again, the funniest book I’ve read so far this year. . . A joy from start to finish.”—Leyla Sanai, The Independent
“Murray is masterful at capturing the cynicism of the banking world, the way its staffers, who keep landlines “for when I need to find my mobile”, indulge in vacuous bar-room chat like debates on “whether a boom or a bust is a better time to be rich”. His prose is peppered with enlightened digressions on art, anthropology, geometry, philosophy and the origins of the corporation in Europe’s Middle Ages. There are moments while reading The Mark and the Void that are almost dizzying, as Murray careers down the side-street of another subplot. In the hands of a novelist with a heavier touch, they could be confounding, but not in Murray’s. He’s written a notable satirical novel. Few can nail the mystifying ways of the Irish as precisely.”—Richard Fitzpatrick, The Irish Examiner
“Murray masterfully builds the tale into an extravagant and rewarding whole, with genuine hilarity floating atop the sobering currents of social commentary. This is a gamble that more than pays off.”—Laurie Grassi, The Toronto Star
“With The Mark and the Void, Paul Murray has done the impossible: he’s written a novel about international finance that not only isn’t dense, boring, or annoyingly didactic, but is, in fact, a hilarious page-turner with a beating human heart that nonetheless provides real insight into the ongoing economic crisis. To put all of these elements in a pot and alchemically produce something so brilliant and cohesively constructed, one might assume Paul Murray is a witch. I think he’s simply a great writer.”—Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen and What’s Important Is Feeling
“People always tell me, ‘If you love Paul Murray so much, why don't you marry him?’ Now thanks to recent legislation in his native Ireland, I finally can. And so should you, reader. The Mark and the Void not only monetizes the death of the novel, but makes us believe in its resurrection. Praise the Lord for Paul Murray's big brain and tender heart.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure
“The Mark and the Void is Murray’s best book yet—a wildly ambitious, state-of-the-nation novel, and a scabrously funny yet deeply humane satire on the continuing fall-out of the biggest financial crisis in 75 years.”—The Bookseller
Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies, his second novel, was long-listed for the Booker prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, the Paris Review, Tin House, The Believer, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Monday Nov 16, 2015
Monday Nov 16, 2015
I Am No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance (BOA Editions / Underdays (Univ of Notre Dame Press)
Please join us this evening as two terrific poets share their latest collections.
I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance by Rick Bursky is a collection of poems that assign new meanings to the people and things of the past. The book moves in three sections through a fantastic landscape that maps human fragility. The poems in the first section speak to matters of the heart--intimacy and loss--punctuated by lovers who leave. The second section is comprised of prose poems chronicling misadventures and conspiracies: Russian spies on Wilshire Boulevard, artichokes that mate for life, and secret photographs of God. Finally, the third section pans out from individual experience, hosting the collective in fable-like reflections. Together, the poems in Extravagance mark with fragile acceptance the surreal extravagance of being alive
Rick Bursky is the author of Death Obscura (Sarabande Books, 2010) and The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. He lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer's Program.
Underdays by Martin Ott is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. Within many of the poems, a second voice, expressed in italic, hints at an opposing force under the surface, or multiple voices in conversation with his older and younger selves his Underdays to chart a path forward. What results is a poetic heteroglossia expressing the richness of a complex world.
Martin Ott is the author of the poetry book Underdays, Sandeen Prize winner, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Martin served as an interrogator in the U.S. Army and moved to Los Angeles to attend the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. His previous full length poetry collections are Captive, De Novo Prize winner, C&R Press, and Poets' Guide to America and Yankee Broadcast Network, coauthored with John F. Buckley, Brooklyn Arts Press. His two books of fiction are the novel The Interrogator's Notebook (currently being pitched as a TV pilot) and his short story collection,Interrogations, Fomite Press, 2016. His blog for writers, Writeliving, has been read by more than 25,000 people in 100+ countries.