Skylight Books Podcast Series

KAYA PRESS PRESENTS KAZIM ALI, HARI ALLURI, AND SPECIAL GUEST ABEER Y. HOQUE

Join us for an evening with authors from Kaya Press, the group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas, with special guest Abeer Hoque.

The Secret Room

In Kazim Ali's wildly inventive novel The Secret Room, written as musical score for a string quartet, he asks: How does one create a life of meaning in the face of loneliness and alienation from one’s own family, culture, or even sense of self? During the space of one single day, the lives of four people converge and diverge in ways they themselves may not even measure.

Sonia Chang, a violinist prepares for a concert. Rizwan Syed, a yoga teacher who gives so much to others, makes one last panicked attempt at reconciliation with his own family. Jody Merchant tries to balance a difficult and stressful work-life with a dream she abandoned long ago. Pratap Patel trudges through his life trying to ignore the pain he still feels at old losses.

Just like the real musical quality of a string quartet, these four characters weave in and out of one another's experiences in a raw, fluid song that mimics the hidden lives that exist within us all.

Praise for Kazim Ali

“Here are new organizing principles; to allow ourselves to be organized by music; to be scored. This is a text that suggests not to worry about how to read it. Rather, it extends an invitation to allow the text to happen with us (and/or for us to happen with the text), and this is a Revolutionary Hermeneutics: to open to the experiences of pain and awe. Text as ambient drift we can move through (the same space where healing and magic happens). The way a line divines another, a voice divines a voice, and the emergent conversation, and how this conversation is a hidden music, the music we have been waiting for.”-- Selah Saterstrom, author of Slab and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics

"Kazim Ali has managed to render into the English language the universal inner voice." -- Lucille Clifton

Kazim Ali's books include five volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, Bright Felon, Sky Ward, and All One’s Blue: New and Selected Poems; three novels, Quinn’s Passage, The Disappearance of Seth and Wind Instrument; a collection of short stories, Uncle Sharif’s Life in Music, and three collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence, Fasting for Ramadan and Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine. He has translated books by Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi and Marguerite Duras. He is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College.

The Flayed City

Hari Alluri is an author who, according to U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, “carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape.” In The Flayed City, Alluri gives an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants, imagining the souls that reside in “broom-filled nights”, “skyscrapers for buoys”, and under an “aluminum rising sun”. The charged poems in The Flayed City sweep together “an archipelago song” scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual—of displacement, of family, of violent yet delicate masculinity, of undervalued yet imperative work—Alluri's lines quiver with the poet's distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with “gravity and blood” where “the smell of ants being born surrounds us” and “city lights form constellations // invented to symbolize war.”

Praise for Hari Alluri

“Hari Alluri is Michaux for our time. Which is to say: he is the poet who is able to find myth in our days of sorrow and displacement, when so many lose homes and identities, Hari Alluri offers a new music. When cities are destroyed by fire, Hari Alluri offers lyric fire that heals the heart, that lets theimagination save us. When there is nothing left to say and the page of our drive to stop the pain is brightly-lit and blank, Hari Alluri brings a few words that sing, brings them by the hand, gives them to us—not just words but images, sparks, from which the fire comes, from which whole villages are alive again. This is the poet to live with."-- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa 

[Hari Alluri] carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape; a most rare set of poems—with jazz beat word lines, long-line wisdom and open space scenes where you can widen your eyes, scrape your hands and rush into colliding worlds. Bravo, many bravos!”

Hari Alluri, who immigrated to Vancouver, Coast Salish territories at age twelve, is the author of Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013) and The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016). An award-winning poet, educator, and teaching artist, his work appears widely in anthologies, journals and online venues, including Chautauqua, Poemeleon and Split This Rock. He is a founding editor at Locked Horn Press, where he has co-edited two anthologies, Gendered & Written: Forums on Poetics andRead America(s): An Anthology. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University and, along with the Federico Moramarco Poetry International Teaching Prize, he has received VONA/Voices and Las Dos Brujas fellowships and a National Film Board of Canada grant. Hari currently serves as editor of pacific Review in San Diego, Kumeyaay land.

Photo by Cynthia Dewi Oka

Olive Witch (Harper 360)

In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities, and hanging on to old colonial habits.

Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit university town where the red clay earth, corporal punishment and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents and laid low by academic pressure and a spiraling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider – wherever she is.

Arresting and beautifully written, with poems and weather conditions framing each chapter, Olive Witch is an intimate memoir about taking the long way home.

Praise for Abeer Y. Hoque

“Told with vivid lyricism yet unflinching in its gaze, Abeer Hoque's memoir is the coming-of-age story of migration on three continents, and about the pain, rupture, and redemptive possibilities of displacement.”
--Tahmima Anam, author of The Bones of Grace

"An unflinching yet luminously beautiful take on family, race, sex and the treachery of memory. Don’t be fooled by the frangipani beauty of Abeer Hoque’s prose. Its razor-sharp edges can draw blood."--Sandip Roy, author of Don't Let Him Know

Abeer Y. Hoque is a Bangladeshi-American writer and photographer. Her first book of fiction, The Lovers and the Leavers, was published by HarperCollins to critical acclaim. She also has a book of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home. She lives in New York City. 

PATTY YUMI COTTRELL DISCUSSES HER NEW BOOK SORRY TO DISRUPT THE PEACE WITH AMINA CAIN

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's Books)

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, child-less, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.

According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.

A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett, and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.

Paise for Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

“Grief takes an unnerving path through a singular mind in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Beckett fans will find a familiar, but Patty Yumi Cottrell’s voice is her very own.”—Amelia Gray

“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s prose does so many of my favorite things—some too subtle to talk about without spoiling, but one thing I have to mention is the way in which her heroine’s investigation of a suicide draws the reader right into the heart of this wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book and then elbows us yet further along  intowhat is ultimately a tremendously moving act of imagination.”—Helen Oyeyemi, author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s adoption of the rambling and specific absurd will and must delight. This is a graceful claim not just about writing but about a way of being in the world, an always new and necessary way to contend with this garbage that surrounds us, these false portraits of our hearts and minds. This book is not a diversion—it’s a lifeline.”—Jesse Ball, author of How to Set a Fire and Why

“Intelligent and mysterious and funny, Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace moves so mesmerizingly towards its blazingly good ending. One is tempted to read it as quickly as possible. But really, it is a book that should be read slowly, as some of its deepest pleasures lie in the careful observations, the witty prose, and just the book’s really wonderful gaze on city life, and actually, on all life. This is a stunning debut.”—Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat

“Sorry to Disrupt the Peace had me opening my mouth to laugh only to feel sobs come tumbling out. It’s absurd, feeling so much at once, but it’s a distinctly human absurdity that Patty Yumi Cottrell has masterfully created in this book. In the end I felt ebullient and spent, grateful to be reminded that life is only funny and gorgeous because life is also strange and sad.”—Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls

“‘Behind every suicide, there is a door.’ So says Helen, aka Sister Reliability, aka ‘spinster from a book,’ who is determined to open the door behind her adoptive brother’s recent death. Her search takes her from a studio apartment in NYC to a childhood home in Milwaukee, and yet thein vestigation is as philosophical as it is practical, as was, perhaps, the death itself. Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a beguiling debut: absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad as fuck.”—Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First

“In this completely absorbing novel of devastation and estrangement, Patty Yumi Cottrell introduces herself as a modern Robert Walser. Her voice is unflinching, unforgettable, and animated with a restless sense of humor.”—Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing

Patty Yumi Cottrell was born in South Korea and grew up in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and other publications. She lives and works in Los Angeles. This is her first novel.

Amina Cain is the author of the short story collection Creature, out with Dorothy, a Publishing Project, and a novel-in-progress, The Energy of Vitória. Her stories and essays have appeared in BOMB, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and Full Stop, among other places.

LAMBDA LITFEST PRESENTS INDIE VOICES FROM INDIE PRESSES

Los Angeles-based authors Alex Espinoza, Dan Lopez, Wendy C. Ortiz, and Martin Pousson discuss the ways they found homes for their unique voices and the independent literary communities that champion them, from publishers to bookstores and publications, in LA and beyond.

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico. He came to the United States with his family at the age of two and grew up in suburban Los Angeles. Author of the novel Still Water Saints, he received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. A recipient of the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Espinoza is currently an associate professor of English at California State University, Fresno. His latest book is The Five Acts of Diego Léon.

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir and Hollywood Notebook. Her work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in such places as The New York Times, Hazlitt, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, Fanzine, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Wendy lives in Los Angeles.

Martin Pousson was born and raised in the bayou land of Louisiana. His short stories won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and have appeared in The Antioch Review, Epoch, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He also was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He now lives in Los Angeles.

Dan Lopez's work has appeared in The Millions, Storychord, Time Out New York, and Lambda Literary, among others. The Show House is his first novel. He lives in Los Angeles. 

DAN CHAON READS FROM HIS NOVEL ILL WILL

ILL WILL (Ballentine Books)

Have you ever thought to yourself, “did that really happen, or did I just imagine that to be true?” In Ill Will Dan Chaon explores two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—both linked by one man’s memory and self-deception. A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he learns that his adopted brother, Rusty who received a life sentence for murdering Dustin’s parents, aunt and uncle, is being released from prison after thirty years. Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients gets him deeply engaged in a string of drowning deaths involving drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses talk of a serial killer as paranoid thinking, but as he gets wrapped up in their amateur investigation, he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way.

Chaon is fascinated by urban legends and conspiracy theories. He writes, “The interesting thing for me was not knowing what was going to happen in this book. The characters became more slippery as I got to know them. The blanket of paranoia over the book extended to the whole writing process and these characters began to unnerve me.”

Ill Will is a page-turning thriller about the failures of memory, the collapse of family and the perils of self-deception.

Praise for Ill Will 

“For this exceptional and emotionally wrenching novel, Chaon plants the seeds of new manias into the hard, unforgiving ground that will be familiar to his readers… With impressive skill, across multiple narratives that twine, fracture, and rest, Chaon expertly realizes his singular vision of American Dread.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A dark genre-bending thriller . . . Chaon has mastered multiple psychologically complex and often fearsome characters. A shadowy narrative that's carried well by the author's command and insight.”–Kirkus (starred review)

“Lauded literary author Chaon tackles the thriller genre, with this tale of a psychologist whose adopted brother is released from prison. Ideally, this will be the rare read that is all pleasure, no guilt.”—New York Magazine, “The Anticipation Index”

“Chaon has created another of those twilight realms of which he is an indisputable master. The book’s characters plumb the depths of deception and surpass all established measures of instability and dysfunction. . . . If the definition of eeriness is indeed ‘strange, suspicious, and unnatural,’ the definers of the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, etc.) have a worthy heir in Dan Chaon.”–Booklist

“Dan Chaon was already a master of the short story well before he wrote his tense and delightfully twisted thriller, Await Your Reply. Ill Will finds Chaon back in thriller territory, with an even more propulsive narrative. It’s one of those books that looks big and heavy, but with pacing so tight it will likely only take a couple of days to read.”–Vulture, “25 of the Most Anticipated Book Releases for 2017”

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Stay Awake, Await Your Reply, You Remind Me of Me, Fitting Ends, and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.

AMY GOODMAN DISCUSSES HER BOOK DEMOCRACY NOW! WITH CO-AUTHOR DENIS MOYNIHAN

Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (Simon & Schuster) 

From the standoff at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the voices of grassroots leaders; from Black Lives Matter activists to the stories of those fighting for peace, climate justice, migrant rights, and LGBTQ equality; from uncovering government surveillance to fighting attacks on freedom of the press, Democracy Now! has been reporting for two decades from the front lines of the movements that are changing America and changing the world. 

In these times of war and elections, movements and uprisings, we need independent media more than ever. The commercial media serves as a mouthpiece for corporate and government interests--giving a platform to the pundits and the pollsters who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.

Free speech is democracy’s last line of defense. We must demand it, defend it, and most of all, use it--now.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now! a daily, global grassroots news hour, broadcasting on over 1,400 public television and radio stations around the U.S. and the world, with millions accessing it online at democracynow.org. An acclaimed international journalist, she has won the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. Goodman is also the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation of Journalism, the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. This is her sixth New York Times bestselling book.

Denis Moynihan has been working with Democracy Now! since 2000. He is a bestselling author and a King Features syndicated columnist. He lives in Colorado, where he founded community radio station KFFR.

PETE BEGLER READS HIS MIDDLE READER BOOK THE FEARLESS TRAVELERS' GUIDE TO WICKED PLACES

The Fearless Travelers' Guide to Wicked Places (Capstone Young Readers)

Twelve-year-old Nell Perkins knows there is magic at work that she can't yet understand. Her mother has been taken by witches and turned into a bird. Nell must journey to get her mother back, even if it takes her deep into the Wicked Places the frightening and dangerous realm where Nightmares resides. There Nell somehow must break the spell and stop the witches from turning our world into a living nightmare.

Praise for The Fearless Travelers’ Guide To Wicked Places

"This magical book is as dark as a Tim Burton film -a land of walking skeletons, rains of knife blades, encounters with slave-driving clowns, and more-but there is great power (and some successful humor) in creating a world so entirely original. Bursts of modernity startle and shake the otherwise fantastical tone of the piece, and the eponymous handbook plays less of a role than perhaps it should-yet, still, this is a gripping, surreal, and utterly delightful adventure that pairs the unsettling, off-kilter wonkiness of Neil Gaiman and Roald Dahl with the zinging imagination of L. Frank Baum." - Booklist Starred Review

"An insecure young girl's quest for her missing mother leads her to Dreamlands, a parallel world of incredible dreams, dark nightmares, and dangerous deceptions . . .Throughout the relentlessly paced, endlessly twisting plot, remarkable Nell emerges a fearless traveler; in her own right . . . A wildly imaginative, richly textured, and complex fantasy." - Kirkus Reviews

"A triumph of world building that combines familiar fantasy elements in surprising ways. . . .[Begler] successfully balances the cozy anthropomorphism of a Narnia-type land with the borderline horror of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. The vividness of this imaginary world would undoubtedly lend itself well to a big-screen adaptation.--Foreword Reviews

Pete Begler lives in Silverlake with his wife and two daughters and writes for television including the Hulu drama Chance

RAMESH SRINIVASAN DISCUSSES HIS BOOK WHOSE GLOBAL VILLAGE? WITH RIGO 23

Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World (NYU Press)

In Whose Global Village?, Ramesh Srinivasan explores how new technologies often reinforce the inequalities of globalization because developers rarely take into account communities outside the Western world. By sharing stories of collaboration with Native Americans in California and New Mexico, revolutionaries in Egypt, and villages in rural India, Srinivasan urge us to re-imagine social media, the Internet, and even mobile phones from the perspective of these diverse cultures.  

Praise for Whose Global Village? 

“The 2016 election showed us what happens when technologies like Facebook, that are supposed to connect us, actually leave us in bubbles and oblivious to the world that doesn’t agree with us. Whose Global Village?shows that another technology is possible, and in fact exists, through examples across the world that are all about furthering cultural voices and conversations.” --The Yes Men

“In the age of video streaming and the internet, indigenous peoples can fight for their rights as we see with the Dakota Pipeline and across the world today. Whose Global Village? points the way forward to a digital world that recognizes the dignity and voices of indigenous peoples.”--Winona La Duke,  Executive Director of Honor the Earth

“Upstart successes like The Young Turks are becoming less common, partially as a result of the increasing corporatization and monopolization of social media. Whose Global Village? offers an alternate path, out of the self-selected echo chambers that marginalize non-western and indigenous voices, and into a future where new technology operates in greater harmony with grassroots concerns and culturally diverse populations across the world.”--Cenk Uygar,  Founder of The Young Turks

Ramesh Srinivasan isthe Director of the Digital Cultures Lab and Associate Professor of Information Studies and Design and Media Arts at UCLA. His work has been featured by Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Young Turks, National Public Radio, and The Huffington Post.  

Rigo 23 is an artist living in Los Angeles and working globally. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at REDCAT and Fowler Museum in Los Angeles; the New Museum and Artists Space, in New York City and Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Rio de Janeiro in Brasil. His work has been included in the First Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India; 2nd Aichi Triennial in Japan; 3rd Shenzhen Hong-Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture, in China; 5th Auckland Triennial in New Zealand; 10th Lyon Biennale in France; the 2006 Liverpool Biennial in the UK, and the 2004 California Biennial, among others.

SARAH MANGUSO DISCUSSES HER NEW BOOK 300 ARGUMENTS WITH ETHAN NOSOWSK

300 Arguments (Graywolf Press)

A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts ofcompression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight.

300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and wise piece of literature.

Praise for 300 Arguments

“A writer's life, solitary and complex, broken apart—not into shards but puzzle pieces. . . . A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind.”—Kirkus Reviews

“300 Arguments shook me. It’s dark, but the darkness comes from a refusal to look away. Its humor is wounded but present. Is it possibly a sort of novel? The writer says somewhere, ‘This book is the good sentences from the novel I didn’t write.’ The idea holds up when applied, and the attentive reader will intuit an encompassing narrative. Sarah Manguso deserves many such readers.”—JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

“A new book by Sarah Manguso is always a cause for celebration. She is a poet-philosopher of the highest order who combines a laser-sharp intellect with a lyric gift and a capacious, generous heart. She is one of my favorite writers, and with 300 Arguments she deepens her inquiry into the very essence of what it is to be human.”—DANI SHAPIRO

Sarah Manguso is the author of three book-length essays, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay; a story collection; and two poetry collections. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at St. Mary’s College.

Ethan Nosowsky is Editorial Director at Graywolf Press. He began his career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and has also been Editorial Director at McSweeney’s. He has edited books by Jeffery Renard Allen, Hilton Als, Kevin Barry, David Byrne, Vikram Chandra, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and Jenny Offill among many others. He lives in Oakland, California.

JOHN DARNIELLE READS FROM HIS NEW NOVEL UNIVERSAL HARVESTER

Universal Harvester (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa a small town in the center of the state, the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and while the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It s good enough for Jeremy: It s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of "Targets" an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store, she has an odd complaint: There's something on it, she says, but doesn t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns "She's All That," a new release, and complains that there s something wrong with it: There's another movie on this tape.

Jeremy doesn't want to be curious. But he takes a look and, indeed, in the middle of the movie the screen blinks dark for a moment and "She's All That" is replaced by a black-and-white scene, shot in a barn, with only the faint sounds of someone breathing. Four minutes later, "She's All That" is back. But there is something profoundly unsettling about that scene; Jeremy's compelled to watch it three or four times. The scenes recorded onto "Targets" are similar, undoubtedly created by the same hand. Creepy. And the barn looks much like a barn just outside of town.

There will be no ignoring the disturbing scenes on the videos. And all of a sudden, what had once been the placid, regular old Iowa fields and farmhouses now feels haunted and threatening, imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. For Jeremy, and all those around him, life will never be the same.

John Darnielle’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and was widely hailed as one of the best novels of the year. He is the writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and sons.

EMILY FRIDLUND READS FROM HER DEBUT NOVEL HISTORY OF WOLVES

History of Wolves (Grove Atlantic)

History of Wolves is the story of fourteen-year- old Linda, who lives with her parents in an abandoned commune in the icy woods of Northern Minnesota. Isolated at home and at school, Linda finds unusual company in her beautiful classmate, Lily, and her charismatic History teacher, Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is accused of possessing child pornography, Linda’s world shifts dramatically. Things seem to look up when the Gardner family moves in across the lake. Linda is welcomed into their home as their son, Paul’s, babysitter. However, this sense of belonging, and her newfound feelings of purpose come at an unexpected price—Linda is drawn into secrets that she doesn’t understand and is eventually forced to make decisions that will affect her entire life.

Praise for History of Wolves

“[A] stellar debut . . . A sense of foreboding subtly permeates the story . . . [the] wordsmithing is fantastic, rife with vivid turns of phrase. Fridlund has elegantly crafted a striking protagonist whose dark leanings cap off the tragedy at the heart of this book, which is moving and disturbing, and which will stay with the reader.”—Publishers Weekly (starred boxed review) 

“An atmospheric, near-gothic coming-of-age novel turns on the dance between predator and prey . . . Fridlund is an assured writer . . . The novel has a tinge of fairy tale, wavering on the blur between good and evil, thought and action. But the sharp consequences for its characters make it singe and sing—a literary tour de force.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“The writing is beautiful . . . a triumph of tone and attitude. Lovers of character-driven literary fiction will embrace this.”—Booklist (starred review)

“First thing you see is the bracing intelligence of the book’s young narrator – no big-eyed sentiments for Linda, raised amid blighted ideals in the ceaseless winters and vast swamps of northern Minnesota. So observant is Linda that you trust her instantly, but it’s her own search for trust, for connection even at enormous cost, that will hold you to the final hour. Emily Fridlund’s language is generous and precise, her story grief-tempered and forcefully moving. History of Wolves is the loneliest thing I’ve read in years, and it’s gorgeous. These are haunted pages.” —Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River

“As exquisite a first novel as I’ve ever encountered. Poetic, complex, and utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful.”—T. C. Boyle

“So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides! I’m so excited for readers to encounter the talent and roiling intelligence of Emily Fridlund.”—Aimee Bender

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Zyzzyva, FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Sou'wester, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. The opening chapter of History Wolves won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and Fridlund's collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande in the fall of 2017.

VANESSA DAVIS LAUNCHES HER NEW GRAPHIC MEMOIR SPANIEL RAGE

Spaniel Rage (Drawn & Quarterly)

Join Los Angeles-based cartoonist Vanessa Davis as she presents her latest release Spaniel Rage: a collection of frank, intimate pencil drawings created over the course of one year to chronicle her life as a single woman in New York. Filled with self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties, intimate moments between friends and lovers, and mingling general observations and wry truths about life in the Big City, Spaniel Rage is a witty tour de force that grabs you by the heartstrings.

Vanessa Davis's autobiographical comics delighted readers ten years ago when she first began telling stories about her life in New York as a young single Jewish woman. More observational than confessional, Spaniel Rage is filled with frank and immediate pencil drawn accounts of dating woes, misunderstandings between her and her mother, and conversations with friends. Her keen observation of careless words spoken casually is refreshingly honest, yet never condemning. Unabashedly, Davis offers up gently self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties and wry truths about the contradictions of life in the big city. These comics are sexy, funny, lonely, beautiful, spare, and very smart—the finest work from a natural storyteller.

Praise for Spaniel Rage

"These comics are a gift. Casual, but precise, Davis has an emotional and intellectual range that creeps up on you with a warmth and a sensibility to the page that feels revelatory. Spaniel Rage is a brave, deeply felt work." Sammy Harkham, Kramers Ergot

"Loose, perfect cartooning. Vanessa Davis is one of the very best." Michael DeForge, Big Kids, Ant Colony, and Lose

"Vanessa's comics feel like a phone call with your best, warm, funny friend. I've kept this book close at hand for the last decade, re-reading it over lunches, in baths, and curled up in bed at night." Lisa Hanawalt, Bojack Horseman, Hot Dog Taste Test

"I spent my 20s reading and re-reading this book. I'm still looking for clues in its warm, perfect drawings and clear, quiet voice a grateful ghost in the white spaces, standing by Vanessa's side." Eleanor Davis, How To Be Happy

Vanessa Davis was born in Florida and currently lives in Los Angeles. She’s a cartoonist and illustrator who has contributed to Vice, the New York Times, Lucky Peach, and Tablet.

 

JOANNA HOFFMAN READS FROM HER POETRY COLLECTION RUNNING FOR TRAP DOORS

Running for Trap Doors (Sibling Rivalry Press)

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Joanna Hoffman navigates family dynamics, lesbian bars, religion, emoticons, and inner demons. Along the way, she begins to see her world and the characters in it in a new light and gradually learns how to get out of her own way.

Praise for Running for Trap Doors 

"What I love most about Joanna Hoffman’s poems in Running For Trap Doors is how they uplift without trying to; the candor embroidered in every story swells the reader with an aliveness, even in moments of undeniable loss. They are quiet anthems. Hoffman’s writing denounces pretension and settles into the violent swirl and joy of life’s incessant mosh pit."-- Rachel McKibbens, New York Foundation of the Arts Poetry Fellow and author of Pink Elephant

"Joanna Hoffman lingers in melancholia, but with instincts erring toward that peculiar strength of character possessed only by those whose frailty has truly taken a stomping. Hoffman’s ills are not imaginary, nor are her efforts to redress them. We should all be so bold, so concerned. And then there is this other thing, which is that never in my life have I read such concisely perfect portrayals of the religions hiding in a woman’s neck as I have in these fine poems. More than a debut, Running for Trap Doors is a statement of purpose."-- Megan Volpert, author of Sonics in Warholia

"While reading Joanna Hoffman’s book, I considered death, remembered high school, ached, marveled that one poem could say as much as a novel, laughed out loud alone, texted someone to say how good it was, and then hugged myself. It is precise, imagistic and purposeful, a fully realized narrative. In this book, there is a clean song jackknifing the fat from bone."-- Karen Finneyfrock, author of The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door

Joanna Hoffman is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Winter Tangerine, decomP, PANK, The Offing, Union Station Magazine, The Legendary, Sinister Wisdom and in the Write Bloody Publishing anthologies We Will be Shelter and Multiverse. Her full-length book of poetry, Running for Trap Doors (Sibling Rivalry Press), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and included in the American Library Association’s List of Recommended LGBT reading for 2014. She was honored by the White House as a 2015 Champion of Change for LGBTQ advocacy through art. 

DANIELLE KRYSA DISCUSSES HER BOOK YOUR INNER CRITIC IS A BIG JERK, WITH MARTHA RICH

Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk: And Other Truths About Being Creative (Chronicle Books)

This book is duct tape for the mouth of every artist's inner critic. Silencing that stifling voice once and for all, this salve for creatives introduces ten truths they must face in order to defeat self-doubt. Each encouraging chapter deconstructs a pivotal moment on the path to success fear of the blank page, the dangers of jealousy, sharing work with others and explains how to navigate roadblock. Packed with helpful anecdotes, thoughts from successful creatives, and practical exercises gleaned from Danielle Krysa's years of working with professional and aspiring artists plus riotously apt illustrations from art world darling Martha Rich this book arms readers with the most essential tool for their toolbox: the confidence they need to get down to business and make good work.

Danielle Krysa has a BFA in Fine Arts, and a post-grad in graphic design. She is the writer/curator behind the contemporary art site, The Jealous Curator. In 2014 she published two books, both with Chronicle Books, titled Creative Block and Collage. Her third book, Your Inner Critic Is A Big Jerk was released in October 2016. Danielle has also had the great pleasure of speaking at TEDx  PIXAR, Creative Mornings, CreativeLive, Altitude Summit, and was interviewed for several video segments on Oprah.com.

Martha Rich is a Philadelphia-based artist working in both the commercial and fine art fields. Drawing, painting, using words, while being absurd and funny, and having a penchant for painting food is what she does.

STEVE ERICKSON READS FROM HIS NEW NOVEL SHADOWBAHN

Shadowbahn (Blue Rider Press)

In Granta Jonathan Lethem called Steve Erickson’s forthcoming novel Shadowbahn "Jaw-dropping … Erickson weaves a playlist for the dying American century with his usual lucid-dreaming prose. I've read every novel he's ever written and I'll still never know how he does it: A tour-de-forcer's tour de force." A prescient book about a divided USA, Shadowbahn is a winding and reckless ride through intersections of danger, destiny, and the conjoined halves of a ruptured nation.

The sleep of reason produces monsters, said Goya—including monsters of architecture and history that meet, most uneasily, in the pages of Erickson's latest. It's a startling scenario, a kind of deus ex machina at the beginning instead of the end of a story: What would happen if, two decades after their collapse, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were to loom up in the South Dakota Badlands? Well, it being America, they turn into a tourist attraction made all the more alluring by the fact that there's a presence up on the top floors of the southern building—a presence that just happens to be the revenant brother of another American icon. It would be a spoiler to get too much into specifics of that fellow's identity and why on earth he happens to be inhabiting a building he never lived to see, but suffice it to say that with this book, perhaps his oddest yet, Erickson stakes a claim to be one of the most centrifugal writers at work today. Even then, he works his magic mostly by conjuring sci-fi-ish plotlines and then having characters move across them in more or less realistic ways: youngsters on their way to visit family on the coast are pulled down a dusty rabbit hole into a place that requires conversations on Adlai Stevenson, Elvis, the old folk song "Shenandoah," Dealey Plaza, Churchill, Wounded Knee, RFK ("Was his big brother being metaphorical now? Ironic? Literary?"), and the whole swirl, for better and worse, of American history. Whatever is normal is upended, but it's all oddly believable. Throughout, Erickson, a master of the mot juste, writes with archly elegant lyricism: "He heads toward a west that is the dreamer's true north, where the desert comes looking for us and curls at the door, a wild animal made of our ashes…." Think Philip K. Dick on smoother acid and with a more up-to-date soundtrack, and you've got something of this eminently strange, thoroughly excellent book.

Praise for Shadowbahn

“A great, great, great, great novel. I could say more -- about its big-world heartedness and old-world shadowness, about twins and towers, brothers and sisters, road trips and all the borders we design and transgress, and of course Erickson’s beautiful heart-bit music -- but it would still add up to the same thing: great.  Sung, of course.”–Mark Z. Danielewski, author of The Familiar

“Steve Erickson is one of America’s greatest living novelists.  He is always inventive, always engaging, always surprising. In Shadowbahn, Erickson combines the social novel, the science fiction novel, the pop music essay, the comedic set piece, and the family novel into a wild, idiosyncratic tour de force.”–Dana Spiotta

“Not sure whether Steve Erickson's off-kilter whoppers have gotten more plausible or the country gets more and more unhinged.  He and his book's bewitching nouns, from the Badlands to "La Bamba," are good company either way.”–Sarah Vowell

“Shadowbahn maps out an American counter-history where events that have touched all Americans, and people from all over the world, are given new shape and speak in new voices.  As both a revisioning of a national story and a family drama, the book has a simultaneous weight and lightness, an older person’s high seriousness and the ability of younger people to see right through it.”--Greil Marcus

Steve Erickson is the author of nine other novels, including Zeroville, which James Franco has adapted for film, Our Ecstatic Days, and These Dreams of You and two nonfiction books that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, American Prospect, and Los Angeles, for which he writes regularly about film, music, and television. Erickson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Currently he teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

MARK SUNDEEN DISCUSSES HIS BOOK THE UNSETTLERS

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America (Riverhead Books)

Today's Americans are looking to escape: faced with drastic increases in climate change, the rise of the One Percent, and a suffocating 24/7 work culture that seems to be keeping an entire population chained to their smart phones, it comes as no surprise that we are now, more than ever, yearning for "the simple life." Organic eating continues to gain popularity and minimalistic Tiny Houses seem to be popping up every direction--but why? And is it actually possible not only to walk away from the modern conveniences on which we've become so paralyzingly dependent but to adopt--even model--a truly sustainable ethical and authentic way of life? 

In The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, Mark Sundeen follows a diverse group of Americans--urban and rural, female and male, black and white--on their complicated quest for a simpler life in modern times, raising fascinating and subversive questions about the way we live, eat, and work. We asked Sundeen what led him to write The Unsettlers, and he replied, "So many people have anxiety about the state of the world--climate change, extinction, financial inequality--but so few have an idea of what they can actually do to extract themselves for the system, much less change it. This book illuminates those who are trying with all their might." 

There is no better writer to tell this story than Sundeen, whose writings on off-the-grid movements have appeared in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, The Believer, National Geographic Adventure, and McSweeny's. His previous book, The Man who Quit Money, was a sleeper hit, earning rave reviews from readers and critics--the Seattle Times deemed it "captivating," and Outside hailed it as a "critique that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt remorse on the treadmill of getting and spending"--cementing Sundeen's reputation as one of the preeminent translators of alternative communities and movements to the mainstream. 

With the lively writing-style of Barbara Kingslover and on-the-ground savvy of Michael Pollan, Mark Sundeen simultaneously explores and contextualizes the fascinatingly complex history of simple living throughout American history--from the Founding Fathers to the present movement in which, among the other subjects he profiles, Detroit natives Olivia Hubert and Greg Willerer set out to revitalize their city by farming it. 

Praise for The Unsettlers

"Rigorously reported and utterly enthralling. With Candor, wit, and live-voltage curiosity, Sundeen profiles pioneers who have developed better ways to live in our overdeveloped world."--Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

"With his chronicles of modern-day American visionaries and iconoclasts who have opted out of the mainstream culture, I've come to think of Mark Sundeen as our poet laureate of a new era of alternative lifestyles."--Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Mark Sundeen is the author of several books, including The Man Who Quit Money and the coauthor of North by Northwestern, which was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has taught fiction and nonfiction in the MFA creative writing programs at the University of New Mexico and Southern New Hampshire University. He and his wife divide their time between Fort Collins, Colorado, and Moab, Utah.