Skylight Books Podcast Series

PSEUDONYMOUS BOSCH reads from his new novel BAD LUCK

Bad Luck (Little Brown and Company)

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

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

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

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

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

A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press)

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

Praise for Brian Evenson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROB ROBERGE discusses his book LIAR with DAVID ULIN

Liar: A Memoir (Crown Publishing)

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

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

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

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

Praise for Liar

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEN RATLIFF discusses his book EVERY SONG EVER with ALEX ROSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARC WEINGARTEN discusses his new book THIRSTY, with NINA REVOYR

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

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

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

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

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

All the Birds in the Sky (Tor Books)

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

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

Praise for All the Birds in the Sky

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

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

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

Me & Miranda Mullaly (Viking)

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

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

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

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

Rus Like Everyone Else (Unnamed Press)

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

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

Praise for Rus Like Everyone Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEMINIST PRESS presents THE FEMINIST UTOPIA PROJECT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praise for Still Night in L.A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Pilgrim (Four Way Books)

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

Praise for All Pilgrims

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

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

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

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

STEVE TOLTZ reads from his new novel QUICKSAND with ANTON MONSTED

Quicksand (Simon & Schuster)

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

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

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

Praise for Quicksand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DINAH LENNEY presents BRIEF ENCOUNTERS, together with EMILY RAPP BLACK, CHRIS DALEY, AMY GERSTLER, TOD GOLDBERG, JIM KRUSOE

Brief Encounters (W.W. Norton)

What anthology could unite the work of such distinct writers as Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Marvin Bell, Sven Birkerts, Meghan Daum, Stuart Dybek, Patricia Hampl, Pico Iyer, Leslie Jamison, Phillip Lopate, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Weschler?  What anthology could successfully blend literary forms as varied as memoir, aesthetic critique, political and social commentary, slice-of-life observation, conjecture, fragment, and contemplation?  What anthology could so deeply and steadily plumb the mysteries of human experience in two or three or five page bursts? 

For the late Judith Kitchen, editor of such seminal anthologies as Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, "flash" nonfiction—the "short"—was an ideal tool with which to describe and interrogate our fragmented world.  Sharpened to a point, these essays sounded a resonance that owed as much to poetry as to the familiar pleasures of large-scale creative nonfiction.  Now, in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, Kitchen and her co-editor, Dinah Lenney, present nearly eighty new selections, many of which have never been published before, having been written expressly for this anthology. 

Taken together, as a curated gallery of impressions and experiences, the essays in Brief Encounters exist in dialogue with each other: arguing, agreeing, contradicting, commiserating, reflecting.  Like Walt Whitman, the anthology is large and contains multitudes.  Certain themes, however, weave their way throughout the whole: the nature of family, the influence of childhood, the centrality of place, and the role of memory.  In Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "The Renaissance," for example, the author remembers her relationship with her mother, tracing her own adolescent route from intimacy to contempt.  In "The Fan," Eduardo Galeano dramatizes the communal devotions of the soccer fan.  And in "There Are Distances Between Us," Roxanne Gay considers the seemingly impossible and illogical demands of love.  What binds these and many other disparate essays together is the ways in which they enrich, color, and shade each other, the manner in which they take on new properties and dimensions when read in conjunction. 

Dinah Lenney is the author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and, with Judith Kitchen, edited, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. She serves as core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and the Rainier Writing Workshop, and as the nonfiction editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Redbook, O the Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Palm Springs and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert MFA Program in Writing and the Performing Arts.

Chris Daley’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, DUM DUM ZINE, and The Collagist, where “Thoughts on Time After Viewing Christian Marclay's ‘The Clock’” first appeared. She teaches academic writing at the California Institute of Technology and, as Co-Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, offers creative nonfiction workshops for students at all levels. Chris has a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. 

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Her book of poems include Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015), and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was the 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.

Tod Goldberg is the author of a dozen books, including, most recently, Gangsterland. His nonfiction, criticism, and essays have appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Best American Essays. He lives in Indio, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside. 

Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You,and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems. His latest novel, The Sleep Garden, is due out this winter from Tin House.

SAM ALDEN discusses his new comic book NEW CONSTRUCTION

New Construction (Uncivilized Books)

New Construction collects two newly expanded stories from cartoonist and Adventure Time contributor Sam Alden. In “Household,” a brother and sister deal with divergent memories of their father and grow closer than ever. In "Backyard," Vegans and anarchists share a house, small dramas and bizarre transformations (featuring a new, never before published ending). Designed as a companion volume for the critically acclaimed It Never Happened Again, New Construction cements Alden's reputation as one of the best cartoonists of his generation.

Praise for New Construction

"Alden's natural sense of framing and pace, his willingness to use silent panels to tell stories, and his beautiful (yes, beautiful) pencil images combined to open my eyes to a new idea of what a great comic can be. It helps that he's also an excellent writer--both stories sketch out lonely, lost characters efficiently, and put them each through very different quests for meaning."--Dan Kois, Slate

"Two thematically divergent, but devastatingly human portraits from an emerging cartoonist displaying the sort of storytelling and artistic restraint that often only comes after years of toiling away at the drawing board. Alden is a talent to watch."--Publishers Weekly

Sam Alden was born in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. He is the recipient of two Ignatz Awards, one for most promising new talent and another for best comic. Sam was an official guest at the BilBoLbul festival in Bologna, Italy. His work has been previously published in Best American Comics 2013, from Houghton-Mifflin. Sam now lives and works as an illustrator and cartoonist in Los Angeles.