Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Monday Oct 15, 2018
LAMBDA Litfest: "Queer Writing"
Monday Oct 15, 2018
Monday Oct 15, 2018
Young queer writers yearn for queer teachers for a variety of reasons: to be seen and acknowledged, to find role models, to work in spaces that include their voices. On this panel, queer writing teachers from UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program will read excerpts from their recent work, and then discuss how queerness factors into their teaching of both straight and queer students.
The teachers included in the panel: Noel Alumit, Antonia Crane, Seth Fischer, Charles Jensen, and Mathew Rodriguez.
Thursday Oct 11, 2018
Bonnie Chau, "ALL ROADS LEAD TO BLOOD"
Thursday Oct 11, 2018
Thursday Oct 11, 2018
Unflinching and compelling portrayals of desire fill All Roads Lead to Blood, an award-winning story collection by Bonnie Chau. Chau explores the lives of young women, focusing on love, heritage, and memory, presenting fresh perspectives of second-generation Chinese-Americans.
Moving back and forth between California and New York, and ranging as far away as Paris, Chau’s exquisitely written stories are bold, highly imaginative, and haunting, featuring unique characters who defiantly exert their individuality.
Tuesday Sep 11, 2018
Ben Marcus, "NOTES FROM THE FOG"
Tuesday Sep 11, 2018
Tuesday Sep 11, 2018
With the thirteen transfixing stories of Notes From the Fog, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world--cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.
In "The Grow-Light Blues," a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer's newest nutrition supplement--the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son's precocity has turned sinister in the chilling "Cold Little Bird." In "Blueprints for St. Louis," two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment--a memorial to a terrorist attack.
In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus's fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor. Blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.
Wednesday Sep 05, 2018
Genevieve Hudson, "PRETEND WE LIVE HERE" w/ Henry Hoke and Myriam Gurba
Wednesday Sep 05, 2018
Wednesday Sep 05, 2018
Future Tense Books is thrilled to be publishing Pretend We Live Here by international writer Genevieve Hudson. In this debut collection of stories, Genevieve explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them.
In “Boy Box,” a young woman yearns to test her luck with a wild punk girl crush. In “God Hospital,” a character journeys deep into the woods of Alabama in search of an infamous religious healer, hoping he can fix her teeth. In “Adorno,” someone in need of forgiveness crosses paths with a band of radical vegan activists and gets subsumed into their world. In “Dance!,” a recluse writes a breakthrough song for her pink dolphin, but the song’s success only drives her further away from society. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia.
Hudson is joined in conversation by Henry Hoke (The Book of Endless Sleepovers) and Myriam Gurba, a writer, artist, and teacher based in Long Beach, California.
Wednesday Aug 29, 2018
Laurie Kilmartin, "DEAD PEOPLE SUCK"
Wednesday Aug 29, 2018
Wednesday Aug 29, 2018
When stand-up comedian Laurie Kilmartin learned her dad was dying, she responded in the only way she knew how: with humor. In 2014, she made headlines by live tweeting her father’s time in hospice, bringing a touch of lightness to the devastating experience of losing her dad. Picked up by outlets like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Today.com, Kilmartin’s hilarious tweets took the world by storm, and revealed the need for a comic interpretation of grief.
Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed, is an honest, irreverent, laugh-out- loud guide to coping with death and dying. Filled with relatable anecdotes and practical advice, Kilmartin voices all of the insensitive things you may have thought about your dying loved one, or wanted to scream at a well-meaning friend, but didn’t. She also brings heart and humor to a topic that is too often met with solemnity and silence, despite being as complicated, messy, and emotional as any other part of our human experience.
Monday Aug 20, 2018
Nick Dybek, "THE VERDUN AFFAIR" w/ Julia Fierro
Monday Aug 20, 2018
Monday Aug 20, 2018
A sweeping, romantic, and profoundly moving novel, set in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and Los Angeles in the 1950s, about a lonely young man, a beautiful widow, and the amnesiac soldier whose puzzling case binds them together even as it tears them apart.
From the bone-strewn fields of Verdun to the bombed-out cafés of Paris, from the riot-torn streets of Bologna to the riotous parties of 1950s Hollywood, Nick Dybek's The Verdun Affair is a riveting tale of romance, grief, and the far-reaching consequences of a single lie.
Dybek is in conversation with Julia Fierro, author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth.
Sunday Aug 19, 2018
Lydia Millet, "FIGHT NO MORE" w/ Zandy Hartig
Sunday Aug 19, 2018
Sunday Aug 19, 2018
In her first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys, which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet explores what it means to be home. Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting fractured communities and families. She moves through the houses of L.A.’s wealthy elite and finds men and women both crass and tender, vicious and desperate. With wit and intellect, Millet offers profound insight into human behavior from the ordinary to the bizarre: strong-minded girls are beset by the helpless, myopic executives are tormented by their employees, and beastly men do beastly things.
Millet is in conversation with Zandy Hartig, an actress known for her roles in Children's Hospital, Wanderlust, Role Models, and The Ten.
Sunday Aug 12, 2018
"SANTA CRUZ NOIR" Contributors
Sunday Aug 12, 2018
Sunday Aug 12, 2018
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Joining us are editor Susie Bright, Jon Bailiff, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Seana Graham, Naomi Hirahara, Lou Mathews, Liza Monroy, and Tommy Moore.
Sunday Aug 05, 2018
PEN AMERICA MEET AND GREET
Sunday Aug 05, 2018
Sunday Aug 05, 2018
PEN America presents the 2018 Emerging Voices Fellows, alumni, and mentors in conversation for the 2019 application cycle at Skylight Books.
The evening will include summer cocktails, short readings, a fellowship overview, and audience Q&A. Featuring Jubi Arriola-Headley, Ron Dowell, Natalie Mislang Mann, Angela M. Sanchez, Francisco Uribe, and more!
Saturday Aug 04, 2018
TINY CRIMES: Contributors
Saturday Aug 04, 2018
Saturday Aug 04, 2018
Tiny Crimes gathers leading and emerging literary voices to tell tales of villainy and intrigue in only a few hundred words. From the most hard-boiled of noirs to the coziest of mysteries, with diminutive double crosses, miniature murders, and crimes both real and imagined, Tiny Crimes rounds up all the usual suspects, and some unusual suspects, too. With illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook and flash fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Amelia Gray, Adam Sternbergh, Yuri Herrera, Julia Elliott, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Charles Yu, Laura van den Berg, and more, Tiny Crimes scours the underbelly of modern life to expose the criminal, the illegal, and the depraved.
Joining us are contributors: Brian Evenson, Adam Hirsch, and Amelia Gray
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
UC RIVERSIDE: Students and Professors
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
Tuesday Jul 31, 2018
Join us as professors and students from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts MFA read from their work. Readers include: Allison Benis White, Steve Erickson, Nora Woolley, Aleksandra Krzywicka, Kate Burns, Carissa Atallah, Carley Besl.
Thursday Jul 26, 2018
Jamel Brinkley, "A LUCKY MAN"
Thursday Jul 26, 2018
Thursday Jul 26, 2018
In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members, and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. This stunning debut by Jamel Brinkley reflects the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
Brinkley is in conversation with Justin Torres, author of We the Animals.
Monday Jul 16, 2018
OTIS COLLEGE MFA WRITING PROGRAM
Monday Jul 16, 2018
Monday Jul 16, 2018
Join us for a special evening as students from Otis College or Art and Design's MFA Writing Program share their poetry and prose.
Friday Jul 13, 2018
Ramona Ausubel and Michael Andreasen
Friday Jul 13, 2018
Friday Jul 13, 2018
Awayland
Some of them previously published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, this collection of eleven delightfully idiosyncratic and elegantly structured stories spans the globe and showcases Ramona Ausubel’s unique ability to tackle the “frustrations and fantasies of being alive” (Publishers Weekly). Her subtle touch of magic used to confront the mysteries of death, love and longing make the stories “weird and wonderful” (New York Times) and perfect for fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Helen Oyeyemi. Ausubel, however, continues to occupy a space as a writer that is all her own—delivering stories that manage to be both “highly imaginative and philosophical in scope” (Refinery29), wildly unconventional yet universally resonant, darkly comic yet tender and soulful. Ausubel’s uncanny ability to simultaneously amuse, mesmerize, move and inspire, makes Awayland a deeply satisfying read that will linger with you in powerful ways.
The Seabeast Takes a Lover
Observe: the Fiction of the Future. See it carry our elders away to the ocean. Note how it pulls wires from our alien brains. Watch as a ship is slowly pulled under determined by an amorous kraken. Meet the happy, headless girl. Visit the funhouse that is Michael Andreasen's wild, brilliant mind. Find out how surprisingly familiar these bizarre scenarios feel; how true to life; and how delighted you are to find that the carnival barker's voice has drawn you into a ride you didn't realize you wanted to go on. Squeeze the guard rails, and whoop your way through the curves. Then, get back in line and go again.
Sunday Jul 08, 2018
"CULPRITS" Anthology Reading
Sunday Jul 08, 2018
Sunday Jul 08, 2018
A hard-bitten crew of professional thieves pull off the score of their lives, coming away with seven million in cash. Like any heist there are some unforeseen complications; a hitch or two and a couple of bodies drop. But despite this, they get away with the swag. Enough to change their lives, make new identities, start fresh. But that’s when the real trouble begins...In this unique, riveting, linked anthology, we follow each culprit as they go their separate ways after the heist, and watch as this perfect score ends up a perfect nightmare. Featuring stories penned by acclaimed writers Brett Battles, Gar Anthony Haywood, Zoë Sharp, Manuel Ramos, Jessica Kaye, Joe Clifford and David Corbett, Culprits shows that sometimes the end means things are just getting started...