Skylight Books Podcast Series

JESSE EISENBERG reads from his debut collection of short stories BREAM GIVES ME HICCUPS

Bream Gives Me Hiccups (Grove/Atlantic)

Jesse Eisenberg is known for acclaimed acting roles in The Social Network, The Squid and the Whale, and other films, but his writing talents are no less impressive. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s and in the New Yorker and he is the author of three plays, including The Revisionist, which starred Eisenberg and Vanessa Redgrave.

Now in his whip-smart fiction debut Bream Gives Me Hiccups Eisenberg delivers a collection of forty-four hilarious, moving, and inventive stories that explore the various insanities of the modern world. 

NOTE: As with all Skylight Books in-store events, this reading is free and open to the public (first come, first served).  But because we're expecting a large crowd at this event, we'll be giving out numbered tickets to the signing line to keep things organized:

• To get a ticket to the signing line, you must purchase a copy of Bream Gives Me Hiccups here at Skylight Books.
• Starting September 8, you can buy books (and get your signing line ticket) in person, by phone, or via our website. Web pre-orders can also be picked up starting the 8th.
• For all website orders for this event, be sure to leave a note in the Order Comments field if you'd like a signing line ticket.
• Can't attend? If you would like a signed book but will not be able to attend, click Signed Copy after adding the book to your cart and we'll do our best to get it signed for you. You  may pick up this book in the store after the event, or have it shipped to you.
• Skylight's Friends with Benefits members get priority signing line tickets (and 20% off this and all other event books each month), so be sure to mention your membership (or join) when you order the book.
• Jesse Eisenberg will sign and personalize ONLY Bream Gives me Hiccups and his plays--no memorabilia, posters, DVDs, fan art, etc. Jesse Eisenberg will also take photographs while signing--no posed photographs.  Thank you for your cooperation! 

Bream Gives Me Hiccups gets its unusual title from the set of stories that begin the book, restaurant reviews written by a nine-year-old child who is taken out for expensive meals by his newly divorced mother. The stories then move from contemporary L.A. to the dorm rooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece, a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by the man’s sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide (The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Karađorđevo agreement); in another, a college freshman forced to live with a roommate is stunned when one of her ramen packets goes missing (She didn’t have “one” of my ramens. She had a chicken ramen); in another piece, Alexander Graham Bell has teething problems with his invention (I’ve been calling Mabel all day, she doesn’t pick up! Yes, of course I dialed the right number – 2!). 

United by Eisenberg’s gift for humor and character, and grouped into chapters that open with illustrations by award-winning cartoonist Jean Jullien, the witty pieces collected in Bream Gives Me Hiccups mark the arrival of a fantastically funny, self-ironic, and original voice.

Praise for Bream Gives Me Hiccups

“Brilliantly witty, deeply intelligent, and just plain hilarious. If David Sedaris wrote about Carmelo Anthony, Bosnian genocide, and ramen-stealing college freshmen, it would probably come out something like Jesse Eisenberg’s Bream Gives Me Hiccups. A moving portrait of human beings at their weaker moments, and a wonderful send-up of the insanities of modern America.” —Sherman Alexie

“Eisenberg has a terrific ear, especially for adolescent inflections, absurdity, self-delusion, and insecurity. He also has a flair for off-the-wall ideas . . . With its panoply of neurotics and narcissists and its smart mix of stinging satire and surprising moments of sweetness, Bream Gives Me Hiccups brings to mind fellow comic actor/writers Woody Allen, Steve Martin and B.J. Novak. It also offers a youthful new twist on what one of Eisenberg’s hopeless dreamers refers to—ironically, of course—as the cruel ‘irony of life.’”—NPR Books

“Compelling . . . A fascinating look into the minds of misfits . . . Whether it’s Alexander Graham Bell bumbling through his first phone calls or Carmelo Anthony of the New York Knicks pacifying a fan, Eisenberg’s ability to create interesting and entertaining dialogue as if the exchange actually occurred is impressive . . . Eisenberg’s wit jumps off the page . . . Bream Gives Me Hiccups is a delightful collection of awkward scenarios twisted into humorous, witty and sometimes poignant life lessons. It’s simultaneously smart, clever and creative.”—Associated Press

“Eisenberg’s strength is in dialogue and monologue, and in writing miserable characters who alternately compel (like a 9-year-old from a broken home who writes restaurant reviews) and repel (like Harper, the footnote-obsessed freshman Eisenberg lovingly describes as ‘maladjusted’) . . . Eisenberg is uncannily good at capturing a specific breed of insincere teen girl.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Jesse Eisenberg is a deeply original comic voice. These stories are about the funniness, sadness, and strangeness of everyday life and they really made me laugh.”—Roz Chast

A great book . . . The first part of the book [is] a series of restaurant reviews Eisenberg writes in the voice of a privileged nine-year old. The reviews are hilarious but gradually reveal a moving portrait of a lonely boy’s bond with his single mom. All the stories seem to work on multiple levels like that.”—Arun Rath, “All Things Considered,” NPR

“[Eisenberg’s] jittery on-screen energy seeps onto the pages of this book.”—Wall Street Journal (15 Books to Read This Fall)

“Eisenberg’s 28 stories in Bream Gives Me Hiccups range from the diary of a nine-year-old food critic to letters about stolen ramen . . . Eisenberg’s characters are lively, and his awareness of universal neuroses (yours and his alike) shows he’s more than a hobbyist.”—Time 

“He’s a walking ball of neuroses, a fledgling playwright, and now a short-story writer, telling tales covering subjects as varied as Pompeii and ramen.”—New York Magazine 

 “Charming, deftly written, and laugh-out-loud funny.” —Publishers Weekly

“I’ve been a fan of Jesse Eisenberg’s plays for years and his prose is just as winning. Bream Gives Me Hiccups is hilarious, poignant and at times so self-deprecating it makes me want to give Jesse a hug. He’s taken decades of neurosis and spun it into comedy gold.”—Simon Rich

“Eisenberg proves to be a compassionate chronicler of absurdity in the realms of family life, romance, and history.”—Booklist

“Bream Gives Me Hiccups isn’t merely comic writing of the first order; it’s an often tender, highbrow-lowbrow mash-up that encompasses everything from Chomsky and Žižek to disastrous pickup lines and pubescent neuroses. Jesse Eisenberg writes with formidable intellect and verbal dexterity, but he also has something many deadeye satirists lack: empathy with his targets. To borrow his most unforgettable character’s line, you’ll want to give his debut collection 2000 out of 2000 stars.”—Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Jesse Eisenberg is an Academy Award–nominated actor, playwright, and contributor for the New Yorker andMcSweeney's. He is the author of three plays, Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils, which won the Theater Visions Fund Award. Eisenberg's acting credits include The Social Network, Now You See Me, Adventureland, The Squid and the Whale, The Double, and The End of the Tour. Forthcoming acting credits include Batman v. Superman.

THOMAS MALLON discusses his new novel FINALE, with JAMES ELLROY

Finale: The Reagan Years (Pantheon Books)

From the author of the acclaimed novel Watergate,  comes a galvanizing new novel about the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president of modern times. 

Finale takes readers to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986; the wealthiest enclaves of southern California; and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel's memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, and even Bette Davis, with whom the president long ago appeared on screen. Several figures including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, a clash of ideologies, and a political revolution. At the center of it all but forever out of reach is Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.

Thomas Mallon is the author of nine novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, andWatergate. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic, and he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Vursell prize for exceptional prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.
 
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz,and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. His newest novel, Perfidia, is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II. 

CHARLYNE YI launches her new book OH THE MOON

Oh the Moon (Harper Perennial)

From actress, comedian, musician, and writer Charlyne Yi comes this collection of illustrated, interconnected short stories and anecdotes that blends comedy, fantastic adventures, and a storm of feelings that will make you want to laugh and cry at the same time reminiscent of the works of Demetri Martin, Shel Silverstein and John Cassavetes.

Charlyne Yi takes readers from the beginning of time to the depths of a frog's stomach, and to Hell and back literally in this collection of short stories that showcases her unique style.Equal parts whimsical, hilarious, heartbreaking, and terrifying, these short stories both written and illustrated by Charlyne can be read separately, but are connected thematically following the difficulties of love at every age: Forgive Me: What happens when the tiniest boy of all time is the only thing standing between the world s largest baby and an angry mob? Who could ever love something so small? Or so big? The Particles: A love story that takes all the time in the universe to tell. She's All Legs: In this spicy, action-packed romance, Agatha, a woman who is literally just legs and a head, decides to hunt down and kill the Devil himself. Along the way she meets Cassady, an Elvis impersonator with his own, mysterious gripe with the Dark Lord.

Charlyne Yi is a struggling poet, comedian, musician, painter, and writer.  She can do ten pushups a day.  She wrote and starred in the fictionalized documentary Paper Heart, for which she won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance.  She has also been in Knocked Up, This is 40, and House.

YUMI SAKUGAWA discusses her new book THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY TO MEDITATE

There Is No Right Way to Meditate (Adams Media Corporation)

In There Is No Right Way to Meditate, award-winning artist Yumi Sakugawa helps you tap into your inner self and finally find the peace that you've been seeking. Each page offers a unique perspective on how to lead a more mindful life, with captivating ink illustrations and encouraging words like, "it's okay if the only thing you did today was breathe." From simple ways to get rid of a bad mood to instructions for making your intentions come true, her lessons will inspire you to become more aware of the present moment and find stillness no matter where you go.

Yumi Sakugawa is an Ignatz Awards nominated comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love With You and Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One With The Universe. Her comics have also appeared in The Believer, Bitch, the Best American Non­Required Reading 2014, The Rumpus, Folio, Fjords Review, and other publications. A graduate from the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in Los Angeles.

TAVI GEVINSON presents the final issue of ROOKIE YEARBOOK

Rookie Yearbook Four (Razorbill)

Rookie is an online magazine for teenage girls with monthly-themed content that includes life lessons, diary entries, DIY projects, playlists and interviews with cultural icons like Mindy Kaling, Shailene Woodley, Laverne Cox, Lena Dunham, Morrissey, FKA Twigs, and Sofia Coppola.

NOTE: As with all Skylight Books in-store events, this reading is free and open to the public (first come, first served).  But because we're expecting a large crowd at this event, we'll be giving out numbered tickets to the signing line to keep things organized:

• To get a ticket to the signing line, you must purchase a copy of Rookie Yearbook Four here at Skylight Books.
• If you'd like to pre-order the book before its October 20th release date, you can do so on our website at any time (add the book to your cart, below) and we will reserve a signing line ticket for you.
• Starting October 20th, you can buy books (and get your signing line ticket) in person, by phone, or via our website. Web pre-orders can also be picked up starting the 20th.
• For all website orders for this event, be sure to leave a note in the Order Comments field if you'd like a signing line ticket.
• Can't attend? If you would like a signed book but will not be able to attend, click Signed Copy after adding the book to your cart and we'll do our best to get it signed for you. You  may pick up this book in the store after the event, or have it shipped to you.
• Skylight's Friends with Benefits members get priority signing line tickets (and 20% off this and all other event books each month), so be sure to mention your membership (or join) when you order the book

Rookie Yearbook Four exclusives will include a teen bedroom diorama and motivational posters written by Willow Smith, an adolescence survival guide by Rashida Jones; conversations between Donna Tartt and Florence Welch, Solange and Ed Droste, and Tracee Ellis Ross with Jamia; illustrated peeks into the closet of Charli XCX and the artistic influences of Dev Hynes and Ezra Koenig; and Friend Crushes between folks like Shamir and Chloe Chaidez and Amandla Stenberg and Kiernan Shipka. More exclusives to come!

Tavi Gevinson is the editor-in-chief and founder of Rookie, an online magazine for teenage girls. Tavi’s career in media began when she created the blog Style Rookie in 2008 at age 11. She was profiled by The New Yorker in 2010, and in 2011, at 15, launched Rookie. Six days after its debut, Rookie received more than one million pageviews. Tavi has since spoken at TEDxTeen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sydney Opera House, the New Yorker Festival, the Commonwealth Club of California, the University of Wisconsin’s Distinguished Lecture Series, the Brooklyn Museum, the Melbourne Writers Festival, and the Economist's The World in 2011. Tavi is also an actress, having most recently starred in Kenneth Lonergan’s Tony-nominated This Is Our Youth on Broadway alongside Michael Cera and Kieran Culkin.

LINDA ROSENKRANTZ discusses her book TALK

Talk (New York Review of Books)

Friendships are built on chatter, on gossip, on revelations—on talk. Over the course of the summer of 1965, Linda Rosenkrantz taped conversations between three friends (two straight, one gay) on the cusp of thirty vacationing at the beach: Emily, an actor; Vince, a painter; and Marsha, a writer. The result was Talk, a novel in dialogue. The friends are ambitious, conflicted, jealous, petty, loving, funny, sex- and shrink-obsessed, and there’s nothing they won’t discuss. Topics covered include LSD, fathers, exes, lovers, abortions, S&M, sculpture, books, cats, and of course, each other.

Suffusing the characters’ banter are the feelings of freedom, indolence, and ennui that accompany summer. But despite its summery stillness, Talk takes place at a turning point for Emily, Marsha, and Vince, who are nearing 30 and for American culture at large. The sixties are in full swing, social mores are being thrown aside, and the three friends are fully caught up in this spirit of change. Talk was ahead of its time in recognizing the fascination and significance of nonfamily ties in contemporary life. It may be almost fifty years since Emily, Vince, and Marsha spent the season in East Hampton, but they wouldn’t be out of place on the set of Girls or in the pages of a novel like Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?

Praise for Talk

"Cool, astringent...something new, something beyond black humor or pop fiction." --The New Republic

"Utterly hip, utterly frank, utterly amoral." --New Haven Register

"The rawest of raw material is hashed over in detail, but with such clinical openness and enthusiasm that one is far more often delighted and stimulated than embarrassed or shocked." --James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy 

"The three [main characters] mercilessly dissect themselves and each other. Ostensibly everything goes in, with sudden realistic swerves of attention from the state of their souls and their sex-lives to the cooking--from egos to eggs, so to speak, which is very much the way life is...The pattern of self-revelation is far from coarse: it is eloquent and convincing, with its insights suddenly stumbled upon, its slender bridges of nervous sympathy that join each private island to the threatening outside world." --Norman Shrapnel, The Guardian 

"The characters are defined by speech alone, and the talk is of a kind that has been missing from literature...Miss Rosenkrantz's importance as a writer is to have shown, right away in her first book, that exact data can go into a novel without the pressures of conventional plot and character requirements." --Vogue

Linda Rosenkrantz is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Telegram, a history of the telegraphic communication, and her memoir, My Life as a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood, and the co-author of Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony in the Golden Age. She was also the founding editor of Auction magazine, a long-time syndicated columnist, and a founder of the popular baby-naming site Nameberry.com. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

BRUCE BAUMAN reads from his newest novel BROKEN SLEEP

Broken Sleep (Other Press)

Spanning 1940s to 2020s America and told with contagious vivacity, Broken Sleep knits the stories of four distinctly memorable characters into an indelible portrait of American culture that is at once sweeping, irreverent, and heartbreaking. When everyman Moses Teumer discovers that he has an aggressive form of leukemia, his search for a donor who can save him sets off a wild chain of events as he discovers that the woman who raised him is not his birth mother. Encompassing a Pynchon-esque saga of rock music, sex, drugs, art, and politics, this novel is an unforgettable examination of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in the name of commandeering our own destinies. 

After his diagnosis, Moses is led to his real mother, Salome Savant, a rebellious avant-garde artist who has spent her life in and out of a mental health facility. Salome’s son and Moses’s half-brother is Alchemy Savant, the mercurial front man of the world-renowned rock band The Insatiables. As Moses’s fate intertwines with Salome and Alchemy’s, the shocking secrets of his lineage and his Jewish identity are revealed. As Moses begins to lose his grip on the life he once thought he had, Alchemy abandons music to launch a political campaign to revolutionize 2020s America. Joining these characters is Ambitious Mindswallow, aka Ricky McFinn, who journeys from juvenile delinquency in Queens to being The Insatiables’ bassist and Alchemy’s Sancho Panza, along with an unforgettable constellation of artists, musicians, movie stars, and creatives who populate the twisted terrain of the Teumer and Savant family’s pasts and futures.

As each of Bauman’s characters comes closer to understanding their identity and the truth about their origins, the reader is gripped by this portrait of life lived to the fullest.  A colorful and provocative tale that takes the reader from Los Angeles to NYC to London to Brazil, Broken Sleep stuns with its propulsive energy and its hilarious and poignant observations about myth-making, the secrets we keep from one another, and how we come to terms with our pasts.

Praise for Broken Sleep

“Such a pleasure to plunge into this joyous kaleidoscope of a novel, a multi-voiced tumbling chorus of outrageous characters, hidden parenthood, secrets and discoveries, the gritty outré art world of the 1970s, rockers and mad visionaries and a man named Moses who just wants to live his life when illness forces him to open up the closed door of his family’s mysterious past. I haven’t seen a book with such energy and joy and sweeping delights since The World According to Garp. Bauman’s novel is a tour de force.” —Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander

“Consuming multitudes of novels before it and after, Bruce Bauman’s flipbook-epic spectacularly shuffles voice and memory—a careening travelogue on psychic terrains of fate, art, sex, madness, history, philosophy, rock ’n’ roll, the personal political, and laws of identity for which no statute of limitations can exist. This is raging, inspiration-jacked literary insomnia at the deepest hour of our brilliant dreaming.” —Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You and Zeroville

“Broken Sleep is a stunning, original, unpredictable novel, with a mix of wild voices and riveting, driving stories.  I love all the characters… The world that Bauman imagines is chilling and vivid, and there is an abundance of wisdom throughout the book, with startling insights on every page. The novel is a brilliant success—brave, wonderfully eccentric, utterly confident and engrossing.” —Joanna Scott, author of De Potter’s Grand Tour

“Broken Sleep is an unabashedly Big Think book that refuses to be categorized. On the surface it’s a roller coaster, jetting forward with ideas/observations on everything from avant-garde art to rock ’n’ roll renown to history and philosophy. Yet beneath the surface it is also a warm-hearted exploration of the deep messiness of families. Of parents, present and absent, and their children. Of siblings and spouses and volitional families of friends and bandmates. It’s a simultaneously poignant and exhilarating ride.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of After

“Broken Sleep could be considered the author’s great American retort to Stephen Dedalus’s declaration in Joyce’s Ulyssesthat ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’...Bauman’s philosophical, humorous, and compelling storytelling ponders many different riddles of exile—personal, political, artistic with an always acute eye and an unfailingly intense empathy.” —Anthony Miller, critic and author

"Bruce Bauman is one of the most engaging and engaged writers and thinkers that I know." —Rebecca Goldstein, author ofPlato at the Googleplex

Bruce Bauman is the author of the novel And the Word Was. Among his awards are a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship in Literature, a Durfee Foundation grant, and a UNESCO/Aschberg Fellowship. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, BOMB, Bookforum, and numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Bauman is an instructor in the CalArts MFA Writing Program and Critical Studies Department and has been Senior Editor of Black Clock literary magazine since its inception in 2003. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Suzan Woodruff.

ANDREA KLEINE reads from her debut novel CALF, and WALLY RUDOLPH reads from his new novel MIGHTY, MIGHTY

Calf (Soft Skull Press)                  

Mighty, Mighty (Soft Skull Press)

Join us tonight for a fantastic evening from one of our favorite publishers Soft Skull Press! 

The year was 1981. The US was entering a deep recession, Russia was our enemy, and John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan shocked the nation. It was also the year author Andrea Kleine learned her close childhood friend had been violently murdered by her socialite mother, Leslie DeVeau. Both events took place in Washington, DC. Hinckley and Deveau were both sent to St. Elizabeth's hospital, guilty by reason of insanity. It was there that they met, and later became lovers. These two real-life, and ultimately converging events inspired Klein's jaw-dropping, spine-tingling novel, CALF. Made up of dual narratives and told over the course of one year, Kleine's account follows a fictionalized John Hinkley in the lead-up to the assassination attempt, and Tammy, older sister to Steffi, the best friend of DeVeau's daughter, Kirin. Part Are You There God, It's Me Margaret and part Taxi Driver, this creepy, unsettling, and absolutely addictive novel shines a light on two terrible events, providing an unflinching depiction of violence, both intimate and sensational.

Praise for Calf

"In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr.'s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan rocked the nation. And Andrea Kleine's gripping novel,Calf will rock readers. This is a wonderfully unsettling book about love, loss, and unlikely connections." -- Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them

Wally Rudolph's Mighty, Mighty is a modern day fable set in a crumbling metropolis riddled with urban poverty and violence.

Dirty apartments, tattoo parlors, food kitchens - these are the markers of home for the struggling young adults around Chicago. Stefy is an artist at Ghost Town, the local tattoo shop, trying to provide for her younger sister Amanda and their ailing grandfather. Amanda is hoping for something better, seeking to escape a past riddled with addiction and an abusive relationship with Georgie. When he confronts her one drunken night at a dive bar, the situation turns violent: Amanda barely escapes with her life but Georgie lies dead on the bathroom floor. This one mistake puts the two sisters in the crosshairs of Georgie's father, a twisted, corrupt ex-cop now out for revenge over the murder of his son. His quest for vengeance will make the neighborhoods of Chicago tremble, leaving no one untouched. 

Mighty, Mighty is a harsh and realistic look at the struggle of two families desperately trying to get out from under the heavy boot of violence and poverty. Like the works of Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, the novel is a startling and accurate portrait of contemporary urban life.

Andrea Kleine is a writer and performance artist whose work has spanned dance, theater, film, literature, and interdisciplinary projects. She has received five MacDowell Colony fellowships and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship award. Her writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Everyday Genius, NYFA Current, and on her blog, The Dancers Will Win. Calf is her first novel.

Wally Rudolph is the author of the novels Mighty, Mighty (2015) and Four Corners (2014). His fiction has been published in Milk Money, Lines+Stars, The Brooklyner, and others. A graduate of The Second City Conservatory in Chicago, he now resides with his family in Los Angeles. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films and TV shows including Sons of Anarchy, Hawaii 5-0, Street Kings, and Bang Bang.

WHAT BOOKS PRESENTS ANNETTE LEDDY, GAIL WRONSKY, and CHUCK ROSENTHAL

Please join us for a special night with three authors from one of our favorite local presses, What Books Press. 

Earth Still

Playful and slyly original, Earth Still tells the story of Patricia, a museum curator and the mother of a young son, who falls for a new neighbor, Rennie, in the aftermath of an alien spaceship’s unexplained landing in present day Los Angeles. The presence of the ship, along with the apparent absence of a pilot, precipitates a social crisis, while Patricia’s affair with the mysterious Rennie creates its own tensions. Referencing art house film directors Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, Italian Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti, and classic science fiction movies, Earth Still is a transfiguring love story, a meditation on the interrelationship of science fiction and visual art, and a riveting fantasy about our obsession with aliens.

Annette Leddy is a writer, critic, and curator. In 2009 she was awarded an arts writer grant from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation and in 2013 was a resident at Montalvo Center for the Arts. Currently she is the New York Collector for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Leddy’s fiction has appeared in Quarterly West and Quarry. Four of her short stories were performed as part of the New Short Fiction series in Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn.

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The Shortest Farewells Are the Best

"The Shortest Farewells Are the Best is a clever and hilarious tour de force. With lines culled from dozens of noir films ranging from the famous to the obscure, Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky have fashioned a brilliant literary collage that is as entertaining as it is thought provoking. I haven’t the foggiest notion of how they came up with the idea for this book, but I’m certainly glad their off-kilter muse paid them a visit."—Tom Hazuka, editor of Flash Fiction Funny 

"Never was there a world where people talked like that—precise, salty, bracingly honest—and maybe that’s darn too bad. Meanwhile, we can console ourselves with Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky’s poems composed of come-ons, smack-downs, threats and enticements spoken by actual B-movie actors. These might read like madhouse non sequitors, but crazy funny, or they might resolve themselves into conversations that seem to make darkly paradoxal sense. The wicked fun the two have with this 40s and 50s dialogue proves what some of us have always suspected, Noir is Poetry’s evil twin. Evil, that is, in a good way."—Suzanne Lummis, author of the poetry collection Open 24 Hours

Gail Wronsky is the author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty, a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Award,The Love-talkers, Again the Gemini are in the Orchard, and Dogland. Her translation of Alicia Partnoy's poems Volando Bajito has been published by Red Hen, and she is the coauthor with Molly Bendall of two books of "cowgirl" poetry: Calamity and Belle, A Cowgirl Correspondence and Dear Calamity, Love Belle. Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, a chapbook of poems about India where she lived for several months in 2006, has been published by Hollyridge Press.
 
Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels:  the Loop Trilogy: Loop’s Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, andLoop’s End; Elena of the Stars; Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac; My Mistress Humanity; The Heart of Mars; and the current Coyote O’Donohughe’s History of Texas.  He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan.  In the fall of 2012 he published his second book of Magic Journalism, West of Eden: A Life in 21st Century Los Angeles. His novel Ten Thousand Heavens was published in 2013 by Whitepoint Press.

EILEEN MYLES reads from her new collection of poetry I MUST BE LIVING TWICE

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (Ecco Press)

Eileen’s poetry and fiction is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers peer into existent places—notably the East Village, where she lives—but also lifts them into dreams, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet’s previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine her sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles’ stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide open lens into a radical life.

Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Grant and a 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. She lives in New York.

MICHAEL MALLORY discusses his new book ESSENTIAL HORROR MOVIES: MATINEE MONSTERS TO CULT CLASSICS

Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics (Rizzoli International)

“Do you like scary movies?” If your answer is yes, and you are ready to come face-to-face with some of the most terrifying vampires, werewolves, ghouls, zombies, psychos (and other creatures that go bump in the night), you will want to check out Michael Mallory’s Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics.  This terrifyingly illustrated volume of the greatest, scariest, and most influential fright films is sure to be become the definitive book on the subject.

Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics chronicles a century’s worth of cinematic terror: from such silent masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to such Golden Era classics as Dracula (1931) and richly colored shockers as House of Wax (1953) to such groundbreaking independent thrillers as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Mallory goes on to spotlight modern horrors from the devilish trio of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen(1976) to the terrifying residences of The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1980). With Alien (1979), we learned that in space no one can hear you scream and no one wanted to go into the water with Jaws (1975). And, how can we forget the likes of Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, and Jigsaw?

Behind-the-scenes anecdotes, trivia, and photos complete the story of these essential motion pictures. Mallory’s tome is not simply a catalog of horror films; it is a study of where the genre came from, how it has progressed, and what motion pictures have contributed to that evolution, set against a backdrop of cultural history. Anyone who has ever loved to be scared by a truly great masterpiece of terror—or even a film that strives for nothing more than to provide the audience with spooky, corny fun—will find Essential Horror Movies a veritable scream!

Michael Mallory is an internationally-recognized authority on film history and animation. He has written six non-fiction books on popular culture subjects, as well as some 600 magazine and newspaper articles. His books include Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror, and X-Men: The Characters and Their Universe, and he has contributed to other volumes including Animation Art, The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons, and the Walt’s Peopleseries and co-authored the memoirs of animation legend Iwao Takamoto.  Mallory has been interviewed by many news outlets, including E! Entertainment Television, BBC Radio, CBC Radio, The New York Times, TV Guide, and USA Today.

SHEA SERRANO presents THE RAP YEAR BOOK with DEVON MALONEY, SEAN FENNESSEY and CHRIS RYAN

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed (Abrams Books)

JUST ANNOUNCED: Former editor for Grantland, Chris Ryan will be joining the panel this evening.

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed takes readers on a journey that begins in 1979, widely regarded as the moment rap became recognized as part of the cultural and musical landscape, and comes right up to the present. Shea Serrano deftly pays homage to the most important song of each year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music from artists backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles among its major players both personal and professional. Covering East Coast and West Coast, famous rapper feuds, chart toppers, and show stoppers, The Rap Year Book is an in-depth look at the most influential genre of music to come out of the last generation. 

Complete with infographics, lyric maps, hilarious and informative footnotes, portraits of the artists, and short essays by other prominent music writers, The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created. 

Shea Serrano is an award-winning writer, author, and illustrator. His first book, Bun B’s Rap Coloring and Activity Book, was widely praised, receiving accolades from Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, MTV, and more. Currently, he is a staff writer for Grantland.

Devon Maloney is a journalist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York magazine, WIRED, GQ, Grantland, Vice, Nylon, Out, Billboard, Pitchfork, MTV, the Village Voice and Spin.

Sean Fennessey is a deputy editor at Grantland. He lives in Los Angeles with 10,000 CDs he ignores.

JEREMIE GUEZ reads from his new novel EYES FULL OF EMPTY, with JAMES ELLROY

Eyes Full of Empty (Unnamed Press)

From France’s hottest young crime writer, comes a hardboiled noir with the pace of a Chandler novel and the French Algerian literary legacy of Camus.

Idir is not your typical Parisian detective. The son of an Algerian immigrant who made good, Idir’s middle class upbringing places him at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to his rich friends from university, while his street smarts make him just intimidating enough to handle the secret problems of Paris’s elite. Put another way, Idir knows precisely how much pressure to exert on behalf of his wealthy clients, while keeping things low profile. That is, until Oscar Crumley, a powerful media mogul, hires Idir to find his missing younger half-brother, Thibaut. Sent on a wild goose chase through highs and lows of the Paris underground, Idir must navigate upper crust treachery and entrenched criminal rings to discover the truth. Echoing the headlong impulsiveness of Chandler’s Marlowe, and deftly translated by Edward Gauvin, Eyes Full of Emptyintroduces us to an entirely new kind of Parisian mystery.

Jěrěmie Guez was born in Paris in 1988 and has been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels, Balanceě dans les cordes and Paris la unit, were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respectively. Eyes Full of Empty is the highly anticipated first English translation of Jěrěmie Guez’s work. He lives in Paris.

Edward Gauvin is a prolific translator and the recipient of numerous awards. His work has been featured most recent ly inThe New York Times, Tin House, Best European Fiction 2014, PEN America, Words Without Borders, and Gigantic, among others. He lives in San Jose, CA. 

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz,and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. His newest novel, Perfidia, is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II. 

UC RIVERSIDE MFA STUDENTS read from their work

Please join us this afternoon as alumni and students in the University of California, Riverside Master of Fine Arts writing program come together and read from their work. Readers include David Campos, Deb Durham, Andy Holt, Ruth Nolan, Nicole Olweean and Alex Ratanapratum.

David Campos is the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press 2015), winner of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Huizache, The Packinghouse Review, Verdad, and Miramar, among other journals and magazines. He is a Canto Mundo Fellow and lives in Fresno, California. 
 
 Deb Durham immigrated to California from the untamed cornfields of Southern Indiana for the sole purpose of writing nonfiction creatively. Her abiding obsessions include teen romance novels of the 1950's and her chihuahua Rockhudson. 

Andy Holt was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. As a result, his blood is mostly lemon-lime Gatorade. He is currently working on a crime novel set in the wilds of suburban Florida.
 
Ruth Nolan, M.F.A., M.A., is a Mojave Desert/Coachella Valley-­based author and professor whose writing is grounded in the California desert, where she’s lived for most of her life, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert. She is editor of the critically-acclaimed anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts, published by Heyday Books, Berkeley. She is writing a memoir about her work as a wildland firefighter in the California Desert District and Western U.S. for the BLM and USFS in the 1980’s. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in Rattling Wall, Short Fiction Los Angeles (Red Hen Press 2016), New California Writing (Heyday), Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Sierra Club Desert Report, the Desert Oracle and many other publications. She blogs about life in the desert for KCET Artbound Los Angeles, Inlandia Literary Journeys, and Heyday, and leads writing and
literature seminars at the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park and for many other colleges and organizations. She is a 2014 graduate of the UCR Low Residency Creative Writing and Creative Writing for the Performing Arts program.

Nicole Olweean is a second year poet in UCR's MFA program. She is originally from Michigan, where many of the people and places that inspire her work still remain. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge and Bird's Thumb. 

Alex Ratanapratum is a Thai/American poet from Orange County, California. He received his B.A.s from CSULB in English Literature and Creative Writing and is in his second year at UCR. He has been a workshop leader for Cambodia's first literary journal Nou Hach in Phnom Penh, and his poems have been published in Rip Rap, Nou Hach, and The Asian American Literary Review.

MATT BELL reads from his new novel SCRAPPER, with AMELIA GRAY

Scrapper (Soho Press)

In Scrapper, Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again. 

Praise for Scrapper:

"Scrapper is an offering to the grim phoenix rising out of the ashes of Industrial America—elegy, eulogy, and prophesy. Readers: listen and attend!"—Aaron Gwyn, author of Wynne's War and Dog on the Cross

"Scrapper is a meditative, moody work of art. It's about love and violence, hope and ruin, a kind of superhero story for adults. Matt Bell is truly gifted and his latest offers more proof that he's a writer we should all be reading."—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

"Matt Bell adds his song to the poetry inherent in the image of the abandoned city. Here, in his fierce second novel,Scrapper, Bell mines Detroit, the zone, with Kelly, an unforgettably rendered ruin, an 'unaccomodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal,' who yet amazes with his capacity to love." —Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends

"In the imaginative, mysterious, and beautiful Scrapper, Matt Bell delves into the complexity of ruins: the wider American ruins and the local personal ruins. This is an evocative novel that lingers over what has been abandoned and shows us how the places we inhabit shape who we are and how we are."—Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

"A fearless and harrowing meditation on the ruination and transformation of cities and of people; but amid loss and destruction, Bell finds a strain of piercing hope. This is an extraordinary book."—Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"Like the very best novels, Matt Bell's dark and suspenseful Scrapper works on so many levels that it's difficult to describe in just a few words, but what I can tell you is that it's ultimately about love and death, and that people will still be reading it when all of America, not just Detroit, is crumbling under the weight of its mistakes." —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She lives in Los Angeles.