Skylight Books Podcast Series

PIT To LAX: My Story Worthy Life (Story Worthy Publishing)

 For Christine Blackburn, the youngest of six kids growing up in Pittsburgh, the idea of living in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment industry seemed like a dream (or at least something you only saw on television). Instead she took a circuitous route—first as a flight attendant, then in the Peace Corps—with some unforeseen setbacks: a rare cancer diagnosis at age 31. With a survivorʼs renewed sense of urgency, Blackburn finally found the courage to take the leap to Los Angeles and pursue her life as a performer, or at least... as a contestant on “The Dating Game.” PIT to LAX: My Story Worthy Life is a series of memories about loving, losing, and letting go, which will inspire you and stay with you long after youʼve left its last pages. With PIT to LAX: My Story Worthy Life, Christine Blackburn proves she has indeed lived a Story Worthy Life.

Praise for PIT to LAX: My Story Worthy Life:

“Christine has written a frank and funny collection of stories. You'll be laughing out loud one minute and then she'll hit you with a poignancy that you didn't see coming. Reading this book is like getting sucker punched in the best way possible.” -ANNABELLE GURWITCH, New York Times Bestselling author of I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT: Compliments, Indiginities and Survival Stories From The Edge of 50

“Hey you, read this book! So what if you don't necessarily know who the author is, she had an interesting life, went to the Peace Corps, survived cancer and a lot of other stuff. Just buy it already. If you don't like it I'll give you your money back.” -TODD GLASS, author of The Todd Glass Situation

“This book will take you on the unique journey of Blackburn's life. It will make you think, feel and laugh. I loved it.” -YAKOV SMIRNOFF, Comedian, Actor, Professor

“From going to the bathroom in a bucket in Tonga while serving in the Peace Corps to undergoing chemotherapy with a doctor named Donald Trump, Blackburn shares and laughs at her many adventures (and misadventures) with heart, humor, and optimism. The optimism which carried her to California, and ultimately saved her life.”-LILIBET SNELLINGS, author of BOX GIRL: My Part-Time Job as an Art Installation

Christine Blackburn is a contributing writer for the Huffington Post, comedian, producer, host, and creator of the highly acclaimed Story Worthy Podcast and the game show, Shotgun Story Worthy. Christine has been seen in over 50 national commercials and spent two years on the USA Network program, Ready For The Weekend Movie. Christine is passionate about music, tennis, and sushi. She lives with her daughter in Los Angeles.

More information including live performance dates and video can be found www.storyworthymedia.com

World Gone By (William Morrow & Company)

 Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of The Given Day and Live by Night, returns with a psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.

Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin's enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe's son, Tomas, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife's homeland.

A master who moves in and out of the black, white, and Cuban underworlds, Joe effortlessly mixes with Tampa's social elite, U.S. Naval intelligence, the Lansky-Luciano mob, and the mob-financed government of Fulgencio Batista. He has everything--money, power, a beautiful mistress, and anonymity.

But success cannot protect him from the dark truth of his past--and ultimately, the wages of a lifetime of sin will finally be paid in full.

Dennis Lehane vividly recreates the rise of the mob during a world at war, from a masterfully choreographed Ash Wednesday gun battle in the streets of Ybor City to a chilling, heartbreaking climax in a Cuban sugar cane field. Told with verve and skill, World Gone By is a superb work of historical fiction from one of "the most interesting and accomplished American novelists" (Washington Post) writing today.

Dennis Lehane is the author of ten novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; Moonlight Mile; and Live by Night, as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He and his wife, Angie, divide their time between Boston and the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Aquarium (Grove Press)

 Please welcome back to Skylight Books one of our favorite authors, David Vann!

 Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother—a docker at the local container port—in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamored of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother toward a precipice of terrifying consequence.

In crystalline, chiseled, yet graceful prose, Aquarium takes us into the heart of a brave young girl whose longing for love and capacity for forgiveness transforms the damaged people around her. Relentless and heartbreaking, primal and redemptive,Aquarium is a transporting story from one of the best American writers of our time.

Published in twenty languages, David Vann’s previous books—A Mile Down; Legend of a Suicide; Caribou Island; Last Day On Earth; Dirt; and Goat Mountain—have won enormous critical acclaim. A former Guggenheim fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, John L’Heureux fellow, and NEA fellow, he has taught at Stanford, Cornell, FSU, USF, holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell, and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.

Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press)

 Rapid change is part of life in the twenty-first century, and we must all adjust to an evolving world. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it nearly impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists and those whose work supports them—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work.

As a group, artists, writers, and musicians have never been rich, but for most of American history, Scott Timberg argues, they have been able to build modest middle class lives through diligent work. Today, even artists who are quite successful—musicians with loyal fans and respected albums, award-winning novelists, visual artists with work in museum collections, architects with national reputations—cannot hold onto the benefits of the middle class: stable housing, access to healthcare, and educational opportunities for their kids. Along with artists themselves, the institutions and structures that have traditionally supported them have been decimated. Publishers, booksellers, galleries, record and video stores, radio stations, and newspapers have hemorrhaged jobs in a world of instantly available digital content and music piracy.

In addition to a brutal recession and a tidal wave of technology, Timberg examines other drivers of the crisis. Trends in academia have devalued literature, focusing instead on impenetrable theory. An avant garde that disdains “middlebrow” artistic production has led to a shrinking audience for art. Radio monopolies have homogenized the airwaves. The music industry has invested almost all resources in a tiny number of hitmakers. Perhaps most important, entrenched stereotypes of artists as idle dreamers or entitled bohemians, rather than hardworking, highly trained professionals, have made it hard for the broader society to see their vital economic and cultural contribution. Americans respond with more sympathy for job losses in the agrarian economy or in manufacturing than to similarly devastating losses in the creative economy.  

Timberg considers both the human costs and the unintended consequences for America if the people who create and support culture cannot stay in the middle class. When only the  independently wealthy can afford to engage in creative pursuits, he warns, culture becomes more narrow, robbed of important and critical perspectives.  When artists and artisans can’t make a living, we all pay the price.

Full of original reporting and thoughtful analysis, Culture Crash provides a sweeping overview of a very real crisis affecting real workers and their families as well as the broader culture. It is alarming and essential reading for anyone who works in a creative field, knows someone who does, or cares about the work artists produce.

Praise for Culture Crash:

“Scott Timberg has written an original and important study. He explores some of the most pressing cultural issues affecting the arts and intellectual life with remarkable clarity. This is the first analysis of our current culture from the bottom up—the precarious situation of the individual artists, writers, and musicians who are now struggling to survive.”—Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“I read Scott Timberg’s pieces every week without fail. It’s great to see his book Culture Crash debunk the mumbo jumbo about the long tail, file-sharing, free information, and positive thinking —and take a hard look at what it all means for artists, musicians, critics and teachers.”—Dean Wareham, lead singer of Luna and author of Black Postcards: A Memoir

“We’ve all had the feeling of these enormous changes—long in the making, not ‘at the last minute’—but Scott Timberg has the synthesis that makes them make sense. Culture Crash throws a clear, defining light on the squeeze that digitally-based economies have put on our artists, the analog makers who have always defined us to ourselves. A hugely important book.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known it.  He mourns the loss of independent book- and record-store clerks who evangelized for quality.  He grieves for artists' ‘day jobs’, which allowed creative workers a toehold in the middle-class. Culture Crash is an urgent, necessary book (or eBook) for anyone who has ever been moved by a song, a film, a paragraph or a painting. Without the humanities, Timberg cautions, we may lose our humanity.”—M.G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and The Accidental Feminist

Scott Timberg is a Los Angeles-based culture writer, contributing writer for Salon, and onetime LA Times arts reporter who has contributed to The New York Times, GQ, and The Hollywood Reporter. He is the co-editor, along with Dana Gioia, of the anthology The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he runs ArtsJournal’s CultureCrash blog and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

Janet Fitch is the author of the novels Paint It Black and White Oleander. Her short stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Los Angeles Noir, and she is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.  A film version of Paint It Black has been recently shot in Silverlake and downtown.  She is currently finishing a novel set during the Russian Revolution. Her publisher, Little Brown, owned by Hachette Book Group,  went 14 rounds with marketing giant Amazon last year.

Ongoingness: The End of A Diary (Graywolf Press)

 In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice.

Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity amid the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.

Praise for Ongoingness:

“The memoir form is shaken up and reinvented in this brilliant meditation on time and record-keeping. Ongoingness is a short book but there’s nothing small about it. Sarah Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit.”—Jenny Offill

“It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians, Sarah Manguso’s work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso’s books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe.”—David Shields

“After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time—about mortality. I can’t think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.”—Miranda July

Sarah Manguso is the author of two memoirs, The Guardians and The Two Kinds of Decay, two poetry collections, and a short story collection. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and theNew York Times Magazine. Born and raised near Boston, she was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles.

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories (Counterpoint)

Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connected to their land--sometimes through love, sometimes through hate--and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. Retired strip miners find themselves victimized by the industry that supported them; a family breaks down along generation lines over a fracking lease; children transcend addict parents and adult suicide; an urban woman must confront her skepticism about worlds behind this one when she finds bones through a mysterious force she can't name.

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley explores poverty, class, environmental breakdown and social collapse while also affirming the world's sacredness. Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect is both pitch-perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her firsthand knowledge of her rural place and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families may remind one of Alice Munro.

Praise for Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley

"[P]owerful, sure-footed and haunting..."--The New York Times

"Pancake's novel is shockingly pure, like holding gold in your hands, or wheat--all the chaff winnowed away." --Orion Magazine

"Lush descriptions of the landscape are matched with a hurtling stream-of-consciousness narration to great effect: one doubts neither the characters' voices nor their places in a very complex poverty." --Publishers Weekly

Ann Pancake’s most recent book is Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (Counterpoint 2015).  Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Counterpoint), was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award.  Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (University Press of New England) won the  Bakeless award, and she has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and a Pushcart Prize.  Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best.  She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Turtleface and Beyond: Stories (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Please welcome back to Skylight Books, one of our favorite short story writers, Arthur Bradford!

 Paddling down a remote, meandering river, Georgie's friend Otto decides to do something both spectacular and stupid: He scales a sandy cliff that rises from the water and runs down its steep face, preparing for a triumphant running dive. As his friends look on, they watch something awful unfold: Otto lands with an odd smack and knocks himself unconscious, blood spilling from his nose and mouth. Georgie arrives on the scene first and sees a small turtle, its shell cracked, floating just below the water's surface.

Otto and the turtle survive the collision, though both need help, and Georgie finds his compassions torn. This title story sets the tone for the rest of Arthur Bradford's Turtleface and Beyond, a strangely funny collection featuring prosthetically limbed lovers, a snakebitten hitchhiker turned wedding crasher, a lawyer at the end of his rope, a menage a trois at Thailand's Resort Tik Tok, and a whole host of near disasters, narrow escapes, and complicated victories, all narrated by Georgie, who struggles with his poor decisions but finds redemption in the telling of each of his tales. Big-hearted and hilariously high-fueled, Turtleface and Beyondmarks the return of a beloved and unforgettable voice in fiction.

Praise for Turtleface and Beyond:

“Arthur Bradford’s work is uncategorizable and unprecedented, but if pressed, you could call it the improbable spawn of Raymond Carver and Roald Dahl. His stories are hilarious and strange, playful and deadpan, and often involve animals and strange injuries to these animals or their human friends. The world of Bradford’s fiction is populated by dreamers, doofuses, banalities, and mysteries, and somehow it’s a world you don’t want to leave.”—Dave Eggers

“Turtleface and Beyond is filled with glorious little fables that are both yummy and nourishing.”—Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park and The Book of Mormon

“Arthur Bradford has the strange, poetic humor of a real writer, but his outlandish plots involving animals and/or underachievers read like pulpy page-turners. While reading Turtleface and Beyond, I couldn’t wait to find out what happened to these injured reptiles and oversexed beach bums.”—Sarah Vowell

“Arthur Bradford’s stories are told plainly yet seductively. You might call them funny and lovely and laconic until you get to the twist and damage that swims beneath them like an unseen snapping turtle. They take straight roads to crooked places and I would read them all day until I was done and you should too.”—John Hodgman

“Writer and filmmaker Bradford will appeal to David Sedaris fans willing to visit the wrong side of the tracks . . . With bad choices and bizarre situations aplenty, Turtleface and Beyond encourages the reader simply to laugh at the strange turns life can take.”—Booklist

Arthur Bradford is an O. Henry Award–winning writer and Emmy-nominated filmmaker. He is the author of Dogwalker, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, McSweeny’s, VICE, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and serves as the co-director of Camp Jabberwocky, the nation’s longest-running residential summer camp for people with disabilities.

There's Something I Want You To Do: Stories (Pantheon Books)

From one of the great masters of the contemporary short story, here is an astonishing collection that showcases Charles Baxter'sunique ability to unveil the remarkable in the seemingly inconsequential moments of an eerie yet familiar life.

Penetrating and prophetic, the ten inter-related stories in There's Something I Want You to Do are held together by a surreally intricate web of cause and effect--one that slowly ensnares both fictional bystanders and enraptured readers. Benny, an architect and hopeless romantic, is robbed on his daily walk along the Mississippi River, and the blow of a baseball bat to the back of his knee feels like a strike from God. A drug dealer named Black Bird reads "Othello" while waiting for customers in a bar. Elijah, a pediatrician and the father of two, is visited nightly by visions of Alfred Hitchcock. Meanwhile, a dog won't stop barking, a passenger on a transatlantic flight reads aloud from the book of Psalms during turbulence, and a scream carries itself through the early-morning Minneapolis air.

As the collection progresses, we delve more deeply into the private lives of these characters, exploring their fears, fantasies, and obsessions. They appear and reappear, performing praiseworthy and loathsome acts in equal measure in response to the request--or demand--lodged in each story's center. The result is a portrait of human nature as seen from the tightrope that spans the distance between dreams and waking life--a portrait that could have arisen only from Baxter's singular vision. Readers will be stunned by his uncanny understanding of human attraction and left to puzzle over the meaning of virtue and the unpredictable and mysterious ways in which we behave.

Praise for There's Something I Want You To Do

“These accomplished stories of precarious marriages and family strife are so laced with paradox and the unexpected and so psychologically intricate, one turns them over and over in one’s mind, seeking patterns and gleaning insights…. Rooted in Minneapolis, its industrial ruins so poetically rendered, these ravishing, funny, and compassionate stories redefine our perceptions of vice and virtue, delusion and reason, love and loss.” —Booklist, *starred review*

“Bare storylines can’t convey the quickly captivating simple narratives…or the revealing moments to which Baxter brings the reader…Similarly, Baxter, a published poet, at times pushes his fluid, controlled prose to headier altitudes, as in ‘high wispy cirrus clouds threatening the sky like promissory notes.’ Nearly as organic as a novel, this is more intriguing, more fun in disclosing its connective tissues through tales that stand well on their own.” —Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*

 “Five stories named for virtues and five for vices make up this collection from a master craftsman….Baxter’s characters muddle through small but pivotal moments, not so much confrontations as crossroads between love and destruction, desire and death….The prose resonates with distinctive turns of phrase that capture human ambiguity and uncertainty: trouble waits patiently at home, irony is the new chastity, and a dying man lives in the house that pain designed for him.” —Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

“Baxter’s delightful stories will make readers hungry for more. Fortunately, there are more out there, and one hopes, more to come.” —Library Journal, *starred review*

“Charles Baxter is nothing short of a national literary treasure. To read these stories—hilarious, tragic, surprising, and indelibly human—is to receive revelation at the hands of a master. Who but this writer has such intimate knowledge of our most shameful depths, and who else can illuminate them with such stunning aptness of word and thought? These ten linked stories, fraught with loneliness, ultimately reveal the unbreakable ties between us all.” —Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Under Water

“With his latest collection, Charles Baxter has given us something altogether new in contemporary fiction: a series of moral tales that contain zero moralizing. At the center of each of these stories is a pivotal request—something I want you to do—and the ensuing narratives unfold with the nuanced complexity we’ve come to expect from Baxter, with a theological acumen few contemporary writers possess. Here is a cast of characters unparalleled since Sherwood Anderson’s Book of Grotesques, with a modern-day Minneapolis as tangible and strange as his Winesburg, Ohio. A stunning and unique work from one of the living masters of the story form.” —Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More

“Charles Baxter’s stories proceed with steady grace, nimble humor, quiet authority, and thrilling ingeniousness. In this his latest collection, all is on display—as are his honoring of the mysteries of love and his dramatic explorations of American manners, mores, family, solitude, and art. He is a great writer.” —Lorrie Moore, author of Bark

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Gryphon, Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, andHarmony of the World.  The stories “Bravery” and “Charity,” which appear in There’s Something I Want You to Do, were included inBest American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Stone in the Sky (Roaring Brook Press) The Baseball Player and the Walrus (Dial Books)

Please join us tonight as we celebrate the launch of Cecil Castellucci's Stone in the Sky, as well as the paperback release of Tin Star and the 10th anniversary of the release of Boy Proof, which was just named as one of the top 100 best YA Books of All Time by Time Magazine! For today's event Cecil will be joined by Ben Loory, who will be launching his first children's book The Baseball Player and the Walrus!

"Brother Blue.

His name, even the color, filled me with a furious fire of pure hatred."

Years ago, Tula Bane was beaten and left for dead on a remote space station far from Earth, her home planet. She started with nothing and had no one, but over time, she found a home, a family, and even love. When it's discovered that the abandoned planet beneath the station is abundant with a rare and valuable resource, aliens from across the galaxy race over to strike it rich. With them comes trouble, like the man who nearly killed Tula years ago—the man she has dreamed of destroying ever since.

In this sequel to Tin Star, Cecil Castellucci takes readers on an extraordinary adventure through space in a thrilling and thoughtful exploration of what it means to love, to hate, and to be human.

Cecil Castellucci is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow and award-winning author of twelve books for young adults, including Boy Proof, The Plain Janes,First Day on Earth, Year of the Beasts, and Tin Star. She lives in Los Angeles.

. . .

From acclaimed short-story writer Ben Loory comes a sweet and poignant story of friendship.

Once there was a famous baseball player who seemed to have it all. He made lots of money and had fans from around the world. But, he didn’t have the one thing he wanted most—happiness. That is until he went to the zoo. There the baseball player sees a walrus who “makes funny noises” and “flaps its flippers” in glee, and he decides he wants the walrus in his life.

When the baseball player leaves his job to spend more time with his new best friend, trouble arises in zoo paradise. Hopefully, the pair can find a compromise that will keep everyone happy and even leave a little time for one last game.

The Baseball Player and the Walrus brings the love of baseball and of friendship together in a humorous story of how we find happiness in the most surprising of places.

Author Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles and is the acclaimed author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, which Kirkus has called “one of kind.” His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and on NPR’s This American Life. Visit him at www.benloory.com.

Illustrator Alexander Latimer lives on the outskirts of a national park, where rogue porcupines wander the nearby streets, though he has yet to find any walruses. He is also the author of The Boy Who Cried Ninja, Lion vs. Rabbit, Pig and Small, andPenguin’s Hidden Talent. Visit him at www.alexlatimer.co.za.

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories (Doubleday Books)

The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine brilliant stories that prove he is a master of the short form as well as the novel.

Jonathan Lethem stretches new literary muscles in this scintillating new collection of stories. Some of these tales--such as "Pending Vegan," which wonderfully captures a parental ache and anguish during a family visit to an aquatic theme park--are, in Lethem's words, "obedient (at least outwardly) to realism." Others, like "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear, " which deftly and hilariously captures the solipsism of blog culture, feature "the uncanny and surreal elements that still sometimes erupt in my short stories."

The tension between these two approaches, and the way they inform each other, increase the reader's surprise and delight as one realizes how cleverly Lethem is playing with form. Devoted fans of Lethem will recognize familiar themes and tropes--the anxiety of influence pushed to reduction ad absurdum in "The King of Sentences"; a hapless outsider trying to summon up bravado in "The Porn Critic;" characters from the comics stranded on a desert island; the necessity and the impossibility of action against authority in "Procedure in Plain Air." As always, Lethem's work, humor, and poignancy work in harmony; people strive desperately for connection through words and often misdirect deeds; and the sentences are glorious.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including Dissident Gardens, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Gun, with Occasional Music. He lives in Brooklyn.

Kaufman's Hill (Bancroft Press)

A profound and intensely moving boyhood memoir, Kaufman's Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by the Creely bullies, who often terrify him. It's the Pittsburgh of the early and mid-1960s, a threshold time just before the counter-culture arrives, and a time when suburban society begins to encroach on Kaufman's Hill, the boy's sanctuary and the setting of many of his adventures. As the hill and the 1950s vanish into the twilight, so does the world of the narrator's boyhood.

Praise for Kaufman's Hill

"Kaufman's Hill is among the most touching, sensitive, and spellbinding memoirs I've encountered in many years. Beautifully and exactly written, this book will surely reach into the hearts of its readers. I was deeply moved."--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“[Kaufman's Hill is] the best book on American boyhood in decades.”--Howard Zinn, author of People's History of the United States

"Kaufman's Hill is a vivid and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of boys and bullies on the edge of post-industrial America. Hampsey's haunting, lyrical world thrums with the dark, erratic rhythms that lie below the surface of our seemingly ordinary childhoods. He makes me remember mine differently, somehow." -- Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

"Hampsey has written a gem of a memoir. As powerful, poignant, funny and deeply moving as anything I've read since Russell Baker's masterpiece, Growing Up. Someone should make a movie of this."--Mark Mathabane, author of Kaffir Boy

John C. Hampsey is professor of Romantic and Classical Literature at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he has won the University Distinguished Teaching Award. Previously, he taught at Boston University and MIT. He received his BA from Holy Cross College and his PhD from Boston College. He is currently working on a novel—Soda Lake, an existential mystery mixed with interconnected imaginary portraits. During his career, Hampsey has had more than thirty stories and essays published in such places as The Gettysburg Review (four times), The Midwest Quarterly, Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Arizona Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Witness, Colby Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and McNeese Review, among many others. His previous book Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought was published by University of Virgina Press in 2005.

Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio)

Join us tonight at Skylight Books for the brilliant debut from a rising "star" (couldn't help it)  of fiction, Sarah Gerard!

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Sarah Gerard’s debut novel Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend, John. On a road trip around the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism and believe they’ve found a direction.

Though she has misgivings about their newfound ideology, the narrator’s involvement becomes critical to the couple’s plan to “take down the sick system.” Trapped in a self-destructive constellation of lies and self-defining, superficial obsessions, she forces herself to complete the semester while preparing the political “action” she and John have planned for the summer. Meanwhile, John’s drinking is spiraling out of control with dangerous results, and they’re closer together than ever.

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick; a society that sells diet pills and sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight, or too much weight, or put on weight; and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success—a cataclysmic story of the quest for perfection.

Praise for Binary Star

"Sarah Gerard's star is rising."--The Millions

"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way."--Jenny Offill

"I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it."--Kate Zambreno

"Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard's young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity--ideological, mental, physical--comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is 'I want to look at the sky and understand.'"--Justin Taylor

"By now I've read Binary Star twice, and I've become so entwined with it that I'm reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I've never read anything like it."--Harry Mathews

"Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard's first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage."--Simon Van Booy

Sarah Gerard's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine's "The Cut," Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of The New School's MFA program for fiction.

Sweet Nothing: Stories (Mulholland Books)

Richard Lange is one of our most highly acclaimed literary mystery writers. He has been hailed as a “natural-born storyteller” and compared to great masters like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson. His debut, Dead Boys, was called “one of the best short story collections of the past 50 years” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and it put his name on the literary map. Now he returns to the form that started it all with his latest collection, Sweet Nothing.

A gambler tries to hide his addiction on a date at the racetrack. An ex-con must decide between cashing in on a lucrative heist and staying the course as a small-time security guard. And a recovering drug addict yearns to connect with a beautiful woman during his graveyard shift at Subway. With the dark side of Los Angeles as a backdrop, these ten unforgettable stories artfully combine the honest characterization of Junot Díaz with the edge-of-your-seat energy of Dennis Lehane. They capture and crystallize the mistakes and poor judgments that truly make us human, and reveal how a moment’s misstep can irrevocably shape a life. 

Praise for Sweet Nothing:

“Skillfully constructed.…Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made.”—Booklist

“For all the darkness that runs through the stories…Lange maintains a disarmingly light touch, finding plenty of human comedy in the proceedings without sacrificing empathy.…Lange’s morality tales are not that far removed from the classic stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant. With a distinctive style, Lange makes his downbeat tales of the underclass quirkily entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly believable postcards from the edge; for those who like their realism not so magical but right there at street level.” —Library Journal

“The best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you’re down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit.”—James Sallis, author of Drive

“What makes this collection a wonderful read is that it’s only marginally akin to anything else. Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master.”—Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Thicket and Edge of Dark Water

“I’ve been reading Richard Lange’s work since Dead Boys blew my doors off years ago, and goddamn, the man just keeps getting better. The stories in Sweet Nothing traffic in the vagaries of the human heart, those wants and needs that push us down dark paths. His vision is steely-eyed, yet you sense that Lange loves his characters—even the worst of them—and that compassion sharpensyour own emotional investment in this powerful brace of stories.”—Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles.

Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum)

Please welcome to Skylight Books the author Roberto Bolaño calls "Mexico's best woman writer" Carmen Boullosa!

A writer in the tradition of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cesar Aira, Carmen Boullosa shows herself to be at the height of her powers with her latest book. Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, Texas: The Great Theftis a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland. Boullosa views the border history through distinctly Mexican eyes, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters—Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and runaway slaves, Southern belles and dance hall girls—makes her storytelling tremendously powerful and absorbing. Shedding important historical light on the current battles over the Mexican-American frontier, while telling a gripping story with Boullosa's singular prose and formal innovation, Texas marks the welcome return of a major writer who has previously captivated American audiences and is poised to do so again.

PRAISE FOR CARMEN BOULLOSA

"A luminous writer . . . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic." — MIAMI HERALD

"Carmen Boullosa writes with a heart-stopping command of language."— Alma Guillermoprieto

"A story and men armed by necessity and by caprice, a tale of indomitable women, a chronicle of cowboys and Indians, of African-Americans and immigrants from other parts, of captives and their keepers, of slavers and rebels." — LA JOURNADA

"I don't think there's a writer with more variety in themes and focuses in his or her writing. . . . Boullosa's style and range is unique for its versatility and its enormous courage."— Juan Villoro, author of La Casa Pierde and Aforismos

" . . . a cross between W. G. Sebald and Gabriel García Márquez."— El Pais

"The world of Carmen Boullosa is revealed as a sui generis form weathering the storms of history."— Letras Libres

"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."— Alvaro Mutis, author of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

Carmen Boullosa (Mexico City, 1954) is one of Mexico's leading writers. The author of over a dozen novels that have received numerous prizes and honors, Boullosa has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. Also a poet and playwright, she has taught at New York University, Columbia University, CUNY, and Georgetown, among other universities, and she hosts a television show, Nueva York, on CUNY-TV, which has received five New York Emmys. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she is currently a FONCA fellow in Mexico. She lives in Brooklyn and Mexico City. You can visit her online atcarmenboullosa.net or follow her on twitter: @carmenboullosa.

Silver Screen Fiend (Scribner)

Skylight Books welcomes back one of our favorite comedic minds --Patton Oswalt -- for a reading and signing of his new book,Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From An Addiction to Film.

NOTE: As with all Skylight Books 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 Silver Screen Fiend here at Skylight Books.  Tickets will be available starting January 6th, 2015.  They will be available in-store, or you can order on our website and leave a note in the "Order Comments" field.  We will also hold a ticket for you if you order and pay for a book over the phone.  In addition to books, Patton Oswalt will sign one additional item and will pose for one photograph with individual attendees, though you are welcome to take photos during the event and from the line (no flash please). Lastly, we ask that you please refrain from making an audio or video recording of the event.  Thank you for your cooperation!

From New York Times-bestselling author, multifaceted comedian and actor, and social media genius Patton Oswalt, a memoir of coming of age as a performer and writer while obsessively watching classic films at the legendary New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles in the mid-90s: Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film.

In Patton Oswalt’s own words, Silver Screen Fiend is “the dorkiest addiction memoir ever.” It tells the story of his early days in the comedy scene of Los Angeles. After moving to LA, he started hanging out constantly at the New Beverly Cinema, absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases. The movies he views inform his notions of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships, and the colorful cast of characters he meets at the New Beverly fill in the rest.

Praise for Silver Screen Fiend:

"Silver Screen Fiend is both a love letter to artistic obsession and string of caution tape around it. Patton describes the ecstatic demands of the arts (in this case, Stand-up and Film) with insight, fond pity, and unfailing humor. This is a book for anyone who strives to be great, or is bored in an airport."--Joss Whedon

"Patton Oswalt is one of the most brilliant comedy minds of a generation. This book confirms it."--Ricky Gervais

Patton Oswalt is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. He has released five TV specials and five critically acclaimed comedy albums, including two Grammy-nominated releases, My Weakness Is Strong and Finest Hour. Oswalt has also appeared on many television shows and in more than twenty films, including Young Adult, Big Fan, and Ratatouille. Oswalt was the host of the 29th Independent Spirit Awards and the 18th Annual Webby Awards. He lives in Los Angeles.