Skylight Books Podcast Series

Walker on Water (Unnamed Press)

 Join us for a very special event as one of Skylight Book's favorite local presses, Unnamed Press.

A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband's brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the world of Kristiina Ehin.

From the 2007 British Poetry Society Popescu prize winner for European poetry in translation: a series of comic, surreal adventures. Kristiina Ehin's quirky voice takes each story directly from the dream state, at times stubborn and resistant, at other times masochistically compliant. Ehin offers up modern folktales in which the very nature of our human identity is at stake-rampant with images and archetypes both new and old, and mediated by the abrupt changes we can only experience in dreams.

Praise for Walker on Water

"The pages drip in rich images and complex emotions in Kristiina Ehin's wildly imaginative and surrealistic collectionWalker on Water. It's Etgar Keret meets Aimee Bender meets Michael Cisco meets Aesop. It's three-headed twins, a woman who inadvertently bites the arms off her husbands, and a Life Story who has a pesky Brain's Monkey. It's a wholly original and revolutionary read."—Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and A Head Full of Ghosts

"Wow! I love this book!"—Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer of DEVO

"Sharp, jarring, and darkly funny, the stories in Walker on Water move seamlessly and defiantly between the real and the surreal, reinventing folklore, redefining fiction, and daringly reexamining relationships."—Susan Steinberg, author of Spectacle

Kristiina Ehin is the author of Walker on Water, out June 2014 from the Unnamed Press and translated from the original Estonian by Ilmar Lehtpere. An internationally renowned poet, her collection The Drums of Silence was awarded the British Poetry Society Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007, and her collection 1001 Winters has been nominated for the same prize in 2013.  In her native Estonia, Ehin has published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian folk tales. She has written plays, as well as poetic radio broadcasts. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala—a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent living as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast.

Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe (Adams Media)

Please join us as one of Skylight Books' favorite (and best-selling) artists celebrates the launch of her newest book.

Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe erases the boundaries of the standard self-help book and sets you free on a visual journey of self-discovery. Inside you will find nine metaphysical lessons set against a surreal backdrop of intricate ink illustrations and dreamlike instructions that require you to open your heart to unexplored inner landscapes. From setting fire to your anxieties to sharing a cup of tea with your inner demons, you will learn how to let go and truly connect with the world around you.

Whether you need a little inspiration or a completely new life direction, Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe provides you with the necessary push to find your true path—and a whimsical adventure to enjoy on the way there. 

Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You. She is a regular comic contributor to The Rumpus and Wonderhowto.com, and her short comic stories “Mundane Fortunes for the Next Ten Billion Years” and “Seed Bomb” were selected as Notable Comics of 2012 and 2013 respectively by the Best American Comics series editors (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her comics have also appeared in Bitch, the Best American Non­Required Reading 2014, Folio, Fjords Review, and other publications. A graduate from the fine art program of University of California, Los Angeles, she lives in southern California. Visit her on the web atwww.yumisakugawa.com.

10:04 (Faber & Faber)

For tonight's event Ben Lerner will be joined by one of Skylight's favorite local authors, Rachel Kushner!

A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire, Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels . . . of his generation" (Lorin Stein, "The New York Review of Books"), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, "The Observer"). Now, his second novel departs from Leaving the Atocha Station's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling.

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.

In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.

Praise for 10:04

"Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start." --Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

"Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new. 10:04 is a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and vitality." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

Ben Lerner is a poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation fellow, and a Guggenheim fellow. In 2011 he won the Preis der Stadt Müenster für Internationale Poesie, the first American to receive this honor. He is the author of a novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Rachel Kushner is the author of THE FLAMETHROWERS, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, longlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and a New York Times Top Five Novel of 2013. Kushner's debut novel, TELEX FROM CUBA, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. Kushner's fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Betrayers (Little Brown and Company)

 

Please welcome back to Skylight Books David Bezmozgis, the award-winning author of Free World and Natasha and Other Stories. His latest, The Betrayers is a compact saga of love, duty, family, and sacrifice from a rising star whose fiction is "self-assured, elegant, perceptive . . . and unflinchingly honest" (New York Times)

 

These incandescent pages give us one fraught, momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident who now finds himself a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the settlements in the West Bank, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior, and the besieged couple escapes to Yalta, the faded Crimean resort of Kotler's youth. There, shockingly, Kotler comes face-to-face with the former friend whose denunciation sent him to the Gulag almost forty years earlier. In a whirling twenty-four hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed, including a teenage daughter, a son facing his own moral dilemma in the Israeli army, and the wife who once campaigned to secure his freedom and stood by him through so much.

 

Stubborn, wry, and self-knowing, Baruch Kotler is one of the great creations of contemporary fiction. An aging man grasping for a final passion, he is drawn inexorably into a crucible that is both personal and biblical in scope. In prose that is elegant, sly, precise, and devastating in its awareness of the human heart, David Bezmozgis has rendered a story for the ages, an inquest into the nature of fate and consequence, love and forgiveness. The Betrayers" is a high-wire act, a powerful tale of morality and sacrifice that will haunt readers long after they turn the final page. 

 

Praise for The Betrayers

“The Betrayers is a moral thriller in the tradition of Bernard Malamud, but the generosity, grace, and wisdom of the writing belong entirely to David Bezmozgis. The magic of fiction is that it makes the reader care deeply about imaginary strangers, and Bezmozgis is a magician.”—Aleksandar Hemon, National Book Award finalist for The Lazarus Project

“This outstanding novel definitively establishes David Bezmozgis as one of the foremost writers of his generation.”

—Ben Fountain, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“This unforgettable novel squanders no words in its brilliant, deft depictions of love, of memory, of compassion—and, ultimately, despite its title, of loyalty.”—Edith Pearlman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award forBinocular Vision 

David Bezmozgis moved from Latvia to Canada at the age of six. After studying English literature at McGill University and fine arts at the Southern California School of Cinema-Television, he created his first documentary in 1999, entitled L.A. Mohel, capturing the busy lives of three mohels (Jewish ritual circumcisers) in Los Angeles. His debut short story collection, Natasha and Other Stories, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and was nominated for a Governor General's Award. Bezmozgis is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Women in Clothes (Blue Rider)

Skylight Books is thrilled to present three phenomenal writers -- Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), Heidi Julavits (The Vanishers), and Leanne Shapton (Important Artifacts) -- for a discussion on their highly anticipated new book, Women in Clothes.

This event will feature a clothing swap!  Attendees are encouraged to bring one special item of clothing that you’d like to swap, with your name and an interesting detail about the garment pinned to the piece. Men are welcome to participate in the swap, too. You don’t have to bring an item to attend, but we encourage it. All leftover clothing will be donated.

Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities--famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old--on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. 

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. 

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women's style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed. 

Praise for Women in Clothes:
"Thoughtfully crafted and visually entertaining.... A provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood, this collection is highly recommended." --Publishers Weekly

"Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries—all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal, to show the connection between dress and 'habits of mind,' and to offer readers 'a new way of interpreting their outsides.' 'What are my values?' one woman asks. 'What do I want to express?' Those questions inform the multitude of eclectic responses gathered in this delightfully idiosyncratic book." --Kirkus Reviews

Sheila Heti is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? She writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and collaborates frequently with other writers and artists. She lives in Toronto.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels, most recently The Vanishers, winner of the PEN/New England Fiction Award. She is a founding editor of The Believer and an associate professor at Columbia University.

Leanne Shapton is a Canadian artist, author, and publisher based in New York City. She is the author of Important Artifacts and Swimming Studies, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books)

 

Join us tonight for a very special reading from one of our generation's most celebrated writers, Junot Diaz! Junot is visiting Los Angeles for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles' 22nd Anniversary Celebration, during which he will receive the Los Angeles Public Library's 2014 Literary Award. To learn more about the work of the Library Foundation, visit lfla.org.

Junot Díaz’s first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was a literary sensation, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning a host of major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.  Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love—obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love.

 

This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead) is one of the most celebrated books of last year. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, Díaz’s stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

 

At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness—and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. 

 

Praise for This Is How You Lose Her

 

"Junot Diaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it's practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy... [It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire... His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Diaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status." -"The New York Times Book Review " 

 

"Nobody does scrappy, sassy, twice-the-speed of sound dialogue better than Junot Diaz. His exuberant short story collection, called This Is How You Lose Her, charts the lives of Dominican immigrants for whom the promise of America comes down to a minimum-wage paycheck, an occasional walk to a movie in a mall and the momentary escape of a grappling in bed." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR 

 

"Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize... Diaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." -"O Magazine" 

 

"Searing, irresistible new stories... It's a harsh world Diaz conjures but one filled also with beauty and humor and buoyed by the stubborn resilience of the human spirit." -"People "  

 

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Diaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

A revelatory synthesis of cultural history and social psychology that shows how one-to-one collaboration drives creative success.

Weaving the lives of scores of creative duos--from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--Joshua Wolf Shenk identifies the core qualities of that dizzying experience we call "chemistry." Revealing the six essential stages through which creative intimacy unfolds, Shenk draws on new scientific research and builds an argument for the social foundations of creativity--and the pair as its primary embodiment. Along the way, he reveals how pairs begin to talk, think, and even look like each other; how the most successful ones thrive on conflict; and why some pairs flame out while others endure. When it comes to shaping the culture, Shenk argues, two is the magic number, not just because of the dyads behind everything from "South Park" to the American Civil Rights movement to "Starry Night," but because of the nature of creative thinking. Even when we're alone, we are in a sense "collaborating" with a voice inside our head. At once intuitive and surprising, Powers of Two will change the way we think about innovation.

Praise for Powers of Two

"We sometimes think of creativity as coming from brilliant loners. In fact, it more often happens when bright people pair up and complement each other. Shenk's fascinating book shows how to spark the power of this phenomenon."--Walter Isaacson

"In this surprising, compelling, deeply felt book, Joshua Wolf Shenk banishes the idea of solitary genius by demonstrating that our richest art and science come from collaboration: we need one another not only for love, but also for thinking and imagining and growing and being."--Andrew Solomon

"Powers of Two is a dramatic, often delightful demonstration of a truth we usually ignore: great accomplishments are rarely the work of a single person. If you aspire to be creative, the most important step might be finding a trusted partner who can support your strengths and offset your weaknesses."--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author ofFlow

"This is a book about magic; about the Beatles; about the chemistry between people; about neuroscience; and about the buddy system; it examines love and hate, harmony and dissonance, and everything in between. The result is wise, funny, surprising, and completely engrossing."--Susan Orlean

"Powers of Two is filled with keen insights into the human condition and terrific examples of creativity at work. This is an inspiring book that also happens to be a great read."--Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy, a New York Times Notable Book. A contributor to the Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other publications, he directs the Arts in Mind series on creativity and serves on the general council of The Moth. He lives in Los Angeles.

We are proud to present a performance by celebrated singer-songwriter Kath Bloom!

Kath Bloom is a legendary American singer-songwriter from Litchfield, Connecticut. In the 1970s she collaborated with Bruce Neumann and recorded with avant-garde guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors releasing multiple albums of fragile, simple folk and blues melodies that play heart strings and raw nerves like a shaman summoning a beast made of blinding light.

She stopped recording new material for a few decades, choosing to raise her children, until Richard Linklater discovered her music sometime in the early '90s and subsequently featured her song "Come Here" in his 1995 film, Before Sunrise. Since then, Bloom has continued to write new songs and has released albums on Caldo Verde Records and Chapter Music. A tribute album entitled Loving Takes This Course was released in 2009 and features artists such as Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, and Mark Kozelek.

Kath’s new album Pass Through Here was recorded over the last three years in Los Feliz and will be released by Chapter Music (Australia) this fall.

"Bloom sounds like a woman who has spent years in the wilderness… An earthy, unpretentious presence, she can snap a heart like a twig." – Pitchfork

The Moor's Account (Pantheon)

Tonight's reading is part of the Los Angeles/Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI).

From the author of Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits comes  The Moor's Account, the imagined memoirs of the New World's first explorer of African descent, a Moroccan slave known as Estebanico.

In 1527, Panfilo de Narvaez sailed from Spain with a crew of six hundred men, intending to claim for the Spanish crown what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States. But from the moment the expedition reached Florida, it met with ceaseless bad luck--storms, disease, starvation, hostile natives--and within a year there were only four survivors, including the young explorer Andres Dorantes and his slave, Estebanico.

After six years of enslavement by Native Americans, the four men escaped and wandered through what is now Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Moor's Account brilliantly captures Estebanico's voice and vision, giving us an alternate narrative for this famed expedition. As this dramatic chronicle unfolds, we come to understand that, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration, and that Native American men and women were not merely silent witnesses to it. In Laila Lalami's deft hands, Estebanico's memoir illuminates the ways in which stories can transmigrate into history, even as storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

Praise for The Moor's Account

“A beautiful, rousing tale that would be difficult to believe if it were not actually true. Lalami has once again shown why she is one of her generation’s most gifted writers.” —Reza Aslan, author of Zealot

“¡Qué belleza! Laila Lalami has given us a mesmerizing reimagining of one of the foundational chronicles of exploration of the New World and an indictment of the uncontainable hubris displayed by Spanish explorers—told from the point of view of Estebanillo, an Arab slave and Cabeza de Vaca’s companion in a trek across the United States that is as important as that of Lewis and Clark. The style and voice of sixteenth-century crónicas are turned upside down to subtly undermine our understanding of race and religion, now and then. The Moor’s Account is a worthy stepchild of Don Quixote de la Mancha.”—Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language and general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature

“A novel of extraordinary scope, ambition and originality. Laila Lalami has given voice to a man silenced by for five centuries, a voice both convincing and compelling. The Moor’s Account is a work of creativity and compassion, one which demonstrates the full might of Lalami’s talent as a writer.”—Aminatta Forna, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and Hurston Prize Legacy Award winning author of The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones, and The Devil That Danced on the Water

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She attended Université Mohammed V in Rabat, University College in London, and the University of Southern California, where she earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. She is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and the novel Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, and in numerous anthologies. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

This reading is a part of the Los Angeles / Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI)

Launching this fall, the Los Angeles / Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI) brings together nearly 30 cultural institutions throughout Los Angeles to tell various stories of traditional and contemporary art from multiple Islamic regions and their significant global diasporas. LA/IAI is the first-of-its kind, wide-scale citywide initiative on Islamic arts producing and presenting programming such as art exhibitions, panels, discussions, and performances. Anchoring LA/IAI are two connected exhibitions, Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art and the contemporary art exhibition, Shangri La: Imagined Cities commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) to be held at DCA’s Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) at Barnsdall Park from October 26 to December 28, 2014.

Los Angeles’ substantial populations from areas with strong Islamic roots make LA a compelling location for this initiative. LA/IAI casts a wide net, being inclusive and welcoming, with art as its central focus. The term “Islamic art” includes work created by non-Muslim artists from Muslim-dominant countries, work by Muslims creating art in non-Muslim dominant countries, and work by artists culturally influenced by Islam. Designed to build a greater understanding of the role of Islamic arts, LA/IAI seeks to stimulate the global conversation in connection to cultural, political, and social issues. The celebration of Islamic art and culture is presented by DCA with major support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Community Foundation, the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the Barnsdall Park Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  http://www.laislamarts.org/

Tomboy (Zest Books)

Razorcake and Skylight Books are teaming up to present graphic novelist Liz Prince, presenting her new graphic memoir Tomboy! 

Growing up, Liz Prince wasn’t a girly girl, but she wasn’t exactly one of the guys either (as she learned when her little league baseball coach exiled her to the distant outfield). She was somewhere in between. But with the forces of middle school, high school, parents, friendship, and romance pulling her this way and that, the middle wasn’t exactly an easy place to be. Tomboy follows award-winning author and artist Liz Prince through her early years and explores—with humor, honesty, and poignancy—what it means to “be a girl.”

From staunchly refuting ”girliness” to the point of misogyny, to discovering through the punk community that your identity is whatever you make of it, Tomboy offers a sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking account of self-discovery in modern America.

Praise for Tomboy

“Liz Prince tells gender norms to eat dirt. A delightful, thoughtful, and compulsively readable memoir. And an important one.” —Ariel Schrag, author of Adam and Potential 

“Liz Prince may have been an uncertain, confused kid, but she’s a confident and sincerely expressive cartoonist. Tomboy is a funny and relatable look at what every child has to deal with at some point—figuring out who you really are inside, when everyone else only sees what they think you should be on the outside.” —Jeffrey Brown, author of Clumsy, Jedi Academy andDarth Vader and Son

“It’s hard to imagine anyone failing to be charmed by this entertaining, clever, and genuinely funny memoir of growing up with gender identity confusion. Even this pretty unconfused regular old dude found plenty to identify with in Liz Prince’s story of adolescent bafflement, exploration, and discovery—all delivered, like all the best such stories, with a light touch, wry wit, understated irony, and not one iota of preachiness. Meaning: I’m a fan. Go Liz!” —Frank Portman, author of King Dork 

“Tomboy is a thoughtful, honest look into the evolution and acceptance of personal gender identity, as told by a smart-mouhed punk named Liz Prince. I wish it had existed when I was in high school.” —Nicole Georges, author of Calling Dr. Laura

“Liz Prince portrays the awkwardness and humiliation of childhood with wonderful (not to mention painful) accuracy. Any kid that picks up this book is going to be privy to secrets most of us don’t learn until it’s too late, and any adult who reads it will be reminded of an essential truth: that’s it’s okay to be exactly who we want to be, no matter how weird everyone else thinks we are. Tomboy isn’t a self help book, but it should be.” —Julia Wertz, author of Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait

“It’s not very often you read a goofy coming-of-age comic written with an astutely critical lens… and then there’s Liz Prince’sTomboy. By tackling everything from Green Day to girl-hate, Prince does a kick-ass job at dissecting gender politics (and playground politics) through riotous anecdotes from her childhood, making this feminist inquiry, well, fun.” —Suzy X., illustrator at Rookie Mag 

“Navigating life as a young tomboy would have been a lot easier if I’d had Liz’s brave, hilarious, and honest story to guide me. Reading this book will make weird kids like us feel a little less alone.” —Melissa Mendes, author of Freddy Stories 

Liz Prince's first book, Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed?, was nominated for several awards and won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Debut in 2005. Born in Boston, MA, she grew up in Santa Fe, NM, and has been drawing comics since the third grade. She has since produced many of her own comics and mini-comics, which mix her real-life foibles with charming cartooning and comic timing. Fans have described her work as being "cute," making them feel "warm and fuzzy," or simply being "too much information." She now lives outside of Boston and drinks more than her fair share of coffee. 

A Death in Vegas (White Whisker Books) 

Love Will Make YOu Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late At Night (White Whisker Books)

Join us tonight for a very special eventing with local publisher White Whisker Books!

In A Death in Vegas, the president of a company that specializes in beneficial bugs for organic gardeners discovers a young woman dead in his Las Vegas hotel suite. She had worked as a sexy lady bug at his convention booth -- and he had nothing to do with her death. While that's being investigated, the FBI raids his booth on a money-laundering scam that he knows nothing about. Soon, the coroner doesn't have good news, either. Who has set him up? Why? With the police and FBI are against him, and his wife missing, he flees to find answers and his wife.

Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late at Night brings a number of Shelly Lowenkopf's previously published short stories together in a single volume. Lowenkopf is best known as a master instructor of fiction writing and a book editor. He taught for over thirty years at the University of Southern California, and now at the noted College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. All the while, he's been publishing these short gems. All the stories revolve around life in Santa Barbara, the oceanside city north of Los Angeles, where people go after they've burned out in San Francisco and L.A. But there's no safe haven anywhere. Interwoven into Santa Barbara's picturesque setting, the people in these twelve stories reveal what their hearts and souls encounter in relationships. Their misreadings, mistakes, and misadventures bare what happens to people who love another. 

Praise for A Death in Vegas

"With his tongue planted firmly in cheek, Christopher Meeks spins a charming and surprisingly sexy tale of murder, betrayal, and the importance of beneficial insects." -Mark Haskell Smith, author of Baked and Raw: A Love Story

"I've never, ever wanted to go to Vegas. I don't care if what happens there, stays there. But Christopher Meeks makes me want to go so I can find out who done it. A fun, exciting read, with Chris's usual wonderful writing and great sense of humor." -Jessica Barksdale Inclan, author of Her Daughter's Eyes and How to Bake a Man.

"Christopher Meeks had me at page three. I couldn't wait to find out how Patton Burch was going to explain the naked body he woke up to in his Las Vegas hotel room - first to the cops and then to his wife." -Sam Sattler, Book Chase

Praise for Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late at Night

"Shelly Lowenkopf is a gifted, humane story-teller. Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late at Night' is a delight."--Aram Saroyan

Christopher Meeks first published short fiction in a number of literary journals, and the stories are available in two collections,The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons. His literary novels have received much acclaim. For instance, The Brightest Moon of the Century is a story of a man who yearns for love and success, covering over thirty years—a tale that Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews describes as “a great and truly humane novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Irving.” Recently, Meeks has focused on crime novels. His first, Blood Drama, has a graduate student in theatre (writing a thesis on David Mamet) in a struggle with a ruthless killer. The new A Death in Vegas is a mystery based on the death of a young woman and the wrong man charged with it. Visit Christopher Meeks online at www.chrismeeks.com.

Shelly Lowenkopf taught in the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing Program for 34 years, has taught at the annual Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference since 1980, and has been guest lecturer in many schools and conferences. He is currently Visiting Professor at the College of Creative Studies, UCSB, with classes in noir fiction, the modern short story, genre fiction, and developing a literary voice. Mr. Lowenkopf has served as editorial director for literary, general trade, mass market, and scholarly book publishers, seeing over 500 books through the editorial and production process. His own short fiction has appeared widely in the literary press.

Anatomy of A Misfit (Harper Teen)

From bestselling adult novelist Andrea Portes comes her Young Adult debut: Anatomy of a Misfit (Harper Teen), an emotionally resonant story that Publishers Weekly raves is “instantly endearing” with a “highly memorable heroine” and voice.  

Anika is the third most popular girl in her high school--despite feeling she doesn’t fit in with the popular crowd in her small Nebraskan town. To maintain her social status, Anika does whatever Becky Vilhauser (first most popular girl in school) tells her to do. But when loner Logan McDonough returns from summer vacation hotter, and more mysterious than ever, Anika has a hard time staying away--even when Becky forbids her to date him. So Anika must choose--ignore her feelings and keep her social status? Or follow her heart and risk becoming a pariah. Which will she pick? And what will she think of her choice when an unimaginable tragedy strikes, changing her forever? An absolutely original new voice in YA in a story that will start important conversations--and tear at your heart.

Praise for Anatomy of A Misfit

"Anika Dragomir is the funniest, snarkiest, most insightful misfit a reader could ever hope to meet. I laughed my way through Anatomy of a Misfit right up until the very end, when the book broke my heart into a million pieces. This is a beautiful, brave and powerful novel."--Melissa Kantor, author of Maybe One Day and The Breakup Bible

“A self-deprecating and highly memorable heroine . . . . instantly endearing.”-Publishers Weekly STARRED Review 

“Anika’s droll voice shines, and her emotions are palpable.”-School Library Journal  

Andrea Portes is the bestselling novelist of the critically lauded adult novel, Hick. The book was her debut and has since been made into a feature film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Blake Lively, Eddie Redmayne, and Juliette Lewis. Bury This, her second novel, was published in January 2014 by Soft Skull Press. Anatomy of a Misfit is her third novel, and her first for young adult readers.

The Lotus and The Storm (Viking Books)

An epic tale of love, loyalty, and war from the acclaimed author of Monkey Bridge.  

Alternating between the voice of Mai, a Vietnamese-American woman and law librarian in the DC area and her father, Minh, a former commander of the airborne brigade in the South Vietnamese army, The Lotus and the Storm transports us to one family’s past in Saigon during the war while at the same time showing us how the drama of what began in Vietnam nearly 40 years previous continues to play out in US Vietnamese refugee communities.  

The book opens in 1963 in Cholon, Saigon’s twin city, where Mai carves out a wondrous existence of innocence shared with her elder sister and a large group of family and friends, including several Chinese business women, U.S. servicemen and even an uncle in the Vietcong who makes secret visits to the family home. Their life is largely tranquil and lush, continuing relatively unaffected by the war until a series of explosive events rock their world, ultimately leading to Mai and her father’s evacuation by U.S. helicopter during the fall of Saigon. 

The story of Mai’s father Minh begins in 2006, when the U.S. is in the thick of another prolonged armed conflict and Minh relives his battles in Saigon, Da Nang, and Hue as the television switches between scenes of fighting in Baghdad and Basra. Day by day, he unravels his life’s story through its most defining moments: from the assassination of President Diem in 1963 to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. Each event is punctuated by irreparable personal loss. His is a story of lost innocence, of broken promises, and of sudden reversals in love and war.

Working across a broad and astonishing canvas, Lan Cao has delivered in The Lotus and the Storm a truly epic drama of love, loyalty, and the legacies of war, and offers a rarely heard Vietnamese-American perspective on events that have been central to twentieth-century American history.. 

Praise for The Lotus and The Storm

"The Lotus and the Storm is part beautiful family saga, part coming-of-age story, part love story, but above all a searing indictment of the American campaign in Vietnam and its incalculable toll on generations past and future. A powerful read from start to end."--Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

 

"A profoundly moving novel about the shattering effects of war on a young girl, her family, and her country. Lan Cao brings Saigon's past vividly to life through the eyes of Mai, following the girl and her father halfway around the world to a suburb in Virginia, where forty years later, Mai's trauma unravels. In this fractured world where old wars, loves, and losses live on, The Lotus and the Storm is a passionate testament to the truth that the past is the present--inseparable, inescapable, enduring."

--Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

 

"A heartwrenching and heartwarming epic about war and love, hurt and healing, losing and rediscovering homelands. Lan Cao dramatizes landmark battles in the Vietnam War and the toll such battles take on winners and losers. The Lotus and the Storm establishes Lan Cao as a world-class writer."--Bharati Mukherjee, author of Jasmine

 

"Lan Cao is not only one of the finest of the American writers who sprang from and profoundly understand the war in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, but also one of our finest American writers, period. The Lotus and the Storm is a brilliant novel that illuminates the human condition shared by us all."--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

 

Lan Cao grew up in Saigon and her own father was a high-ranking paratrooper in the South Vietnamese army. In 1975, when South Vietnam was defeated by the Communist North, she was adopted by an American friend of the family and taken out of Vietnam to live with his family in Connecticut until her parents made their way to the US several months later. Lan went to high school in Northern Virginia, and ultimately went on to earn her law degree from Yale. She is now a novelist and a professor at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Monkey Bridge, was the first work of fiction published by a major publishing house about the Vietnam War written by a Vietnamese-American and has become a modern classic.

Ham on Rye, Post Office, and The Women (new editions from Ecco)

 To celebrate what would have been the 94th birthday of literary legend Charles Bukowski (born August 16, 1920), we're throwing a party featuring Jerry Stahl, Richard Lange, and Dan Fante, reading excerpts of their favorite Bukowski works.  A birthday cake and tasty beverages will also be served, thanks to our sponsor, Ecco, who just published new editions of three of Bukowski's most popular novels.

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. 

Jerry Stahl is the author of the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight and Perv—a Love Story, both Los Angeles Times bestsellers, as well as the acclaimed novels Pain Killers, Plainclothes Naked, and I, Fatty. He has written extensively for film and television.

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, which received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 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. 

Dan Fante is the author of the memoir Fante, the novels 86'd, Chump Change, Mooch, and Spitting Off Tall Buildings, and several books of poetry, short stories, and plays. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

Beware Beware (Minotaur Books)

 Please join us for a very special launch event for Skylight favorite, Steph Cha!

Juniper Song--an unforgettable new crime heroine hailed as "young, sharp, and worldly-wise" by New York Times bestselling author Meg Gardiner--returns in this smart, fast-paced follow-up to Steph Cha's critically acclaimed debutFollow Her Home.

Working as an apprentice at a P.I. firm, Juniper Song finds herself nose deep in a Hollywood murder scandal where the lies may be more glamorous than most, but the truths they cover are just as ugly. When a young woman named Daphne Freamon calls looking for an eye on her boyfriend, her boss punts the client to Song. Daphne is an independently wealthy painter living in New York, and her boyfriend Jamie Landon is a freelance screenwriter in Los Angeles, ghostwriting a vanity project for aging movie star Joe Tilley. Song quickly learns that there's more to this case than a simple tail, and her suspicions are confirmed when Tilley winds up dead in a hotel room. Nonetheless, when Jamie becomes the prime suspect in the movie star's murder, she agrees to help the charismatic couple discover the truth, even as the police build their case against Jamie. As she chases leads and questions grieving Hollywood insiders, she uncovers a sordid layer of blackmail and hidden identities, of a history of violence that leaves no one--not even Song--safe from judgment.

An edgy, gorgeously written read, Beware Beware is perfect for fans of Megan Abbott and Tana French. It's a tale that twists around the lies we tell ourselves and others, that examines the ugliness under the skin-deep glamor of L.A. 

Praise for Follow Her Home:

“[Song] is a compelling and original protagonist… One only hopes that Cha and her driven, neo-noir detective have more opportunities to explore those troubling intersections over many books to come.” –LA Times

“Cha’s debut updates Marlowe’s dark and dangerous LA to modern times while keeping the quirky characters and a twisty mystery that will hold readers to the bitter end.” –Kirkus

“Intriguing...it’s clear that Song, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, and noir-ish young woman with a Raymond Chandler fixation is well on her way to being a first-rate investigator.” —Publishers Weekly

“For fans of urban noir and of mysteries that address contemporary social issues. Cha is a promising mystery author to watch.”–Library Journal

“Many try to emulate Raymond Chandler; few succeed.  Put Cha in the latter category…. [she] has that certain something that makes you want to follow Song on her next adventure.”–RT Book Reviews

“Follow Her Home’s strength is in the creation of a relatable, dynamic, modern protagonist… Cha has penned a well-written, atmospheric text. But Follow Her Home is also a gritty tale that serves up social commentary on cultural fetishization.”–KorAM Magazine

“While Cha pays very clear homage to Chandler -- indicated in the enthusiastic use of similes and Juniper often wondering what Marlowe would do -- she definitely transcends his influence to make the story her own… Cha does a great job of keeping the suspense taut, with deft pacing and effective cliff-hangers. Action pushes the plot resolutely forward -- whether Juniper is getting knocked out in the middle of the night or finding her bed chillingly made by someone other than herself. And Juniper herself is a likeable character with a distinct voice.”–Hyphen Magazine

“Cha keeps you wanting to turn the pages with a need to know what is going on and cheering Song on to help work through the pain from her past. A well-written and very intriguing book.”–Suspense Magazine

“As the sleuth is a Chandler fan, readers will find many references to his work throughout the story, but the novel holds its own as we see the grittiness of L.A. and Koreatown, and the fetishization of Asian woman through June’s perspective.”–Mochi Magazine

Steph Cha is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California. In her mysteries, Cha writes with a “unique perspective that an Asian American woman’s voice offers to this traditional genre, something that goes beyond its usual tropes” (Hyphen Magazine).