Skylight Books Podcast Series

MICHAEL LOCKE and VINCENT BROOK discuss their book SILVER LAKE CHRONICLES: EXPLORING AN URBAN OASIS IN LOS ANGELES

Silver Lake Chronicles: Exploring an Urban Oasis in Los Angeles (History Press)

Situated between Los Feliz and Echo Park a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, Silver Lake thrives as a perennially avant-garde and enchanting enclave. From mansion builders and movie stars to bohemians, visionaries and just plain folk, discover Silver Lake's illustrious past and a fantastic cast of characters sure to enrich contemporary experience and inform the past. Colorful anecdotes about early movie magnates William Selig and Mack Sennett and silent-screen idols Mabel Normand, Antonio Moreno and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle flesh out these famous figures' lives in new and surprising ways. Other lesser-known but richly deserving stories about the area's pioneer families are shared perhaps for the first time. Authors Michael Locke and Vincent Brook present a rich tapestry of this unique urban oasis whose appeal seems only to grow.

Michael Locke is a longtime resident of Southern California. He served on the first Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, as the Region One representative and vice chair, and was founder of the Beautification Committee. Since 2003, he has edited and published The Silver Lake News, an online community newspaper. He is also a regular contributing writer and photographer for the Los Feliz Ledger, the Los Feliz Observer and the Los Angeles City Historical Society Newsletter. He lives in the Durex Model Home (Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument Number 1025) in Los Feliz with his wife, Donna Jean. 

 

Vincent Brook has a PhD in film and television from UCLA. He teaches media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; California State University, Los Angeles; and Pierce College. He has authored or edited five other books, most recently: Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles and Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (both 2013). Born in Van Nuys, he has lived in Silver Lake with his wife Karen since 1978. 

RICHARD LANGE reads from his newest short story collection SWEET NOTHING

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.

ROBERT S. LEVINSON reads from his novel THE EVIL DEEDS WE DO

The Evil Deeds We Do (Five Star)

The evil deeds we do are often the things we do for love.

Lainie Davis Gardner’s past comes back to haunt the one-time record industry powerhouse in the complex, gripping, often intense tale bestselling author Robert S. Levinson weaves in The Evil Deeds We Do, his twelfth mystery-thriller. First, she’s confronted by L.A. Assistant D.A Harry Roman, who promises he’ll soon prove Lainie was behind the murder of her husband, Roy. Next, the mayor’s chief advisor, Thom Newberry, Lainie’s one-time lover, offers her a permanent solution to her problem with Roman, but it comes at a steep price, one Lainie agrees to pay on Newberry’s guarantee it will keep her from ever losing custody of her troubled, trouble-inspiring teenage daughter, Sara.

She has six weeks to locate and steal a file secreted in heavily guarded quarters by brutish Leonard Volkman, who runs a vast financial empire and was, she believes, behind Roy’s financial downfall. She strikes a partnership deal with Volkman to create a label built around singer-songwriter Miranda Morgan and reluctantly accepts help from Rod Flynn, a gregarious Irishman operating Volkman’s bogus film production company. Events escalate to include fading movie star Lance Clifford; Chips Crandall, Lainie’s nemesis during her time behind bars; Berry Berryman, a notorious hoodlum; music impresario Benny Sugar; and Newberry’s teenage son, Jerry, whose relationship with Lainie’s daughter Sara causes a series of twists that culminate in multiple deaths and heartbreaking tragedy.

Robert S. Levinson is the bestselling author of twelve mystery-thrillers, among them Finders, Keepers, Losers, Weepers, Phony Tinsel, A Rhumba in Waltz Time, The Traitor in Us All, and Ask a Dead Man. His short stories appear frequently in the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. He is a Derringer Award winner, a Shamus Award nominee, and regularly included in “year’s best” anthologies. Bob served four years on Mystery Writers of America’s (MWA) national board of directors. He wrote and produced two MWA Edgar Awards shows and two International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards shows. His work has been praised by Nelson DeMille, Clive Cussler, Joseph Wambaugh, Margaret Maron, David Morrell, Jeffery Deaver, T. Jefferson Parker, Willliam Link, John Lescroart, James Rollins, Joseph Finder, Margaret Maron, Thomas Perry, William Kent Krueger, and others. He resides in Los Angeles with his spouse, Sandra, and Rosie, their mixed-breed rescue pooch, who believes she rescued them. More atwww.robertslevinson.com.

CARMEN BOULLOSA reads from her novel TEXAS: THE GREAT THEFT

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.

PATTON OSWALT discuss his new book SILVER SCREEN FIEND

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. 

BRENT ARMENDINGER reads from his new book of poetry THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING, together with CLAUDIA RANKINE

The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press)

Where does one body end and another begin? In The Ghost in Us Was Mul­tiplying, Brent Armendinger explores the relationship between ethics and queer desire, infusing meditations on public life and politics with a radical sense of intimacy. Although grounded in lyric, these poems are ever mindful of how language falls apart in us and – perhaps more im­portantly – how we fall apart in language. Armendinger asks, “What ra­tio of news and light should a poem deliver?” This book is a continuous reckoning with that question and the ways that we inhabit each other.

Praise for The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying:

To “multiply.” To “ devote.” To “ferment inside a hush.” Brent Armendinger writes through and from the body, recollected [contravened] at all turns by the ferocity of its accompanying landscapes, affinities and the heart itself. “How else can I survive?” writes the poet, deep inside a book that traces the index of an intense need: the kind of contact that can’t be assuaged by touch alone. I was so interested in this other, longitudinal and “surpassing” touch that happened again and again in a book both measured and dreamed: the “pictogram,” for example, that’s heard rather than seen; the blood that’s mailed “back north”-- a “stain, my zero.” What does it mean to encounter a zero -- a “stranger”-- that doesn’t diminish in repetition, but which strengthens, glitters, hurts to look at directly or feel? Brent Armendinger writes into this quality or “crucial” space with an emotional and soulful approach to the “amniotic” potential of vocabu­laries, human and otherwise. “What do the birds think?” I loved this book so much, for what it senses into as much as it expresses: a longing for radical company; studies of water and cosmic flows of all kinds. “Where will you live now,” asks the poet, “and can you hear it,/the way your voice has changed?” Brent Armendinger is a rare experimental writer who writes deeply and passion­ately from the soul. I am extremely honored to write in support of his poetry. --Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue

The poems in Brent Armendinger’s The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying are hushed, as if spoken the morning after a heavy snow. They are also admirably attentive to sadness, breath, and desire. Their speaker laments being “too permeable,” but it’s precisely that translucence that matters here: it makes audible the mu­sic of his “almost way of touching,” as well as delivering the sometimes mel­ancholy, perennially essential sound of “how the heart opening always feels.
—Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Brent Armendinger was born in Warsaw, New York, and studied at Bard College and the University of Michigan. In addition to The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying, Armendinger has published two chapbooks, Undetectable and Archipelago. His work has appeared in many journals, including Aufgabe, Bateau, Bloom, Bombay Gin, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LIT, Puerto del Sol, RECAPS Magazine, Volt, and Web Conjunctions. In 2013, Armendinger was awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Pitzer College, where he is an Associate Professor of English and World Literature.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and the plays, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions (co-authored with Casey Llewellyn). Rankine is co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century series with Wesleyan University Press andThe Racial Imaginary with Fence Books. A recipient of awards and fellowships from  The Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Lannan Foundation,  Poets and Writers and the National Endowments for the Arts, she teaches at Pomona College. 

BLACK QUEER LIT: THEN AND NOW

In recognition of Black History Month, join us as we remember the contributions of Black Queer writers past and present. Frederick L. Smith (Play It Forward) Sheree L. Greer (Let The Lover Be), Rebekah Weatherspoon (Treasure), and Fiona Zedde (Desire at Dawn) discuss their current novels--courtesy of Bold Stroke Books--as well as the past, present, and future of Black LGBTQ literature.

Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Frederick Smith is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and Loyola University Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles and is also the author of Down for Whatever and Right Side of the Wrong Bed. Readers can contact him at www.FrederickLSmith.com.

A Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, Sheree L. Greer has been published in Hair Trigger, The Windy City Times, Reservoir, Fictionary, and the WindyCity Queer Anthology: Dispatches from the Third Coast. She has performed her work across selected venues in Milwaukee, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Tampa, where she hosts Oral Fixation, the only LGBTQ Open Mic series in TampaBay. She received a Union League of Chicago Civic Arts Foundation Award, earned her MFA at Columbia College Chicago, and currently teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College. Ms. Greer is an Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund grantee and completed a VONA residency at University of Miami. She recently published a short story collection, Once and Future Lovers and an excerpt from her novel What Has Never Been Taught appears in Best Lesbian Romance 2012.

After years of meddling in her friends’ love lives, Rebekah Weatherspoon turned to writing romance as a means to surviving a stressful professional life. She has worked in various positions from library assistant, meter maid, middle school teacher, B movie production assistant, reality show crew chauffeur, D movie producer, and her most fulfilling job to date, lube and harness specialist at an erotic boutique in West Hollywood. Her interests include Wonder Woman collectibles, cookies, James Taylor, quality hip-hop, football, American muscle cars, large breed dogs, and the ocean. When she’s not working, writing, reading, or sleeping, she is watching Ken Burns documentaries and cartoons or taking dance classes. If given the chance, she will cheat at UNO. She was raised in Southern New Hampshire and now lives in Southern California with an individual who is much more tech savvy than she ever will be. Member RWA.

Jamaican-born Fiona Zedde currently lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of several novellas and novels of lesbian love and desire, including the Lambda Literary Award finalists Bliss and Every Dark Desire. Her novel, Dangerous Pleasures,was winner of the About.com Readers’ Choice Award for Best Lesbian Novel or Memoir of 2012. Her short fiction has appeared in various anthologies including the Cleis Press Best Lesbian Erotica series, Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers, Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica, and Fist of the Spider Woman. Writing under the name "Fiona Lewis," she has also published a novel of young adult fiction called Dreaming in Color with Tiny Satchel Press. And as “Lindsay Evans,” she has written multiple novels for Harlequin Kimani Romance. Her latest novel, Desire at Dawn, is available now.

***Unfortunately our little podcast recording device ran out of digital space before this event reached completion.  We regret the omission but trust the listener will enjoy the hour of recorded material that is available***

DAVID TREUER reads from his novel PRUDENCE

Prudence (Riverhead Books)

Please join us tonight for David Treuer's haunting and unforgettable novel about love, loss, race, and desire in World War II-era America.

On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family's rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are those he's about to leave behind: his hovering mother; the distant father to whom he's been a disappointment; the Indian caretaker who's been more of a father to him than his own; and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence, with consequences that will reverberate years into the future for all of them and that will shape how each of them makes sense of their lives.

With Prudence, David Treuer delivers his most ambitious and captivating novel yet. Powerful and wholly original, it's a story of desire and loss and the search for connection in a riven world; of race and class in a supposedly more innocent era. Most profoundly, it's about the secrets we choose to keep, the ones we can't help but tell, and who--and how--we're allowed to love

Praise for Prudence:

"David Treuer's novel Prudence is a wondrous and mesmerizing narrative--intricate, seductive and wholly gratifying." --Toni Morrison

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He grew up on Leech Lake and left to attend Princeton University where he worked with Paul Muldoon, Joanna Scott, and Toni Morrison. He published his first novel, Little, when he was twenty-four. Treuer is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and his work has been named an editor's pick by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate.com, and The Washington Post. He has a PhD in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Southern California. He divides his time between LA and The Leech Lake Reservation.

AMELIA MORRIS discusses her book BON APPETEMPT: A COMING OF AGE STORY (WITH RECIPES!)

Bon Appetempt: A Coming of Age Story (with Recipes!) Grand Central Publishing

When Amelia Morris found a beautiful chocolate cake in Bon Appétit and took the recipe home to recreate it for a Christmas day brunch, it collapsed into a terrible (but delicious) mess that had to be served in an oversized bowl. It also paralleled the never-quite-predictable situations she's gotten herself into throughout her life, from her one-day career as a six-year-old lady wrestler to her ill-fated job at the School of Rock in Los Angeles.

Now author of a blog named one of the best of 2012 by TIME magazine and awarded “Best Food Humor Blog” 2012 by Saveurmagazine, Amelia has woven those stories into Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) – a funny and poignant memoir about collapsing cakes and coming of age in your twenties and thirties.

Full of hilarious and touching observations about food, family, unemployment, romance, and the excesses of modern L.A., and incorporating recipes as basic as Toasted Cheerios and as advanced as gâteau de crêpes, Bon Appetempt follows Amelia as she finds that even if some of her attempts fall short of the standard set by a food magazine, they can still bring satisfaction to her and her family and friends.

Praise for Bon Appetempt

"Bon Appetempt is a charming, thoughtful, and touching memoir about growing up and becoming the person and artist you've always wanted to be--both inside and outside the kitchen. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and I could not put it down. It also made me very, very hungry for crepes!"--Edan Lepucki, author of California

"Amelia Morris's debut, Bon Appetempt, is one of the most compulsively readable books I've picked up in years. It's spirited, funny, smartly nostalgic, wistful, real. I've never seen another author break a reader's heart, make them laugh, and offer up a recipe for broccolini in the span of two pages. It's all here: big love, big sadness, superb self-aware writing, and cake. Indulge in all of it as fast as you can, and enjoy the rewarding fullness of this incredible book."--Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women

"Amelia Morris uses her trademark humor and fierce honesty to tell a wry and touching coming-of-age story. It made me laugh, wrenched my heart and gave me an instant craving for beans and rice in coconut milk."--Luisa Weiss, founder of The Wednesday Chef and author of My Berlin Kitchen

"Morris adopts an interest in cooking as an adult, grabbing food glossies at grocery checkouts and trying to re-create the meals they picture. The impetus for the blog she starts, with which this book shares its name, was a growing realization that if words failed her, food wouldn't: cooking, as opposed to writing, became a place to lightheartedly attempt great things, and not feel personally hurt if she failed. . . Some recipes are described in the text, too, like the toasted cheerios Morris makes, immediately summoning childhood memories. Sure to appeal to fans of her personable blog, and to round up new ones."--Booklist

Amelia Morris is the creator of Bon Appétempt, which TIME magazine named as one of the twenty-five best blogs of 2012. Her work has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Splendid Table, Saveur.com, BonAppetit.com, and McSweeney's. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the recipient of the Margaret Shannon Morton Fellowship. She currently lives on the east side of Los Angeles with her husband, baby son, and small dog. Visit her at www.bonappetempt.com and on Twitter @bonappetempt

TOSH BERMAN reads and discusses his book of poetry THE PLUM IN MR BLUM'S PUDDING, with special guest RUTH BERNSTEIN

The Plum in Mr Blum's Pudding (Penny Ante Editions)

“My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.”

- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding is Los Angeles native Tosh Berman’s first printed collection of poetry. In 1989, Berman left the United States behind, moving to Japan after learning his wife's (artist Lun*na Menoh) mother was ill in Kitakyushu. The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding was penned while both rapt and lost by this transition. Gracefully toiling between the quirky and earnest, these poems describe the liminal space of the foreigner caught between the strange and the familiar. The result is surreal and unclassifiable, a book of love poems overshadowed by isolation and underscored with curiosity and lust.

Originally published in 1990 by “Cole Swift & Sons” (Japan) as a small hardcover edition of two hundred copies, this new edition acts to preserve this work and features an introduction by art critic and curator Kristine McKenna and an afterword by Ruth Bernstein.

Tosh Berman is a publisher and writer. His press, TamTam Books, has published works by Boris Vian, Guy Debord, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Mesrine, artist Lun*na Menoh, and Ron Mael & Russell Mael (Sparks). He is the author of Sparks-tastic: 21 Nights with Sparks in London. As the son of artist Wallace Berman, Tosh has delivered talks and various essays toward furthering his late father’s artistic legacy including his influential folio series, Semina (1955–1964). He resides in Los Angeles.

Ruth Bernstein lives in Highland Park where she writes postcards and collects books.

BEAU RICE discusses his documentary novel TEX together with TRACY JEANNE ROSENTHAL

TEX (Penny Ante Books)

Skylight Books' very own Beau Rice joins us for the release of his documentary novel, Tex!

An experiment between the epistolary and the ectype, Tex is a performance act in print. Featuring walk-ons by various interlocutors, this archival outpour demonstrates the potentiality of relationships in the digital age. Metonymic displacements, grammatical violations and verbal spillage form the book's rowdy non-narrative about a young LA artist’s sexual explorations, his attachment to a Texas-based former fling, Matt G, and the energy and opportunism involved with the continually forthcoming publication of this, his first book.

Rated X for strong language and sexual content.

Beau Rice is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles.

By 2015, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal will have three books, Close (Sibling Rivalry Press), Ri Ri (Re)Vision (Publication Studio), and This Is The ENDD (Wilner Books). She is Beau's friend, an art critic for Rhizome.org, and a bratty bottom.

ELAINE SOLOWAY reads from her book GREEN NAILS AND OTHER ACTS OF REBELLION

Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion: Life After Loss (She Writes Press)

Early in 2009, after more than a decade of marriage, Elaine Soloway's husband, Tommy, began to change exhibiting inappropriate behaviors at times, becoming inexplicably weepy at others. More troublesome, he began to have difficulty finding words. Ultimately, Tommy's doctors discovered that he had frontotemporal degeneration a diagnosis that explained Tommy's baffling symptoms and transformed Soloway from irritated wife to unflappable, devoted caregiver in one fell swoop.

In Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion Soloway documents Tommy's deteriorating health and eventual death, shedding light on the day-to-day realities of those who assume the caregiver role in a relationship with uncompromising honesty and wry humor. Charming, frank, and ultimately uplifting, Soloway's story reveals how rich with love and appreciation a life compromised by an incurable illness can be and how even widowhood can open a door to a new, invigorated life.

Praise for Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion

"Soloway's story delves deeper than the role of caregiver to her husband. It's not so much about Tommy as it is about coping with Tommy's illness and learning to live with it. It's about accepting life's challenges and moving forward, even when forward sometimes feels backward. It's a story that manages to stay surprisingly lighthearted, as Soloway injects bittersweet memories and bits of humor into her writing. There is no woe-is-me moment in this book. There is no asking of sympathy. I always respect that in a writer." -Sophie L. Nagelberg, Literary Chicago

"What a sweet, poignant collection of memories, revisited with honesty and wit. Elaine Soloway may be a rookie widow but she is a master reporter, with high honors in tender loving care." --Elinor Lipman, author of The Inn At Lake Devine, Then She Found Me, I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays

"Soloway wins the day with her upbeat closing essays, showing us that there is 'Life After Loss' as she soldiers on in her seventies, to more joy and happiness, embracing a life filled with love and laughter from friends and family." -Sandy Pesman, WidowsList.com

Elaine Soloway is the author of the memoir The Division Street Princess, the novel She's Not The Type, and a contributor to the anthology Ask Me About My Divorce. A public relations consultant for thirty years, she also writes the blogs The Rookie Widow, The Rookie Caregiver, and Too Old To Talk Tech. Along with developing her own essays, she is a writing coach and a tech tutor. Soloway is a lifelong Chicagoan and currently lives in the city's River North neighborhood. 

MEGHAN DAUM discusses her THE UNSPEAKABLE: AND OTHER SUBJECTS OF DISCUSSION, together with BERNARD COOPER

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (Farrar Straus Giroux)

A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life. For tonight's event Meghan Daum will be joined by Bernard Cooper!

In her celebrated 2001 collection, My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum offered a bold, witty, defining account of the artistic ambitions, financial anxieties, and mixed emotions of her generation. The Unspeakable is an equally bold and witty, but also a sadder and wiser, report from early middle age.

It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide," Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital. Elsewhere, she writes searchingly about cultural nostalgia, Joni Mitchell, and the alternating heartbreak and liberation of choosing not to have children.

Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with a warm humor reminiscent of Nora Ephron, Daum dissects our culture's most dangerous illusions, blind spots, and sentimentalities while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.

Praise for The Unspeakable: And Other Subject of Discussion:

“The Unspeakable is a fantastic collection of essays: funny, clever and moving (often at the  same time), never more universal than in its most personal moments (in other words, throughout), and written with enviable subtlety, precision and spring. As if that weren’t enough, Meghan Daum very nearly persuaded me to listen to Joni Mitchell again!”– Geoff Dyer

“The Unspeakable speaks with wit and warmth and artful candor, the fruits of an exuberant and consistently surprising intelligence. These are essays that dig under the surface of what we might expect to feel in order to discover what we actually feel instead. I was utterly captivated by Daum’s sensitive fidelity to the complexity of lived experience.” – Leslie Jamison

"For several years now, I've kept copies of some of these essays . . . by my desk . . . Her writing has a clarity . . . that just makes you feel awake." --Ira Glass

"A Joan Didion for the new millennium, Meghan Daum brings grace, wit, and insight to contemporary life, love, manners, and money." --Dan Wakefield

Meghan Daum is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth. She is also the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House and The Quality of Life Report, a novel. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, and other publications. She has also contributed to NPR’s Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Bernard Cooper is the author of the forthcoming memoir, My Avant-Garde Education. He is also the author of The Bill From My Father, Maps To Anywhere, A Year of Rhymes, Truth Serum, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again. Cooper is the recipient of the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature.  His work has appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Essays of 1988, 1995, and 1997, 2002, and 2008.  His work has also appeared in magazines and literary reviews including, Granta, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.  He has contributed to National Public Radio's "This American Life" and for six years wrote monthly features as the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine

ADELLE WALDMAN reads from her novel THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. in conversation with director MARC WEBB

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Picador)

Adelle Waldman, whose novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. has been on our bestseller list for months, discusses her book with film director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man).

A debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the romantic life of a brilliant young man.

Writer Nate Piven's star is rising. After several lean and striving years, he has his pick of both magazine assignments and women: Juliet, the hotshot business reporter; Elisa, his gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; and Hannah, "almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice," who holds her own in conversation with his friends. When one relationship grows more serious, Nate is forced to consider what it is he really wants.

In Nate's 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a flawed, sometimes infuriating modern man--one who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down in ways that may just make him an emblem of our times. With tough-minded intelligence and wry good humor The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is an absorbing tale of one young man's search for happiness--and an inside look at how he really thinks about women, sex and love.

Praise for The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.:

"Deliciously funny, sharply observed, elegantly told, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is the best debut I've encountered in years, the best novel about New York, and the best novel about contemporary manhood and the crazy state of gender roles and just "contemporary" life. With a pitch perfect balance of satire and sympathy, reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, and Jay McInerney'sBrightness Falls, Adelle Waldman's voice is nevertheless entirely--and unabashedly--her own." --Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of the novel A Fortunate Age

"Novelist Adelle Waldman does a very tricky thing: she succeeds in crossing the gender line, imagining the world from behind the eyes of a male character both sympathetically and unsentimentally. This former young-literary-man-in-Brooklyn found himself cringing in recognition." --William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

"I can't remember the last novel this good about being young and smart and looking for love in the big city. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. reads as if one of the top tier 19th-century novelists zeroed her social x-ray eyes onto present-moment Brooklyn. Up-and-coming writers and artists everywhere will be squirming with uncomfortable recognition of themselves, their friends, and their psyches; far more readers will be thanking Adelle Waldman for this hilarious, big-hearted, ruthlessly intelligent, and ridiculously well-written novel." --Charles Bock, author of the best-selling novel Beautiful Children

""Bracing and astute. Waldman writes these crisp, smart sentences that are every bit as thoughtful as her characters--people whose relationships founder and flourish in ways that will captivate readers from page one." --Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance and "Woke Up Lonely

Adelle Waldman is the author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Filmmaker Marc Webb most recently directed The Amazing Spider-Man 2, after helming the critically acclaimedThe Amazing Spider-Man which grossed over $750 million worldwide. Webb will direct the third installment in the series, The Amazing Spider-Man 3, scheduled for release in 2018. Webb made his feature film debut with the two-time Golden Globe nominated (500) Days of Summer for which he received The National Board of Review’s Spotlight Award, recognizing outstanding directorial debuts.

JONATHAN LETHEM reads from his book DISSIDENT GARDENS and LYDIA MILLET reads from her book MERMAIDS IN PARADISE

Dissident Gardens (Vintage Books) Mermaids in Paradise (W.W. Norton & Company)

Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called "as ambitious as [Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan" ("Los Angeles Times"), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga.

Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her equally passionate and willful daughter, Miriam, flees Rose's influence for the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. Despite their differences, they share a power to enchant the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her feckless chess hustler cousin, Lenny; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinger husband, Tommy Gogan; and their bewildered son, Sergius. Through Lethem's vivid storytelling we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet returns to redefine “comedy of errors” in Mermaids In Paradise, the genre-bending satire of a tropical honeymoon hijacked by mermaids, kidnappers, and mercenaries.

In this hilarious novel, a honeymooning couple makes friends with a marine biologist who discovers genuine mermaids in a coral reef—and who, the next night, apparently drowns in her hotel bathtub. As a resort chain swoops in to corner the market on mermaids, the newlyweds (opinionated, skeptical narrator Deb and handsome online gamer Chip, the world’s friendliest man) join forces with other vacationers—including an ex–Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ—to protect the mermaids from the corporate “Venture of Marvels” that wants to turn their habitat into a theme park.

Mermaids in Paradise is Millet’s funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and emotional power of her more recent, critically acclaimed novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, comic on the surface and deeply solemn at its core.

Praise for Dissident Gardens:

"Dissident Gardens seamlessly weaves together three generations, yet it doesn't broadcast itself as a multigenerational epic, nor is it afflicted by the desire to pose as the next great American novel. It's an intimate book."--The New York Times Book Review

"A tour de force, a brilliant, satiric journey through America's dissident history."--The Star Tribune

"Lethem has artfully blended, redefined, ignored, satirized and enriched the traditional categories of fiction."--The Plain Dealer

"Remarkable. . . . Lethem's best novel since "Motherless Brooklyn." . . . Crackle[s] with wordplay and intelligence."--The Miami Herald

"The writing soars. . . . Lethem can riff with the best, spinning knockout lines that make you stop and stare . . . while you admire a sentence's every turn."--The Seattle Times

"An assured, expert literary performance by one of our most important writers. . . . Magnificent."--Los Angeles Review of Books

Praise for Mermaids in Paradise:

"Mermaids in Paradise makes brilliant comedy out of a honeymoon trip that veers from the absurd to the sublime and back again. Lydia Millet is a stone-cold genius. --Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

"I laughed so hard all over town. Leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there. She's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious. --Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! andVampires in the Lemon Grove

Jonathan Lethem is the "New York Times" bestselling author of nine novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the nonfiction collection The Ecstasy of Influence. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem's work has appeared in "The New Yorker," "Harper's Magazine," "Rolling Stone," "Esquire," and "The New York Times," among other publications. 

Lydia Millet is the author of twelve previous books of fiction. Her novel Ghost Lightswas a New York Times Notable Book; its sequel Magnificence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times Awards in fiction; and her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.