Skylight Books Podcast Series

On the eve of Los Angeles Pride, Skylight Books presents its third annual celebration of LGBT writing.  The work of James Baldwin, Eloise Klein Healy, Oscar Wilde, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jerome Stueart will be explored by some of our favorite writers including Jervey Tervalon, Naomi Hirahara, Ali Liebegott and Wendy Ortiz.  Curated by Noel Alumit

Mabel and Me (Angel City Press)

Join us tonight for a very special event from local publisher and friend of the store, Angel City Press.

Mabel and Me is a novel about the Movies—a sharply observed, historically accurate, deliciously intimate story set in the earliest days of motion pictures. Beautifully told, this is a tale of Jack, his coming of age with the Movies, and his passionate, destructive, and ultimately liberating love for one of the very first movie stars, the sweetheart of slapstick—Mabel Normand. Theirs is the story of the birth of the modern movie age. It’s a story they lived together. Day in, day out. Until they didn’t.

Mabel Normand was the model for the modern woman: her brief life, from slapstick girl to box­office bonanza to drug addict to modern savvy star, embodied the evolution of the Movies. She was the Queen of Comedy, a flapper a decade before flappers, the first to have her name emblazoned in the title of a picture, the first director of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp—not to mention the person who convinced Mack Sennett to give Chaplin his first break, immediately recognizing his comic genius. Mabel was the first woman allowed to be both beautiful and funny, the model for the modern comedic star, and she was shockingly sexy at the time. Watching Mabel on screen was like “being slapped in the face with a perfumed glove.” Author Jon Boorstin portrays her love affairs—all fact­based, particularly her defining, explosive relationship with Mack Sennett—with humor, poignancy, and drama.

Mabel and Me takes us directly inside the world of the birth of the Movies, inside the world of Hollywood 1912. We become obsessed with motion pictures, in love with their mesmerizing power. Entertaining, heartfelt, and unexpected, Boorstin’s novel delivers us to the first moments of filmmaking and recreates the sense of all that was happening on film and behind the scenes for the very first time. Written in a voice that’s side by side with Hollywood’s premier female movie star, one that’s close to her, and from a perspective that’s often privy to what Normand is thinking—even when she starred with Chaplin in the first feature­length comedy ever made.

Jon Boorstin's first novel, Pay or Play, was called “the definitive send ­up of Hollywood” by Publishers Weekly in a coveted starred review. His second, The Newsboys’ Lodging-­House, won the New York Society Library Award for Historical Fiction. Boorstin has also written a book of practical film theory, Making Movies Work, which is used in film schools all over the world. The work of an Oscar®­nominated documentary filmmaker and longtime screenwriter and producer, Mabel and Me is the culmination of Boorstin’s lifelong affair with the Movies.

The City Under The Skin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

 

A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map.

 

A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that’s not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can’t quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he’s just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it’s not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps.

 

They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it’s the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he’d prefer to ignore.

 

In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others.

 

For tonight's reading, Geoff Nicholson will be joined by founder and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books Tom Lutz.

  

Geoff Nicholson is the author of sixteen novels. His debut, Street Sleeper, was short-listed for the Yorkshire Post First Work Award; Bleeding London was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize; and Bedlam Burning was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. His nonfiction titles include Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking, and his journalism has appeared in, among other publications, The New York Times, Bookforum, Gastronomica, ArtReview, Black Clock, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Times and Custom Car. He is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was born in Sheffield, England, and currently lives in Los Angeles.

An Untamed State (Grove Press)

Roxane Gay is a powerful new literary voice whose short stories and essays have already earned her an enthusiastic audience. In An Untamed State, she delivers an assured debut about a woman kidnapped for ransom, her captivity as her father refuses to pay and her husband fights for her release over thirteen days, and her struggle to come to terms with the ordeal in its aftermath.

Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti's richest sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her father's Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent. 

Roxane Gay's writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American,American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. Her first book, Ayiti, was a collection of poetry and short stories. She is the coeditor of PANK. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University.

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (Three Rivers Press)

 

Kristin Newman spent her 20s and 30s dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead started traveling the world, often alone, for a few months each year, falling madly in love with attractive locals who provided moments of the love she wanted without the cost of the freedom she needed.  She introduces readers to the Israeli bartenders, Argentinian priests, Finnish poker players, and sexy Bedouins who helped her transform into "Kristin-Adjacent" on the road—a quieter, less judgmental, and, yes, sluttier version of herself at home.

 

Ultimately, Kristin's adventures led her to a better understanding of what she was actually running away from at home and why every life hurdle seemed to put her on a transatlantic flight to the unknown. Equal parts laugh-out-loud storytelling; thoughtful, candid reflection; and wanderlust-inspiring travel tales, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is a compelling and hilarious debut that will have readers scrambling to renew their passports. 

 

Kristin Newman is a television writer who has worked in Hollywood for almost twenty years. She has written for That '70s Show, Chuck, and How I Met Your Mother. She currently writes for ABC's The Neighbors. 

The Snow Queen (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Skylight Books is very excited to welcome to Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours.

NOTE: We're expecting a big crowd for this event.  As always, our events are free and open to the public, but we will be issuing numbered singing line tickets to keep the line organized (the number is your place in line).  To get a ticket to go through the signing line, you must purchase a copy of The Snow Queen here at Skylight Books.  Tickets will become available on the day the book is released -- May 6. You can purchase the book and get a ticket in our store, over the phone (at 323-660-1175), or on our website (just leave a note in the "order comments" field that you'd like a ticket).  Members in our Friends with Benefits program get 20% off the event book and a ticket to the priority signing line, so sign up or mention your membership when you buy. 

Michael Cunningham's luminous new novel begins with a vision. It's November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn't believe in visions--or in God--but he can't deny what he's seen.

At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett's older brother, a struggling musician, is trying--and failing--to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of love.

Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.

Michael Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul.

The Snow Queen, beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Michael Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation.

Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York.

Off Course (Sarah Crichton Books)

Skylight Books is proud to welcome two legendary authors for one legendary evening.

"A bear climbs onto a cabin's deck, presses his nose to the sliding door. Inside, a young woman stands to face him. She comes closer, and closer yet, until only the glass stands between them . . ."

The year is 1981, Reagan is in the White House, and the country is stalled in a recession. Cressida Hartley, a gifted Ph.D. student in economics, moves into her parents' shabby A-frame cabin in the Sierras to write her dissertation. In her most intimate and emotionally compelling novel to date, Michelle Huneven--author of Blame, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award--returns with her signature mix of fine-grained storytelling, unforgettable characters, and moral complexity. Cress, increasingly resistant to her topic (art in the marketplace), allows herself to be drawn into the social life of the small mountain community.

The exuberant local lodge owner, Jakey Yates, with his big personality and great animal magnetism, is the first to blur Cress's focus. The builder Rick Garsh gives her a job driving up and down the mountain for supplies. And then there are the two Morrow brothers, skilled carpenters, who are witty, intriguing, and married. As Cress tells her best friend back home in Pasadena, being a single woman on the mountain amounts to a form of public service. Falling prey to her own perilous reasoning, she soon finds herself in dark new territory, subject to forces beyond her control from both within and without. In Off Course, Huneven introduces us to an intelligent young woman who discovers that love is the great distraction, and impossible love the greatest distraction of all.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three previous novels—Blame, Jamesland, and Round Rock. Her nonfiction writing includes restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Weekly, other food journalism, and, with Bernadette Murphy, The Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction. Huneven lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, Jim Potter.

Mona Simpson’s novels include My Hollywood, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, The Lost Father and Anywhere But Here. Her books have won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, the Whiting Writer’s Award and placed as finalist for the PEN/FAULKNER award. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Lila Wallace Prize. Most recently, she was the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and letters. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harpers, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and The Paris Review. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she lives in Santa Monica, California. Her new novel, Casebook, is on sale from Knopf in April, 2014.

Math, Heaven, Time (Eyewear Publishing) 

Join us for a very special evening as Mandy Kahn reads from her debut collection of poetry, featuring soloist Becky Stark and The ∞ Angeles Ladies' Choir performing new collaborative works that feature poetry, solo voice and a chorus.

Math, Heaven, Time is the lush, lyric and unabashedly beautiful debut from poet Mandy Kahn. A teeming corridor where characters from a Noel Coward play tire of eating oysters, where Alfred Stieglitz ruminates on Georgia O'Keeffe's hands, where a rooster crows for dawn all day, and where the consideration of simple things - common wheat, a renovated loft, couples that argue on reality TV - rises to the level of exhalation, of prayer. 

Mandy Kahn is coauthor (with Aaron Rose) of the nonfiction book Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis (JRP/Ringier), which was also released as a record with a score by No Age. She has collaborated with many composers to create works that feature poetry in tandem with classical music, and has had readings and signings at Colette (Paris), Motto (Berlin), Shoreditch House (London), Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco), Printed Matter (New York), and Art Center College of Design (Los Angeles). 

Becky Stark was described by the NY Times as “Lucille Ball and Tinkerbell engaged in a duet.” She is the voice of the band Lavender Diamond and is a member of the harmony group The Living Sisters. She is the founder of the community healing project the LA Ladies Choir and is also the director of the LA River Choir, a public ecological healing force. She joined the Decemberists on their album “Hazards of Love” to sing the role of Margaret. Alongside comedian & musician Charlyne Yi she is a one half of the musical comedy group called Courage. She sings with John C. Reilly in the musical variety band John Reilly & Friends. She studied comparative literature at Brown University.

Here Comes Everybody (Chicago Review Press)

From the one of the founding members of the legendary punk band The Pogues comes a blistering memoir of the fury and passion that ignited their lives and their music.

The Pogues came barreling out of Kings Cross, London in the early 80s—a riotous sound of punk rock and poetic Celtic folk that would turn traditional Irish music on its head. With emotive songwriter Shane MacGowan at the helm,  the Pogues were destined for world tours with the likes of Elvis Costello, U2 and Bob  Dylan.

In Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues, James Fearnley paints a clear, often dark picture of the fantastic highs and dramatic lows of life in one of the most original bands of their era. Drawing from his personal experiences as well as the series of journals and the letters he wrote throughout the band’s career, Fearnley reveals how the drifters who made up the Pogues, led  by MacGowan, succeeded, according to Billy Bragg, in “taking Irish music and throwing it down the cellar steps.”

The exuberance of their live performances coupled with relentless touring spiraled into years of hard drinking and excess which eventually took their toll—most infamously on MacGowan, but also on the rest of the band—causing them to break up after nine years (though reuniting in 2001 and touring ever since). Here, their story is told with beauty, humor and honesty by James Fearnley, who with a novelist’s eye brings to life the youthful friendships, the concerts, the conflicts and the eventual collapse, in a hugely compelling and moving account.

James Fearnley was born in 1954 in Worsley, Manchester. played guitar in various bands, including the Nips with Shane MacGowan, before becoming the accordion player who still tours with the Pogues. He lives in Los Angeles.

Over Easy (Drawn & Quarterly)

Artist and Los Angeles resident, Mimi Pond comes to Skylight Books with her sort-of memoir Over Easy, a brilliant portrayal of a familiar coming-of-age story.

After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Cafe, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles. Gradually she realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions.

Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California--with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex, and drug use--and bildungsroman of a young woman who grows from a naive, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout into a self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond's chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise semi-memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.

Praise for Over Easy:

"As funny and warm-hearted as a memoir about a bunch of punks, drug dealers, hippies, and art school dropouts screwing in the 1970s can get. Mimi Pond's coming-of-age graphic novel, "Over Easy", is a delicious charmer." --Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

Mimi Pond is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. She has created comics for the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen Magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications too numerous to mention, and has written and illustrated five humor books. She has also written for television: her credits include the first full length episode of The Simpsons, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" in 1989, and episodes for the television shows Designing Women and Pee Wee's Playhouse. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the painter Wayne White.

The Harlem Hellfighters (Broadway Books)

From bestselling author Max Brooks, the riveting story of the highly decorated, barrier-breaking, historic black regiment--the Harlem Hellfighters

The Harlem Hellfighters is a fictionalized account of the 369th Infantry Regiment--the first African American regiment mustered to fight in World War I. From the enlistment lines in Harlem to the training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the trenches in France, bestselling author Max Brooks tells the thrilling story of the heroic journey that these soldiers undertook for a chance to fight for America. Despite extraordinary struggles and discrimination, the 369th became one of the most successful--and least celebrated--regiments of the war. The Harlem Hellfighters, as their enemies named them, spent longer than any other American unit in combat and displayed extraordinary valor on the battlefield. Based on true events and featuring artwork from acclaimed illustrator Caanan White, these pages deliver an action-packed and powerful story of courage, honor, and heart.

Bark: Stories (Knopf)

We're thrilled to present acclaimed writer Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs, Birds of America), who will visit Skylight to read and sign her new short story collection, Bark.

Scarecrone (Publishing Genius Press) E! Entertainment (Wonder Press)

In Scarecrone, Melissa Broder deepens her self-aware and dark brand of poetry, which The Chicago Tribune says “risks the divine” and Flavorwire calls “unbelievable and overwhelming for its imaginative power alone.” Publishers Weekly says her work is "as funny and hip as it is disturbing."

The full-length version of Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment sparkles with the static of TV personalities, the privileged dramas of MTV’s The Hills and Bravo’s Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith.Kate Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian’s fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in a language of diamond-studded lavishness.

A recent transplant from Brooklyn, Melissa Broder now lives in Los Angeles, CA where she continues her work as assistant director of publicity and social media at Penguin Random House. Broder's poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, et al. Her previous books are Meat Heart and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles based writer and artist. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic), and co-author of Abra, an artist’s book and interactive iPad app created with the help of a NEA grant from Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Durbin is founding editor of the online pop cultural criticism journal, Gaga Stigmata; her tumblr project, Women as Objects, archives the teen girl tumblr aesthetic. 

Creative Block (Chronicle Books)

Creative block presents the most crippling--and unfortunately universal--challenge for artists. No longer! This chunky blockbuster of a book is chock-full of solutions for overcoming all manner of artistic impediment. The blogger behind The Jealous Curator, Danielle Krysa interviews 50 successful international artists working in different mediums and mines their insights on how to conquer self-doubt, stay motivated, and get new ideas to flow. Each artist offers a tried-and-true exercise--from road trips to 30-day challenges to cataloging the medicine cabinet-- that will kick-start the creative process. Abundantly visual with more than 300 images showcasing these artists' resulting work, Creative Block is a vital ally to students, artists, and creative professionals.

For today's panel, Danielle Krysa will be joined by Stephanie Vovas (Photography) and Jenny Hart (Contemporary embroidery/drawing)

Danielle Krysa is the artist/curator behind The Jealous Curator, an art blog that celebrates the work of contemporary artists. Along with writing a daily post on her own site, Danielle has also written guest posts for West Elm, Style by Emily Henderson, Etsy, and many other blogs. She is a regular contributor to SFGirlByBay.com, and has written articles for Frankie Magazine, and Anthology Magazine. All of this writing has recently lead to Danielle becoming a published author - in February of 2014 her first book, Creative Block, was released by Chronicle Books. A second book, focused on contemporary collage, will be published in the fall of 2014. Danielle lives in British Columbia, Canada.
www.thejealouscurator.com

Stephanie Vovas is a fine art and editorial photographer. Her favorite thing to do is photograph people. She has won numerous awards including American Photography 29, Prix de la Photographie Paris, and the International Photography Awards. Her work has been published in Treats! Magazine, Playboy, Rooms and PDN. Her photography is held in many private collections and has been exhibited in several solo and group shows. She lives in Los Angeles with her fiancé Tom, and their dog Toadie.

Jenny Hart founded Sublime Stitching in 2001 as a new model for embroidery design and resources. She first began working in hand embroidery in the summer of 2000, creating portraits of the famous and infamous. Recognizing a need to update and expand embroidery design commercially led to the launch of Sublime Stitching a year later. Since then, Jenny has become an internationally recognized fine artist and designer with works appearing in Vogue, Nylon, Lucky, Rolling Stone, The Face, Juxtapoz, The New York Times Magazine and others. She is an award-winning author of seven titles on embroidery for Chronicle Books, and her drawings and works in embroidery have been exhibited and published internationally. In 2012, Hart's embroidered work "La Llorona" became a part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Jenny lives in Los Angeles, California.

For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey (Beacon Press)

For All of Us, One Today is a fluid, poetic story anchored by Richard Blanco's experiences as the inaugural poet in 2013, and beyond. In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges behind the creation of the inaugural poem, "One Today," as well as two other poems commissioned for the occasion ("Mother Country" and "What We Know of Country"), published here for the first time ever, alongside translations of all three of those poems into his native Spanish. Finally, Richard Blanco reflects on his life-changing role as a public voice since the inauguration, his spiritual embrace of Americans everywhere, and his vision for poetry's new role in our nation's consciousness. Like the inaugural poem itself, "For All of Us, One Today" speaks to what makes this country and its people great, marking a historic moment of hope and promise in our evolving American landscape.