Skylight Books Podcast Series

ERIC BRACH discusses his book CONQUERING THE ELECTRON, with special guests JENNIFER OUELLETTE, ALEX KORB and KYLE HILL

Conquering the Electron: The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs and Scoundrels Who Built Our Electronic Age

(Rowman and Littlefield)

Conquering the Electron offers readers a true and engaging history of the world of electronics. Beginning with the discoveries of static electricity and magnetism and ending with the creation of the smartphone and the iPad, this book shows the interconnection of each advance to the next one on the long journey to our modern day technologies. Exploring the combination of genius, infighting, and luck that powered the creation of the electronic age we inhabit today, Conquering the Electron debunks the hero worship that so often plagues the stories of great advances.

Want to know how AT&T s Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and an early grave? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside the blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.

Praise for Conquering the Electron

"Conquering the Electron contains an amazing number of little-known facts about the giants who shaped technology and still have an impact today. This book is an interesting read and an inspiration to engineers, entrepreneurs, and young people who aspire to make a difference. It will also provide ample conversation material for any social encounter.--Dr. Milton Chang, former CEO of Newport Corporation and New Focus, Inc. and author of Toward Entrepreneurship

"Best history of electronics ever. Derek Cheung is an outstanding technologist and businessperson, and he gets the technical and business details right. This is a great story of a mighty industry."--David Rutledge, Tomiyasu Professor of Engineering, Caltech

Eric Brach is a lecturer in English West Los Angeles College in Culver City, California. He is the author of Billy the Hill and the Jump Hook, and has been a contributor to national magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including Bleacher Report, Box Office, and The Onion. He lives in Culver City, California.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of four popular science books, including The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. She also served as editor for The Best Online Science Writing 2012.

Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times Book Review. She blogs for Scientific American, and she co-hosts the Virtually Speaking Science podcast for Blog Talk Radio. She also holds a black belt in jujitsu.

Alex Korb is a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at UCLA. His research focuses on mood disorders and the development of brain stimulation techniques using focused ultrasound. Since 2010, he has written the neuroscience blog PreFrontal Nudity for PsychologyToday.com.

When he takes off his lab coat, Alex coaches the UCLA women's ultimate frisbee team, using his knowledge of brain and behavior to unlock their peak performance. His book The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression will be released in spring 2015 by New Harbinger Publications.

Kyle Hill is a science writer based in Los Angeles, California. His work has been published by Scientific American, WIRED, Popular Science, Slate, and the Boston Globe, and he has appeared as an expert on Fox News, Al Jazeera America, and Huffington Post Live, among others.

Kyle currently serves as the science editor for the popular Nerdist podcast, and in 2013, WIRED named him one of the 20 science communicators to follow. He graduated with a masters degree from Marquette University.

YUMI SAKUGAWA discusses her book YOUR ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BECOMING ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE

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.

BEN LERNER reads from 10:04, in conversation with RACHEL KUSHNER

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.

ELIZABETH GORCEY reads from her children's book GOING TO THE PARK

Going to the Park (Bowie Books + Liv on Life Series)

Going to the Park is the first book in the Liv On Life Series. It tells the story of Liv and Bowie  (her Boxer dog) realizing that Mom and Dad need a break from the stresses of work. Liv and Bowie convince their Mom and Dad to put down the technology and head out together for a fun day at the park!

The Liv On Life book series was inspired by Elizabeth’s daugher, Olivia, and the joy she has brought to the lives of her mother and others. In encouraging Olivia to embrace, cherish and use her authentic voice, Elizabeth has realized how much parents can, and must, learn from the purity and honesty of a child's perspective.

Director, producer and actor Elizabeth Gorcey has expanded her repertoire to book publishing with the LIV ON LIFE (”LOL”) children’s book series. The twelve-book series is written from the endearing perspective of Elizabeth’s daughter, Olivia, who shares her insights and observations on modern-day life. Elizabeth currently lives in LA with her family. When not making films or publishing books, she works diligently on her non-profit art program for terminally ill children called the CARING STROKES ART PROGRAM. For more info, please vist www.livonlife.com

JOSEPH O'NEILL reads from THE DOG

The Dog (Pantheon Books)

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai. 

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, the hero of this novel leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In a Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-La, our protagonist struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the "doghouse," a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped--even if he's just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind's moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O'Neill's hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times. 

 Praise for The Dog:
"Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Shades of Kafka and Conrad permeate O’Neill’s thoughtful modern fable of exile, a sad story that comments darkly on the human condition and refuses bravely to trade on the success of Netherland."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Joseph O'Neill is the author of the novels Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), This Is the Life, and The Breezes, and Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. He lives in New York and teaches at Bard College. 

DAVID BEZMOZGIS reads from THE BETRAYERS

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.

BARBARA THOMASON presents 100 NOT SO FAMOUS VIEWS OF L.A., in conversation with DAVID ULIN

100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. (Prospect Park Books)

Join us tonight for a very special visual presentation by local painter Barbara Thomason.

For four years, artist Barbara Thomason roamed her beloved Los Angeles, seeking the vistas, nooks, bridges, signs, streets, and landmarks that most captivated her. Inspired by the color, compositions, and tonal changes of Hiroshige’s acclaimed print series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, this grand project resulted in one hundred paintings, all of which Thomason executed in Cel-Vinyl to resemble woodblock ink in texture and tone.

Each of these original paintings have now been beautifully reproduced and are accompanied by the artist’s personal commentary and historical insight about her subject matter—an alchemical mix that results in a unique and splendid tour of the vibrancy, quirkiness, charm, and essential personality of a great American city.

Praise for 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A.

“This is Los Angeles without its history of forgetting, no longer rootless, placeless, but instead, through Thomason’s transforming imagination, the embodiment of place.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic (from the Foreword)

“Everyone who loves L.A. is going to want this book. Once you get the idea, it becomes addicting—you're compelled to pore over each page. She had me at Felix, the strangely ironic cat that lorded over all of my really awful late-night food choices as an undergrad at USC. It’s the perfect hostess/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/anyone who lives in or has ever loved L.A. gift.” —Greg Freitas, Traveler’s Bookcase (Los Angeles, CA)

Barbara Thomason is a Los Angeles-based artist and professor of printmaking, sculpture, and painting at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her paintings, drawings, and prints have been shown in exhibitions at many galleries, museums, and universities. She received a masters degree in printmaking from California State University, Long Beach, and worked as a master printer in lithography at the renowned Gemini G.E.L., where she printed for Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Ed Ruscha, Ellsworh Kelly, and many others. She has been on the art faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Redlands; Otis College of Art and Design; and other fine institutions.

David Ulin" is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and the editor of The Library of America's Writing Los Angeles.

COURTNEY MORENO reads her novel IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

In Case of Emergency (McSweeney's)

Join us as we celebrate the release of the debut novel from this award-winning writer. 

What do you do when you can’t function? After rookie EMT Piper Gallagher responds to a call outside a Los Angeles shopping mall for a man who can only tell her, "I can’t function," the question begins to haunt her.

How will Piper continue to function despite the horror she sees working in South Central, and despite her own fractured past? And how will the woman Piper loves continue to function as she experiences the aftershocks of her time spent serving in Iraq?

Piper’s experiences as a rookie break her down and open her up. This vivid and visceral debut is a rich study in trauma—in its causes and effects, in its methods and disguises, in its power and its pull. 

Praise for In Case of Emergency:
"Moreno writes about physical and emotional damage with such precision that the reader feels supine, strapped into her own ambulance, careening from page to page. It's a story about the greatest emergency of all: the plight of being a human with a fragile heart, beating amidst all these dangers." —Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me

"Piper may be a rookie with a lot to learn, but Moreno’s inspiring debut reads like it’s been written by someone with years of experience already under her belt." —K.M. Soehnlein, author of Robin and Ruby and The World of Normal Boys

Courtney Moreno's award-winning writing has been published in LA Weekly and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received a B.S. in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of San Francisco. During the ten years in between, she worked as an entomologist’s assistant, lab technician, clinical research coordinator, stagehand, set carpenter, modern and aerial dancer, EMT, and field training officer. She lives in San Francisco. 

SHEILA HETI, HEIDI JULAVITS, and LEANNE SHAPTON present their book WOMEN IN CLOTHES

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.

JUNOT DIAZ reads from THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER

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. 

JOSHUA WOLF SHENK reads from POWERS OF TWO

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.

Against The World (Dumont Verlag)

Join us for a very special event as tonight's co-sponsor, Villa Aurora, presents their writer-in residence, Jan Brandt.

A village on the furthest outskirts of northwest Lower Saxony, only a few kilometres from the Dutch border: Cows are grazing on the meadows, farmers are tilling their fields, every once in a while the din of a low-lying aircraft disturbs the tranquility. Flowers are blossoming behind the trimmed cedar hedges, shiny, freshly waxed new cars stand in the driveways.

This is the world into which Daniel Kuper was born in the mid 1970s, a lanky, withdrawn boy with much too much imagination and much too little opportunity to live out only a fraction of it. Strange things soon start taking place and Kuper is held responsible. The more he tries to rebut the accusations, the deeper he gets enmeshed in them. Kuper takes up the fight against the village, its inhabitants, its traditions, its narrowness and its closeness. They are ones Kuper rebels against and they are the ones he loses out to in the end.

Jan Brandt, born in Leer (Eastern Frisia) in 1974, studied history and literature in Cologne, London and Berlin and graduated from the German Journalism School in Munich. Amongst others his short stories have been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He was awarded numerous fellowships and residences such as to Ledig House and Yaddo in New York. Brandt’s first novel Against The World was a finalist for the 2011 German Book Award and won the Nicolas-Born-First-Novel-Award. It’s going to be published in English by Seagull Books in 2015. His second novel deals Germans who emigrated to America. 

DAVID BAJO reads from MERCY 6

Mercy 6 (Unbridled Books)

In Mercy 6, four people in four separate places within the same Los Angeles hospital all collapse and die at once. After a quick examination, Dr. Anna Mendenhall, the first ER doctor to care for the patients, orders the entrances and exits be sealed, believing the cause is contagion. With her is Mullich, the architect responsible for re-designing the hospital, which he had redesigned for precisely this scenario: containment

Almost as soon as she makes the call, however, Mendenhall realizes it’s a mistake. As infectious disease specialists take over, she fears they will draw out the investigation—see what they want to see—and keep everyone locked in the hospital for an unnecessarily long time.

What actually occurs, however, is more complex and unnerving than Mendenhall expects, as sinister outside agencies begin to get involved and medical concerns cease to be the primary concern. The farther her investigation goes, the more she understands that the forces around her want her contained, not because of her exposure to the patients, but because of what she suspects.

Mercy 6 is well researched and only slightly speculative—which makes this understated and cutting-edge medical thriller as chilling as it is suspenseful.

David Bajo was raised on the California-Mexico border and has worked as a journalist and translator. He is the author of Panopticon and The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri. He teaches writing at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Elise Blackwell, and their daughter.

A SPECIAL PERFORMANCE by musician KATH BLOOM

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

LAILA LALAMI reads from THE MOOR'S ACCOUNT

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/