Skylight Books Podcast Series

ABDI NAZEMIAN reads from THE WALK-IN CLOSET

The Walk-In Closet (Booksparks)

Step into a world where glamour, money and family honor – no matter the cost – reign supreme in Abdi Nazemian’sThe Walk-In Closet. Fans of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians will love this debut novel from Los Angeles screenwriter Abdi Nazemian (The Quiet, Celeste in the City) about two best friends in Los Angeles juggling a fictional relationship and searching for true love. Hilarious, heartbreaking and edgy, with a shocking twist, The Walk-In Closet provides a glimpse into the lives of the Iranian-American elite.

Kara Walker has never found much glamour in her own life, especially not when compared to the life of her best friend Bobby Ebadi. Bobby, along with his sophisticated parents Leila and Hossein, is everything Kara always wanted to be. The trio provides the perfect antidote to what Kara views as the more mundane problems of her girlfriends and her divorced parents. And so when the Ebadis assume that Kara is Bobby’s girlfriend, she willingly steps into the role. She enjoys the perks of life in this closet, not only Leila’s designer hand-me-downs and free rent, but also the excitement of living life as an Ebadi.

As Kara’s 30th birthday approaches, Leila and Hossein up the pressure. They are ready for Kara to assume the mantle of the next Mrs. Ebadi, and Bobby seems prepared to give them what they want: the illusion of a traditional home and grandchildren. How far will Kara be willing to go? And will she be willing to pull the Persian rug out from under them when she discovers that her own secret is just one of many lurking inside the Ebadi closet?

Abdi Nazemian is the screenwriter of "The Quiet," "Celeste in the City," "Beautiful Girl," and the short film "Revolution," which he also directed. He is an alumnus of the Sundance Writer’s Lab, a mentor at the Outfest Screenwriter’s Lab, and has taught screenwriting at UCLA Extension. He lives in Los Angeles with his two children, and his dog, Hedy Lamar. Connect with Abdi at abdaddy.com, Facebook.com/AbdiNazemian and on Twitter @Abdaddy.  

LGBT WRITERS WHO INSPIRED US featuring NOEL ALUMIT, JERVEY TERVALON, ALI LIEBOGOTT, WENDY ORTIZ and NAOMI HIRAHARA

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

JON BOORSTIN reads from MABEL AND ME

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.

GEOFF NICHOLSON reads from THE CITY UNDER THE SKIN, in conversation with TOM LUTZ

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.

ROXANE GAY reads from AN UNTAMED STATE

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.

KRISTIN NEWMAN reads from WHAT I WAS DOING WHILE YOU WERE BREEDING

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. 

ELIZABETH CANTWELL reads from NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

Nights I Let The Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press)

Elizabeth Cantwell's debut book of poems is a startling reminder of the range of voices to be found in the poetic landscape of Los Angeles. A can't miss reading for lovers of poetry.

Nights I Let The Tiger Get You is a neurotic journey through the surreal déjà vu of recurring dreams and the disorienting patterns of our own personal histories. The collection’s poems view the failures of a family’s internal structure through the distorted lens of the subconscious—but the language’s twists and turns ultimately open the narrator’s world to hope.

Praise for Nights I Let The Tiger Get You

“In her brilliant debut collection, Nights I Let the Tiger Get You, Elizabeth Cantwell excavates layers of contemporary anxiety to reveal that Blake’s Tyger has been, all along, that rough beast slouching toward us, and is in fact now living among us -- with an unsettling intimacy -- in both our unconscious and daily lives. Elizabeth Cantwell’s poems honor the disjunctions of voice and dislocations of consciousness present in our century, and their elegant and luminous shards glint in the darkness like the Tyger’s stripes. These exquisite reflections form a kind of handbook of post-apocalyptic forms, as the most psychologically fraught aspects of our dreams slowly emerge as the actual landscapes of our lives.”-- David St. John

“The surreal volleys in Elizabeth Cantwell's poems vividly capture the miniature catastrophes and cataclysms hidden within suburban America and its culture. Her poems 'Recess' and 'Interlude,' with their taut imagination, echo that horror in our lives to make something  happen. The tiger in these poems is real, synonymous with an unnamed anxiety, and roams at will through our haunted lives: ' we’re flying  / onto some other field of pistols. We have / more than one shot.' Her vision is unconventional and often brilliant.”--Mark Irwin

“Submerged in a burning sea of images, is the dreamer losing or finding herself?  "Fire self-replicates," yet she is "not a flame or a ripple."  Simultaneously bold and hermetic, these poems are ferociously interrogatory, seeking to distinguish between what can and cannot be saved.”--Claire Bateman

Elizabeth Cantwell is finishing her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her poems have recently appeared in such publications as Anti-, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and the Indiana Review. Elizabeth’s first book of poetry, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, was a finalist for the 2012 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her chapbook Premonitions is forthcoming from Grey Books Press. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and small dog.

AUSTIN STRAUS reads from THE LOVE PROJECT

The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry (Red Hen Press)

There's plenty of love between Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus, but it has an edge: every kiss, every snuggle, every touch is political. How to make a marriage work under the unyielding pressures of racial bigotry and cultural bias? How to maintain their creativity and independence as poets and artists faced with the daily pressures of survival? For over three decades, Coleman and Straus have grappled with these questions--and with one another. Together, they have built a wall of desire, carnal and spiritual, to shield them from an often unwelcoming world. The Love Project sings their blood oath in an open and jazzy verse that holds nothing back, offering to the world some of the better that has flowered between them.

Austin Straus, poet and visual artist, makes beautiful unique books, now in many collections. He was married to Wanda Coleman for nearly 33 years.  

J. DYLAN YATES reads from THE BELIEF IN ANGELS and PAMELA RIBON reads from NOTES TO BOYS

The Belief In Angels (She Writes Press)  Notes to Boys (Rare Bird Books)

Join us this evening as two wildy talented authors bring you coming of age tales quite unlike any you've read before.

Jules Finn and Samuel Trautman know that sorrow can sink deeply—so deeply it can drown the spirit. In The Belief in Angels, by J. Dylan Yates, these two wounded souls must decide: surrender to the grief that threatens to destroy them, or find the strength to swim for the surface.

Growing up in a volatile hippie household on a tiny island off the coast of Boston, Jules’s imaginative sense of humor is the weapon she wields as a defense against the chaos of her family’s household. But somewhere between gun-waving gambling debt collectors and LSD-laced breakfast cereal adventures, her younger brother Moses dies—and it’s a blow from which Jules may never fully recover.
Jules’s grandfather, Samuel, wants to help his grandchildren, but he’s wrapped up in a sad story of his own. Once called Szaja, Samuel is an orthodox Jew who lived through the murderous Ukranian pogroms of the 1920s, as well as the Majdanek Death Camp—but his survival came at an unspeakable price.

In their darkest moments, Jules and Samuel receive what could only be explained as divine intervention—serendipitous experiences that give them each the hope they so desperately need. Ultimately, however, they both must look inside themselves for the courage to come to the rescue of their own fractured lives.

Notes to Boys: And Other Things I Shouldn't Share in Public is a "mortifying memoir" from bestselling author and tv/film writer Pamela Ribon. Miserably trapped in a small town Texas with no invention of the internet in sight, Ribon spent countless hours of her high school years writing letters to her (often unrequited) crushes. The big question is: Why did she always keep a copy for herself? Wince along with Ribon as she tries to understand exactly how she ever thought she'd win a boy's heart by writing him a letter that began: "Share with me your soul," and ends with some remarkably awkward erotica. You'll come for the incredibly bad poetry, you'll stay for the incredibly bad poetry about racism.

Raised on a tiny, New England peninsula, J. Dylan Yates pursued her BA from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Yates worked with Boulder County's Voices for Children program as a CASA volunteer for 15 years and now volunteers with the Big Sister program. The Belief in Angels, Yates's debut novel, won the Alexis Masters Scholarship Award at the February 2012 San Francisco Writers Conference. She lives in San Diego with her partner and a talking cat.

Pamela Ribon is a bestselling author, television writer and performer. A pioneer in the blogging world, her first novel,Why Girls Are Weird, was loosely based on her extremely successful website pamie.com. The site has been nominated for a Bloggie in Lifetime Achievement, which makes her feel old. Ribon created the cult sensation and tabloid tidbit "Call Us Crazy: The Anne Heche Monologues", a satire of fame, fandom and Fresno. Her two-woman show, "Letters Never Sent" (created with four-time Emmy winner and "Jay Leno Show" favorite Liz Feldman) was showcased at the 2005 HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. She has been writing in television for the past seven years, in both cable and network, including on the Emmy-award winning "Samantha Who?" starring Christina Applegate. Using her loyal Internet fan base, Ribon sponsors book drives for libraries in need. Over the years, pamie.com has sent thousands of books and materials to Oakland and San Diego, sponsored a Tsunami-ravaged village of schoolchildren, and helped restock the shelves of a post-Katrina Harrison County, Mississippi. Ribon's book drive can now be found at DeweyDonationSystem.org, which has sponsored libraries from the Negril School in Jamaica to the Children's Institute in Los Angeles. 

DAN EPSTEIN reads from STARS AND STRIKES: BASEBALL AND AMERICA IN THE BICENTENNIAL SUMMER OF '76

Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 (Thomas Dunne Books)

When our nation celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976 it marked a year in which the United States hadn’t been involved in an active war for over twelve years, the radio airwaves saw an overflow of songs dedicated mostly to carnal pleasures, TV comedies started getting a little more daring, clothes became more outrageous with disco on the horizon, and baseball saw a re-birth like it hadn’t experienced in decades.  Award-winning journalist and esteemed pop culture chronicler Dan Epstein takes the reader back in time to an amazing year of baseball – amazingly wonderful and amazingly crazy in Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.

By the 1976 season, baseball was beginning to be defined by big afros and long hair, by cookie-cutter multi-purpose stadiums that truly did look exactly alike, and by more than one team donning some of the most hideous looking uniforms the game has ever witnessed.  Oh, and Astroturf, way too much Astroturf.  The ’76 season also saw a clash between the last feel-good moments and outrageous personalities of the game as well as the looming labor angst and the full onset of wide open free agency.   Change had subtly been taking place, but by the end of that 1976 season much of the game’s innocence would be lost forever and baseball would never be the same again.

Each chapter of Stars and Strikes is titled for a famous song of that year and the baseball exploits covered therein truly follows the theme of the songs themselves.  Along with baseball coverage, Dan Epstein also highlights the events of the world around the game of baseball: Olympic exploits, a new President signaling the end of the Watergate era, busing riots, the trial of heiress Patty Hearst, the tragic Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak in Philadelphia, and so many more.

Dan Epstein brought the rollercoaster decade of the 1970s to readers’ attention with his widely acclaimed Big Hair and Plastic Grass. Stars and Strikes brings to life all the characters, events and cultural forces behind the Spirit of ’76.  

Praise for Big Hair and Plastic Grass

"There is a trove of nuggets many of us either never knew or forgot...savor the good parts, which are plentiful." --The New York Times

"Dan Epstein and baseball in the '70s go together like Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon." --Wall Street Journal

"What the 1960s were to America, the 1970s were to baseball, and Dan Epstein has finally given us the swinging book the '70s deserve." --ESPN.com

"Dan Epstein--the leading chronicler of '70s baseball." --Deadspin

"Epstein's book waves its freak flag high."--The Onion A.V. Club

Dan Epstein is an award winning journalist, pop culture historian, and avid baseball fan who has written for Rolling Stone, SPIN, Men’s Journal, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, MOJO, Guitar World, Revolver, LA Weekly and dozens of other publications.  He currently resides in Los Angeles.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM reads from THE SNOW QUEEN

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.

LEILA HOWLAND reads from NANTUCKET RED

Nantucket Red (Disney-Hyperion)

We like to welcome back to Skylight, the wonderful Leila Howland with her follow-up to Nantucket Blue!

Cricket Thompson's lifetime of overachieving has paid off: she's headed to Brown University in the fall, with a spot on the lacrosse team and a scholarship that covers "almost" everything. Who knew living in the dorm cost money? An Ivy League education seems to mean living at home for the next four years.

When Cricket is offered the chance to earn enough cash to afford a real college experience, she heads back to Nantucket for the summer. But the faraway island challenges Cricket in ways she hadn't anticipated. It's hard to focus on earning money for next year, when she finds her world opening up in entirely new ways-to art, to travel, and, most unexpectedly, to a future completely different from the one she has been working toward her whole life. A friendship blossoms with Ben, the gorgeous surfer and bartender who encourages Cricket to be free, even as she smarts at the pain of seeing Zack, her first love, falling for her worst enemy.

But one night, when Cricket finally lets herself break all her own rules, she realizes she may have ruined her carefully constructed future with one impulsive decision. Cricket must dig deep to fight for her future, discovering that success isn't just about reaching goals, but also about listening to what she's been trying to ignore-her own heart.

A graduate of Georgetown University, Leila Howland spent five years acting in New York in everything from an MTV public service announcement for safe sex to a John Guare play at Lincoln Center and was a proud company member of the award-winning Flea Theater in Tribeca. Currently, she teaches high school English and English as a second language in downtown Los Angeles and occasionally moonlights as an extra on the Young and the Restless. Nantucket Red is her second novel.

NATHAN DEUEL reads from FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB

Friday Was the Bomb (Dzanc Books)

Skylight Books would like to invite you to experience profoundly moving memoir about fatherhood and family amid the war-torn regions of the Middle East. A can't miss event.

In 2008, Nathan Deuel, a former editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and his wife, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent, moved to the deeply Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to see for themselves what was happening in the Middle East. There they had a daughter, and later, while his wife filed reports from Baghdad and Syria, car bombs erupted and one night a firefight raged outside the family's apartment in Beirut. They struggled with the decision to stay or go home.

At once a meditation on fatherhood, an unusual memoir of a war correspondent’s spouse, and a first-hand account from the front lines of the most historic events of recent days—the Arab Spring, the end of the Iraq war, and the unrest in Syria—Friday Was The Bomb is a searing collection of timely and absorbing essays.

Nathan Deuel has contributed essays, fiction, and criticism to The New York Times, Financial Times, GQ, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, Salon, Slate, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, Tin House, The Atlantic, and many others. Previously, he was an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Tampa and a B.A. in Literature from Brown University, and he attended Deep Springs College. He recently moved to Los Angeles from Beirut with his wife and daughter.

MICHELLE HUNEVEN reads from OFF COURSE, in conversation with MONA SIMPSON

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.

UC IRVINE MFA STUDENTS read from their work 2014

Join us for a special evening as students from University of California Irvine, one of the nation's most prestigious writing programs, share their poetry and prose.

Claire Cronin was born and raised in Los Angeles. In addition to writing poetry, she makes performances, songs, and collaborative pieces with other artists and musicians across the city. You can learn more at: www.clairecronin.com

Meriwether Clarke received her BA in Poetry and History from Northwestern University. She enjoys sipping iced coffee, listening to Aretha Franklin, watching Mama Mia!, and reading books where at least one character dies.

Scott Lerner is from Van Nuys, California and received his BA in American Literature from UCLA.

Sir William Lytton was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1640 to 1648. He supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War. Will Litton is a distant relative, probably.