Skylight Books Podcast Series

MANDY KAHN reads from MATH, HEAVEN, TIME, with a special performance by BECKY STARK and THE ∞ ANGELES LADIES' CHOIR

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.

DAHLIA SCHWEITZER reads from CINDY SHERMAN'S OFFICE KILLER

Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster (Intellect)

One of the twentieth century's most significant artists, Cindy Sherman has quietly uprooted conventional understandings of portraiture and art, questioning everything from identity to feminism. Critics around the world have taken Sherman's photographs and extensively examined what lies underneath. However, little critical ink has been spilled on Sherman's only film, "Office Killer," a piece that plays a significant role both in Sherman's body of work and in American art in the late twentieth century.

Dahlia Schweitzer breaks the silence with her trenchant analysis of "Office Killer" and explores the film on a variety of levels, combating head-on the art world's reluctance to discuss the movie and arguing instead that it is only through a close reading of the film that we can begin to appreciate the messages underlying all of Sherman's work.

The first book on this neglected piece of an esteemed artist's oeuvre, Cindy Sherman's "Office Killer" rescues the film from critical oblivion and situates it next to the artist's other iconic works.

Dahlia Schweitzer is a writer, teacher, and former cabaret star who has toured widely in Europe and the United States. Schweitzer's works include the books Queen of Hearts, Breathe With Me, Seduce Me, Lovergirl, and I've Been a Naughty Girl; essays in publications including Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, and The Journal of Popular Culture; and an album of electronic dance music, "Plastique." Dahlia currently teaches classes on writing, art, and film in Los Angeles while working towards her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.

DINAH LENNEY reads from THE OBJECT PARADE, in conversation with DAVID ULIN

The Object Parade (Counterpoint)

This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell? 

For tonight's reading, Dinah Lenney will be joined by Los Angeles Times book critic (and author himself) David Ulin.

In recalling her experience, Dinah Lenney's essays each begin with one thing -- real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the gifted watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth's love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream. 

Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of moving to Los Angeles and raising a family; of coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with up-ended notions about home and family and career and aging, too. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time. 

Dinah Lenney is the author of Bigger than Life, published in the American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press, and excerpted for the “Lives” column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. She serves as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars and for the Rainier Writing Workshop, and in the writing program at the University of Southern California. She has played a wide range of roles in theater and television, on shows such as ER, Murphy Brown, Law and Order, Monk, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Sons of Anarchy. She lives in Los Angeles. 

ESTHER PEARL WATSON reads from UNLOVABLE, VOl. 3

Unlovable, Vol. 3 (Fantagraphics Books)

OH NO, you did not just get invited to the Unlovable Volume 3 Launch Party, we were just SHOWING you that there is one. Kim said that she and Erick were gonna like, crash it, but we just got these swede pants from the thrift store and new earrings from the Collin Creek Mall---OH FINE, EVERYONE IS INVITED!

Skylight Books is proud to host the Unlovable Volume 3 Launch Party with cartoonist Esther Pearl Watson onSunday, May 4th. Summer vacation is here and Tammy Pierce is back with more sometimes ordinary, often humiliating, occasionally poignant, and usually hilarious exploits from the pages of Bust magazine! Her hopes, dreams, agonies, and defeats are brought to vivid, comedic life by Watson's lovingly grotesque drawings, filled with all the eighties essentials - too much mascara, leg warmers with heels, and huge hair, etc. - as well as timeless teen concerns like acne, dandruff, and the opposite sex (or same sex, in some cases). Tammy's life isn't pretty, but it is endlessly endearing and hilarious especially under the pen of Esther Pearl Watson.

Esther Pearl Watson lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and fellow artist, Mark Todd. Together they authored the influential D.I.Y. tome, Whatcha Mean, What's A Zine? 

JAMES FEARNLEY reads from HERE COMES EVERYBODY

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.

MIMI POND reads from OVER EASY

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.

BENJAMIN ROSS discusses his book DEAD END: SUBURBAN SPRAWL AND THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN URBANISM

Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism (Oxford University Press)

Transportation activist Benjamin Ross discusses and signs his new book on urban development and sprawl.

More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason.

As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use.

Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanists, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live. 

Praise for Dead End:
"Ben Ross' Dead End is a highly personal account of a larger journey that we are embarked on as a nation -- from sprawl to walkable communities, from anoxic, sterile neighborhoods to vibrant, transit-served urban areas that are the wellspring of innovation, economic development and cultural richness." --John Porcari, Former Deputy Secretary, United States Department of Transportation  

Benjamin Ross was president for 15 years of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit, which grew under his leadership into the nation's largest grass-roots transit advocacy group. Professionally, he is a consultant on environmental problems and served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and EPA Science Advisory Board. He writes frequently on political and social topics in Dissent magazine and is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment. 

CARRIE ARCOS reads from THERE WILL COME A TIME

There Will Come A Time (Simon Pulse)

Mark knows grief. Ever since the accident that killed his twin sister, Grace, the only time he feels at peace is when he visits the bridge on which she died. Comfort is fleeting, but it's almost within reach when he's standing on the wrong side of the suicide bars. Almost. 

Grace's best friend, Hanna, says she understands what he's going through. But she doesn't. She can't. It's not just the enormity of his loss. As her twin, Mark should have known Grace as well as he knows himself. Yet when he reads her journal, it's as if he didn't know her at all. 

As a way to remember Grace, Hanna convinces Mark to complete Grace's bucket list from her journal. Mark's sadness, anger, and his growing feelings for Hanna threaten to overwhelm him. But Mark can't back out. He made a promise to honor Grace--and it's his one chance to set things right.

Carrie Arcos is the author of There Will Come a Time and Out of Reach, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She lives with her family in Los Angeles, California. Visit her at CarrieArcos.com.

WORLD BOOK NIGHT KICKOFF PARTY featuring DEREK KIRK KIM

World Book Night Kickoff Party 

Skylight Books has been chosen as one of twenty U.S. locations to host an official World Book Night launch event on April 22, 2014. Joining us to celebrate this great cause will be the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Award Winning authorDerek Kirk Kim. Derek’s Same Difference is one of the 37 official WBN editions being distributed around the country by volunteers on April 23.

As part of this celebration, Derek Kirk Kim will speak briefly about reading and giving. Of special importance, all local givers are welcome to come share their giving stories.

Additionally, all attendees at our April 22 event will receive a free copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a special WBN edition.

Other official WBN launch events will take place in Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, Denver, Santa Fe, Houston, Chicago, Duluth, Lexington KY, Stone Ridge VA, Wilmington NC, Vero Beach FL, Buffalo and Ithaca NY, Barre VT, Washington DC, and New York City. 

 

Derek Kirk Kim is the award-winning author of the Tune series, Same Difference, The Eternal Smile (with Gene Luen Yang), and Good As Lily (with Jesse Hamm). He has also contributed to numerous anthologies including Flight, Volume 1, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and Bizarro World. 

 

World Book Night U.S. is an ambitious campaign to give a half million free, specially-printed paperbacks to light or non-readers across America on one day. 25,000 volunteer book lovers will go out into 6,000 communities to primarily seek out those without the means or access to printed books. The volunteers go to such diverse locations as hospitals, underfunded schools, military bases, women’s shelters, nursing homes, community centers, and more. 

World Book Night takes place on April 23, 2014 – Shakespeare’s birthday – and is in its third year in the U.S., after the UK launch in 2011. We hand out 500,000 books in the U.S. every April 23.

As part of World Book Night, 2,300 bookstores and libraries in all 50 states serve as community organizers for the book distribution to the volunteer givers.

MORLEY reads from IF YOU'RE READING THIS, THERE'S STILL TIME

If You're Reading This, There's Still Time (Cameron & Company)

Join us today for a very special event with a very special artist. Poetic and insightful, there's no mistaking the work of Morley.

Morley is a Los Angeles-based street artist that specializes in bold, typographic posters which he wheat pastes within the urban landscape. Blending humor, hope and his unique perspective on life, Morley's aim is to act as a friendly voice amongst the cacophony of billboarded messages and corporate slogans. This voice was given a face when he began including an image of himself in each of his pieces, looking to create a more intimate relationship between the artist and the audience than many of his anonymous contemporaries could allow.

In 2011, Morley's work caught the eye of Steve Lazarides whose Outsiders imprint began selling his work, describing it thusly: "His sympathetic statements give the tirelessly aspirational residents a welcome reminder of what's important in life: love, simple pleasures, making the world a slightly better place and not hating on yourself too much."

Today, he continues to paste his work in any city that doesn't enforce their vandalism laws through caning. Also he made us promise to include the fact that he can hold his breath for over an hour, and that "if anyone challenged him to a breath holding contest, they would totally lose," but he was probably lying about that.

Praise for If You're Reading This, There's Still Time

"Morley is the antithesis of street artists in Los Angeles. Where traditional taggers obscure their name in scrawled script only readable to their own, Morley prints big messages with his large bold lettering. Where most find it cool to be cryptic, Morley shares his wit in complete sentences. Where many street artists prefer anonymity or an empowered alter-ego, Morley includes a plain drawing of his unglamorous self writing each ironic aphorism. His humor veers from self-deprecating to sly, his insight ranges from soul searching to silly."-The Huffington Post

"Breaking the mold is exactly what street art needs today, and Morley seems to be that bit of unpretentious breath of fresh air."- Vandalog

"Morley's pieces are much more than slogans. He has something to make you think about, and he does this in a very effective and funny way"- Claude Crommelin (from New Street Art)

"Morley has a unique gift for what he does. When it comes to artists on the streets, nearly everyone uses words, but no one uses them so well. Morley's street poetry is poignant enough to cause a person to think, and packaged short enough to be consumed in a moment. Morley is a poet of the Streets. Those are our words, not his. Morley would probably find a better way to phrase it."- MelroseAndFairax

"Poetic and insightful, Morley's art captures truths, hardships, and the quirkiness of the human condition."- G. James Daichendt, Author of Stay Up! Los Angeles Street Art

Morley is a Los Angeles-based street artist that specializes in bold, typographic posters which he wheat pastes within the urban landscape. He can hold his breath for over an hour.

JUSTIN GO reads from THE STEADY RUNNING OF THE HOUR

The Steady Running of the Hour (Simon & Schuster)

In this mesmerizing debut, a young American discovers he may be heir to the unclaimed estate of an English World War I officer, which launches him on a quest across Europe to uncover the elusive truth.

Just after graduating college, Tristan Campbell receives a letter delivered by special courier to his apartment in San Francisco. It contains the phone number of a Mr. J.F. Prichard of Twyning & Hooper, Solicitors, in London--and news that could change Tristan's life forever.

In 1924, Prichard explains, an English alpinist named Ashley Walsingham died attempting to summit Mt. Everest, leaving his fortune to his former lover, Imogen Soames-Andersson. But the estate was never claimed. Information has recently surfaced suggesting Tristan may be the rightful heir, but unless he can find documented evidence, the fortune will be divided among charitable beneficiaries in less than two months.

In a breathless race from London archives to Somme battlefields to the Eastfjords of Iceland, Tristan pieces together the story of a forbidden affair set against the tumult of the First World War and the pioneer British expeditions to Mt. Everest. Following his instincts through a maze of frenzied research, Tristan soon becomes obsessed with the tragic lovers, and he crosses paths with a mysterious French girl named Mireille who suggests there is more to his quest than he realizes. Tristan must prove that he is related to Imogen to inherit Ashley's fortune--but the more he learns about the couple, the stranger his journey becomes.

The Steady Running of the Hour announces the arrival of a stunningly talented author. Part love story, part historical tour de force, Justin Go's novel is utterly compelling, unpredictable, and heartrending.

 Praise for The Steady Running of the Hour

"A wonderful time-slip story, beautifully written with a superb sense of place. Go captures the spirit of early 20th-century England perfectly, both in the past and the present, in a novel that is exciting, emotionally engaging and ambitious. I loved it!"--Kate Mosse

"Justin Go has written an astonishingly vast, meticulously plotted, and beautifully told novel. In elegant, haunting prose he tells a wartime story that is at once violent and lovely, hopeful and despairing. I won't soon forget Go's passionate, star-crossed lovers and their deeply moving story, set against the riveting, utterly realistic backdrop of the Great War."--Anton DiSclafani

Justin Go was born in Los Angeles and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and University College London. He has lived in Paris, London, New York City and Berlin, among other places. The Steady Running of the Hour is his first novel and is being translated into more than eighteen languages. 

SUSAN MINOT reads from THIRTY GIRLS

Thirty Girls (Knopf Publishing)

Skylight Books' is proud to present award-winnig novelist Susan Minot, and her first novel in over ten years. The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.

Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities, who is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.

With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Susan Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.

MAX BROOKS reads THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS

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.

LORRIE MOORE reads and signs her short story collection BARK

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.

POETRY READING by members of POETS AT WORK

Come celebrate National Poetry Month with readings from Kim Dower, Yvonne M. Estrada, Dylan Cameron Gailey, Brett Guitar Hofer, Eric Howard, Kay Sundstrom, Sharon Venezio, Tina Yang, Helen Yeoman and Terry Wolverton for an explosion of forms and styles, moods and revelations.