Skylight Books Podcast Series

KATE GALE reads from GOLDILOCKS ZONE

Goldilocks Zone (University of New Mexico Press)

Goldilocks Zone explores the inventions of bridges, condoms, fireworks, and glass weaved into the stories of creative people teetering on the brink of disaster. But those lives are also immersed in light, love, joy, and madness, all the elements of a rich and wild inventive life.

Dr. Kate Gale is managing editor of Red Hen Press, editor of the Los Angeles Review, and president of the American Composers Forum, LA. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She is author of five books of poetry, a novel, and Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis. Her most recent projects include a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto adapted from Kindred by Octavia Butler with composer Billy Childs. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

STEVE EARLY reads from SAVE OUR UNIONS and RAND WILSON reads from JOBS WITH JUSTICE

Jobs With Justice (PM Press)     Save Our Unions (Monthly Review Press)

Meet Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress and Rand Wilson, union organizer and longtime Jobs With Justice activist.

MELISSA BRODER reads from SCARECRONE and KATE DURBIN reads from E! ENTERTAINMENT

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

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

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

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

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

DANIELLE KRYSA presents CREATIVE BLOCK with STEPHANIE VOVAS and JENNY HART

Creative Block (Chronicle Books)

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

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

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

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

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

RICHARD BLANCO reads from FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET'S JOURNEY

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

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

JUSTIN HOCKING discusses THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD, in conversation with ANTOINE WILSON

The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (Graywolf Press)

Surfing in Far Rockaway, romantic obsession, and "Moby-Dick" converge in this winning and refreshing memoir. 

Justin Hocking lands in New York hopeful but adrift--he's jobless, unexpectedly overwhelmed and disoriented by the city, struggling with anxiety and obsession, and attempting to maintain a faltering long-distance relationship. As a man whose brand of therapy has always been motion, whether in a skate park or on a snowdrift, Hocking needs an outlet for his restlessness. Then he spies his first New York surfer hauling a board to the subway, and its not long before he's a member of the vibrant and passionate surfing community at Far Rockaway. But in the wake of a traumatic robbery incident, the dark undercurrents of his ocean-obsession pull him further and further out on his own night sea journey. With Moby-Dick as a touchstone, and interspersed with interludes on everything from the history of surfing to Scientology's naval ties to the environmental impact of the Iraq War, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld is a multifaceted and enduring modern odyssey from a memorable and whip-smart new literary voice.

KYLE MINOR discusses PRAYING DRUNK, in conversation with AMELIA GRAY

Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books)

Skylight Books is thrilled to welcome back Kyle Minor. For today's reading he'll be joined by another Skylight favorite,Amelia Gray.

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end.

Kyle Minor is a columnist at Salon and The Nation. His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial, Esquire, Volt and many others. He is the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction, the Tara M. Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, and is the author of In The Devil's Territory (Dzanc, 2008).

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She is the author of the novel Threats. She lives in Los Angeles.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY reads from PATTER

Patter (Red Hen Press)

From one of our favorite local presses comes one of our favorite local poets! Join us for an unforgettable evening.

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”  

LILIBET SNELLINGS reads from BOX GIRL

Box Girl: My Part Time Job as an Art Installation (Soft Skull Press)

When 22-year-old Lilibet Snellings moved to Los Angeles on a whim, she unintentionally became a "slash" to keep her head above water--a writer/waitress/actress/Box Girl.

One night each week, Lilibet would go to The Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, don a pair of white boy shorts with a matching tank, touch up her lip gloss, and crawl into a giant glass case behind the front desk. There, she could do whatever she wanted--check email, catch up on reading, even sleep--as long as she ignored the many hotel guests who would point and ask the staff, "Is she allowed to use the bathroom?" (Yes.)

Dog-paddling through her twenties, Snellings resisted financial bailouts (for the most part) from her sweet Southern mother and business-oriented dad, while pondering her peculiar position as a human art installation. Was she a piece of art or a piece of ass? Was she allowed to read both Walt Whitman and "US Weekly" as she lounged in an oversized, waterless aquarium behind a hotel concierge desk? From misinterpreting a modeling agency interview as a talent audition, to avoiding Bond-girl-style deaths at New Year's Eve parties, Snellings shares and laughs at her many mishaps while living in LA.

Lilibet Snellings was born in Georgia and raised in Connecticut. She earned her MFA from the University of Southern California and resides in Los Angeles and Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, LA Magazine, Anthem, Flaunt, and This Recording, among other publications.

ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ discusses and signs her cookbook ISA DOES IT

Isa Does It: Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week (Little, Brown & Company)

Bestselling vegan cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz visits Skylight to discuss and sign her latest cookbook, Isa Does It.

How does Isa Chandra Moskowitz make flavorful and satisfying vegan meals from scratch every day, often in 30 minutes or less? It's easy! In Isa Does It, the beloved cookbook author shares 150 new recipes to make weeknight cooking a snap. Mouthwatering recipes like Sweet Potato Red Curry with Rice and Purple Kale, Bistro Beet Burgers, and Summer Seitan Saute with Cilantro and Lime illustrate how simple and satisfying meat-free food can be.

The recipes are supermarket friendly and respect how busy most readers are. From skilled vegan chefs, to those new to the vegan pantry, or just cooks looking for some fresh ideas, Isa's unfussy recipes and quirky commentary will make everyone's time in the kitchen fun and productive. 

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the best-selling author of the hit books Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook,Vegan With a Vengeance, and many other titles. She is currently a Bust magazine columnist where she writes about cooking on a limited budget, and she has written for Vegetarian Times, Time Out NY, Natural Health and VegNews. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

JAY MARTEL reads from CHANNEL BLUE

Channel Blue (Head of Zeus)

From the executive producer of "Key & Peele" comes a comic novel that may strike a little too close to home. 

 

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy - the saviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way - just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's live.

But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.

Only one man can save our planet and he's hardly a likely hero...

Jay Martel is an executive producer and writer for "Key & Peele" on Comedy Central. He's created various TV shows, written screenplays with UCB cofounder Ian Roberts, gardened for Richard Nixon, and was once arrested for confronting Jeb Bush about Florida's death penalty program. He's also written comic pieces for "The New Yorker" and "Rolling Stone." Channel Blue is his first novel. For more info on Channel Blue and Jay's writing, please check out facebook.com/authorjaymartel.

UC RIVERSIDE MFA STUDENTS, joined by alum ERIC SHONKWILER reading from ABOVE ALL MEN

Above All Men (Midwestern Gothic)

Join us for a special evening as the members of Gather: The UC Riverside MFA reading series share their work alongside former student Eric Shonkwiler, reading from his debut novel.

Years from now, America is slowly collapsing. Crops are drying up and oil is running out. People flee cities for the countryside, worsening the drought and opening the land to crime. Amid this decay and strife, war veteran David Parrish fights to keep his family and farm together. However, the murder of a local child opens old wounds, forcing him to confront his own nature on a hunt through dust storms and crumbling towns for the killer.

ANNABELLE GURWITCH reads from I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT, with special guests

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (Blue Rider Press)

Is 50 the new 40 or is 50 still 50? Maybe. In this wickedly funny new collection of essays, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch explores the hazards of turning 50, outsourcing your endocrine system, and falling in lust at the Genius bar. From the woman the Washington Post calls “hilarious,” this new book is the ultimate coming-of middle-age story and a must-read for women everywhere.

The panic began to set in when Annabelle turned 49. The solicitations from the AARP began flooding her mailbox as she weighed going back to school, getting divorced and raising llamas. She couldn’t afford a vacation, so she was taking a lot of naps. A visit to her gynecologist ended not with one of his usual benign send-offs—stay healthy, stay happy, stay hydrated—but instead with the slightly ominous: "Stay funny."

In this new collection of essays, Annabelle Gurwitch has taken her gynecologist's advice to heart. Whether she's navigating the extensive anti-aging offerings in the department store beauty counter or negotiating the ins and outs of acceptable behavior with her teenage son, Gurwitch bravely turns an unflinching eye towards the myriad of issues women can expect to encounter in their middle years. 

For tonight's reading Annabelle Gurwitch will be joined by members of the Suite 8 Writer's Collective, Jillian Lauren, Heather Havrilesky and Joshua Wolf Shenk.

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and author of You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up, a self-hurt marital memoir co-written with her husband, Jeff Kahn, now a theatrical play in its third national tour; and Fired! Tales of the Caned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. Her Fired! documentary premiered as a Showtime Comedy Special and played film festivals around the world. Gurwitch gained a loyal comedic following during her numerous years co-hosting the cult favorite, Dinner & a Movie; her acting credits include Dexter, Boston Legal, Seinfeld, Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Shaggy Dog and Not Necessarily The News on HBO. Most recently, she starred in the adaptation of Grace Paley’s A Coney Island Christmas by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies at The Geffen Playhouse. Live appearances include New York Comedy Festival, 92nd St Y, Upright Citizens Brigade and story salons in both New York and Los Angeles. She has served as a regular commentator on NPR and a humorist for TheNation.com. Her writing has appeared in More, Marie Claire, Men's Health, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. Gurwitch is a passionate environmentalist, a reluctant atheist, and lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.

Jillian Lauren is the author of the novel Pretty and the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Salon, The Rumpus and The Moth Anthology, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The Awl and Bookforum, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. You can also follow her on Twitter at @hhavrilesky.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist, author, and creative strategist based in New York City. He is a correspondent for Slate.com, and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey. 

RACHEL PASTAN reads from ALENA

Alena (Riverhead Books)

In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.

At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring young curator is given the career break of a lifetime when she meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. Would she like to take the reins at the museum—a position that has remained vacant since the tragic death of the charismatic Alena, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse? Shaking off her Midwestern past, our heroine—nameless, as is du Maurier’s original—jumps at the chance, only to find herself well beyond her depths. Like du Maurier’s Manderley, the Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the sinister, Mrs. Danvers-like business manager who was passionately devoted to Alena. The shadow of her predecessor hangs over the narrator as she tries to shift the Nauk away from the extreme art favored by Alena and to express her own sense of what art is. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, however, her loyalties, integrity, and courage are put to the test and shattering secrets come to the surface.

A delicious restaging of one of the most popular novels of the 20th century (later an Academy Award-winning Hitchcock film), Alena is also a stirring exploration of the role of beauty and the nature of originality.

Rachel Pastan is the author of two previous novels, Lady of the Snakes and This Side of Married, and has won numerous prizes for her short fiction. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, she is also Editor-at-Large for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she writes the blog Miranda.

KEM NUNN reads from CHANCE

Chance (Scribner)

When Kem Nunn’s debut novel Tapping the Source was published, the Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote: "Kem Nunn is the bright son of a very good family. His 'parents' include Hammett, Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and yes, Ross MacDonald. What Kem Nunn has done is what every good parent yearns for and is afraid of: he has surpassed them all." Now, with Chance, Nunn surpasses even himself. Half Coen Brothers, half Dashiell Hammett, Kem Nunn has written a gritty, twisted psychological thriller centered on a lonely, brilliant, forensic neuropsychologist in San Francisco.

Dr. Eldon Chance has a track record of becoming involved with the wrong women. As he enters a mid-life crisis brought on by the failure of his marriage, a series of bad decisions lead him into a relationship with Jaclyn Blackstone, a patient suffering an apparent dissociative identy disorder. And unfortunately her abusive husband, an Oakland homicide detective, is the jealous type. At the same time, Chance meets a young man named “D,” a self-styled Samurai who Chance thinks is a war veteran, but is really more of a deranged loner. As Chance finds his life twisting more and more uncomfortably into Jaclyn Blackstone’s world, D acts as Chance’s guide to the underbelly of San Francisco and his coach for the looming show-down with Jaclyn’s psychotic husband. In his own cool, gray City of Love, amid its fluid, ever-changing beauty and shifting fogs, Dr. Chance will be forced to live up to his name.

By turns horrific and darkly comic, suspenseful and thought provoking, Chance is a head trip through the fun house from “one of the most interesting writers working the coast” (San Diego Union Tribune) and confirms Kem Nunn’sreputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank. 

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian and the author of six novels, including the National Book Award NomineeTapping the Source, Tijuana Straits, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, and Unassigned Territory. In addition to writing novels, he writes screenplays for television and film, most notably John from Cincinnati which he co-created with David Milch, Deadwood, and currently, Sons of Anarchy. He lives in Southern California.