Skylight Books Podcast Series

CECIL CASTELLUCCI reads from TIN STAR

Tin Star (Roaring Brook Press)

Skylight Books' very own Cecil Castellucci returns to launch her newest YA novel, a sci-fi adventure for the ages.  Cecil will follow a reading from her novel with a Q&A with JPL scientist Steve Collins!

On their way to start a new life, Tula and her family travel on the "Prairie Rose," a colony ship headed to a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. All is going well until the ship makes a stop at a remote space station, the Yertina Feray, and the colonist's leader, Brother Blue, beats Tula within an inch of her life. An alien, Heckleck, saves her and teaches her the ways of life on the space station.

When three humans crash land onto the station, Tula's desire for escape becomes irresistible, and her desire for companionship becomes unavoidable. But just as Tula begins to concoct a plan to get off the space station and kill Brother Blue, everything goes awry, and suddenly romance is the farthest thing from her mind.

Cecil Castellucci is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, an award-winning author of five books for young adults, and the YA and children's book editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in New York City, Cecil lives in Los Angeles. For the research of Tin Star, Cecil attended LaunchPad, a NASA funded workshop intended to teach writers of science fiction about the most up-to-date and correct space science.

Steve Collins is an Attitude Control engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Most recently Cruise ACS System Engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover, Steve has worked on numerous NASA/JPL missions including Epoxi, Dawn, Deep Impact, MER, Deep Space One, Galileo and Mars Observer.  In flight, Steve's job includes keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction, performing trajectory corrections and figuring out "what the heck just happened??"  When he's not flying a robotic spacecraft around the solar system, Steve can be found playing soccer, racing his Miata, jamming on the Theremin with the band Artichoke, or acting on-stage with TACIT, Caltech's resident theater company.

RON ATHEY presents PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (Intellect Books)

Ron Athey is a central figure in the development of performance art since the early 1990s, and this is the first book devoted to his practice. Pleading in the Blood (ed. by Dominic Johnson) foregrounds the prescience of Atheyʼs work, exploring how his visceral practice foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded sexuality, identity, and the body in art and critical theory in the late twentieth century. This landmark publication includes Atheyʼs own writings, and commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics. It showcases full-colour images of Atheyʼs art and performances since the early 1980s, including extensive documentation of solo performances and ensemble productions, and his photographic collaborations with other visual artists.

Pleading in the Blood also includes three newly commissioned essays on different aspects of Atheyʼs work by Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones, and Dominic Johnson. These scholarly essays are complemented by shorter texts byHomi K. Bhabha, Jennifer Doyle, Tim Etchells, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Matthew Goulish, Lydia Lunch, Juliana Snapper, Julie Tolentino, Alex Binnie, Catherine
(Saalfield) Gund, Bruce LaBruce and Catherine Opie, along with a hand-written text from Robert Wilson.

Including new pieces and hard-to-find archival texts. The publication is lavishly illustrated with full-colour images by photographers including Catherine Opie, Manuel Vason, Elyse Regher, Slava Mogutin, Dona Ann McAdams, Bruce LaBruce, Rick Castro, Sheree Rose, Edward Colver, Jennifer Precious Finch, and others, and includes a foreword to the publication written by Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons.

Praise for Pleading in the Blood:

"At long last, Dominic Johnsonʼs book begins the dauntingly exhilarating task of assessing the richly provocative art of Ron Athey. Incorporating Atheyʼs own prose version of his extraordinary childhood, astute critical essays, and moving appreciations from other artists, Pleading in the Blood advances Performance Studies and Art History by forging a mode of commentary expansive enough to address an artist who consistently works to expand the intricate drama of human embodiment. Atheyʼs art refuses the usual distinctions between pleasure and pain, or faith and doubt, and has been both blamed and celebrated for its radical inquiries into the limits and possibilities of queer bodies. Athey emerges from these pages as one of the most compelling theatre artists of our time."--Peggy Phelan, Standford University

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including: gender, sexuality, SM and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

EDMUND WHITE reads from INSIDE A PEARL: MY YEARS IN PARIS

Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris (Bloomsbury Publishing)

From the celebrated author of The Flaneur and City Boy, comes a fabulous new memoir from the iconoclastic Edmund White.

When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn’t speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he’d made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He’d also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he’d come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.

The book’s title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It’s a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

Edmund White is the author of two previous memoirs, My Lives and City Boy, and a previous book on Paris, The Flâneur. His many novels include the autobiographical A Boy’s Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes & His Friend. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. 

SCOTT O'CONNOR reads from HALF WORLD

Half World (Simon & Schuster)

A jaw-dropping page-turner based on real-life events, Half World by Scott O’Connor, a B&N Discover Great New Writers Award winner, is a riveting literary thriller from an author poised for a long and impressive career.

From its official sanction in 1953 to its shutdown in 1973, the CIA clandestinely conducted methods of mind control on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. This covert and illegal operation, Project MKUltra, made national headlines upon the declassification of thousands of documents in 2001. Inspired by these events, O’Connor came to write HALF WORLD, the gripping story of Henry March, a fraying CIA analyst who conducts secret mind-control experiments in San Francisco. With each passing day that Henry spends supervising the hapless men lured into his facility with no idea of what they’re about to endure, his controversial task weighs on him as he struggles between his duty to his country and his responsibility to his wife and children. When the point comes when he can no longer separate himself as the company man from the family man, he makes a decision to vanish into the night, abandoning his family forever and becoming a CIA mystery.

Two decades later, Dickie Ashby, a young, drug-addled CIA agent, is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals who claim to have been abused in a government brainwashing operation years earlier. While the members of the group can’t trust their memories, they know that they need to find Henry March, and that the only bridge to Henry is Hannah: Henry’s once-precocious, sensitive daughter who now owns a photography gallery in the city. Tempted to believe that the burglars are telling the truth, Dickie finds himself torn between doing his job and protecting Hannah, as he is dragged deeper and deeper into the stunning legacy of the Henry’s past experiments.

Scott O’Connor was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of an air-traffic controller and a preschool teacher. An alum of SUNY Brockport, Scott is a co-founder of GO Studios, a post-production and motion graphics design firm, and the author of two novels: Among Wolves and Untouchable, for which he was awarded the 2011 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for fiction. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. Discover more about Scott and Henry March at www.scott-oconnor.comand www.whoishenrymarch.tumblr.com.

WRITEGIRL reads from the anthology YOU ARE HERE

You Are Here (WriteGirl)

WriteGirl is a creative writing and mentoring organization that promotes creativity, critical thinking and leadership skills to empower teen girls. Founded in 2001, WriteGirl pairs under-served girls, ages 13-18, with professional women writers for one-on-one mentoring, workshops and college readiness activities. Through public readings and publication in award-winning, nationally-distributed anthologies girls develop critical writing and public speaking skills and the confidence to make an impact on the world around them.

In 2013, WriteGirl was honored with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the highest national honor awarded to such programs. Executive Director Keren Taylor and mentee Jacqueline Uy, age 16, personally accepted the award from First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.

SAM HARRIS reads from HAM: SLICES OF A LIFE

Ham: Slice of Life: Essays and Stories (Gallery Books)

ham (noun) [haem] 
1 the hind leg of a hog, salted, smoked, and cured 
2 second son of Noah 
3 somebody who performs in an exaggerated showy style 
-always hamming it up

Just when you thought you knew everything about ham, you discover that ham is also: 
4 a reason to laugh about everyday life, and 
5 an irresistible collection of humorous essays from a man who was born to entertain us.

In sixteen brilliantly observed true stories, Sam Harris emerges as a natural humorist in league with David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Carrie Fisher, and Steve Martin, but with a voice uniquely his own. Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for his "manic, witty commentary," and with a storytelling talent the New York Times calls "New Yorker- worthy," he puts a comedic spin on full-disclosure episodes from his own colorful life.

What better place to find painfully funny material than in growing up gay, gifted, and ambitious in the heart of the Bible belt? And that's just the first cut: From partying to parenting, from Sunday school to getting sober, these slices of Ham will have you laughing and wiping away salty tears in equal measure with their universal and down-to-earth appeal. After all, there's a little ham in all of us.

Sam Harris's diversified career has run the gamut from multi-million-selling sinder and songwriter to Tony-nominated actor to writer, director and producer. After winning over a weekly audience of more than 25 million viewers as the first winner of Star Search, Sam has toured extensively in concert. He resides in Los Angeles with his husband and their son.

ANDERS NILSEN reads from RAGE OF POSEIDON and MICHAEL DEFORGE reads from ANT COLONY

Rage of Poseidon (Drawn & Quarterly) + Ant Colony (Drawn + Quarterly)

Anders Nilsen & Michael DeForge join forces for a can't-miss reading and presentation.

Imagine you are Poseidon at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The oceans are dying and sailors have long since stopped paying tribute. They just don’t need you anymore. What do you do? Perhaps, seeking answers, you go exploring. Maybe you end up in Wisconsin and discover the pleasures of the iced latte. And then, perhaps, everything goes wrong.

Anders Nilsen, the author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, explores questions like these in his newest work, a darkly funny meditation on religion and faith with a modern twist. Rage of Poseidon brings all the philosophical depth of Nilsen’s earlier work to bear on contemporary society, asking how a twenty-first-century child might respond to being sacrificed on a mountaintop, and probing the role gods like Venus and Bacchus might have in the world of today. Nilsen works in aunique style for these short stories, distilling individual moments in black silhouette on a spare white background. Above all, though, he immerses us seamlessly in a world where gods and humans are more alike than not, forcing us to recognize the humor in our (and their) desperation.

In the few short years since he began his pamphlet-size comic book series Lose, Michael DeForge has announced himself as an important new voice in alternative comics. His brash, confident, undulating artwork sent a shock wave through the comics world for its unique, fully formed aesthetic.

From its opening pages, Ant Colony immerses the reader in a world that is darkly existential, with false prophets, unjust wars, and corrupt police officers, as it follows the denizens of a black ant colony under attack from the nearby red ants. On the surface, it's the story of this war, the destruction of a civilization, and the ants' all too familiar desire to rebuild. Underneath, though, Ant Colony plumbs the deepest human concerns--loneliness, faith, love, apathy, and more. All of this is done with humor and sensitivity, exposing a world where spiders can wreak unimaginable amounts of havoc with a single gnash of their jaws. Michael DeForge's striking visual sensibility--stark lines, dramatic color choices, and brilliant use of page and panel space--stands out in this volume.

Anders Nilsen is an award-winning cartoonist and visual artist. He is the author of several books, including Don't Go Where I Can't Follow and the magnum opus Big Questions, for which he was awarded the 2012 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and the Ignatz Award, and was nominated for the top prize at the Angouleme International Comics Festival. Nilsen's works have been translated into a number of languages, and he has exhibited his drawing and painting internationally. He lives and works in Minneapolis.

Michael DeForge was born in 1987 and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. After a few years of experimenting with short strips and zines, he created Lose #1, his first full-length comic, which won Best Emerging Talent at the Doug Wright Awards. He has since published a handful of comic books, which have received industry praise and two Eisner Award nominations. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times and Bloomberg View; his comics have appeared in Believer, Maisonneuve, and the Adventure Time comic book series.

ANDREA PORTES reads from BURY THIS

Bury This (Soft Skull Press)

If twenty-five years can discover the internet, the cell phone, this thing called the iPod, can twenty-five years discover the secret of a girl murdered, abandoned, by the side of the road? That is the haunting premise of Bury This, an impressionistic literary thriller about the murder of a young girl in small-town Michigan in 1979.

Beth Krause was by all intents a good little girl - member of the church choir, beloved daughter of doting parents, friend to the downtrodden. But dig a little deeper into any small town, and conflicts and jealousies begin to appear. And somewhere is that heady mix lies the answer to what really happened to Beth Krause. Her unsolved murder becomes the stuff of town legend, and twenty-five years later the case is re-ignited when a group of film students start making a documentary on Beth's fateful life. The town has never fully healed over the loss of Beth, and the new investigation calls into light several key characters: her father, a WWII vet; her mother, once the toast of Manhattan; her best friend, abandoned by her mother and left to fend for herself against an abusive father; and the detective, just a rookie when the case broke, haunted by his inability to bring Beth's murderer to justice. All of these passions will collide once the identity of Beth's murderer is revealed, proving once again that some secrets can never stay buried.

Adrea Portes was born in rural Nebraska, and spent her early years living in Illinois, Texas, North Dakota, North Carolina, Rio de Janiero, and Brasilia. Portes attended Bryn Mawr and received her MFA from UC San Diego. She is the author of the semi-autobiographical novelHick, and has also completed the comic book series Super Rad, which will be released in September 2013 by Dark Matter.

RATTLING WALL ISSUE #4 RELEASE PARTY

Join us for a terrific reading from one of Los Angeles' premier literary magazines!

PEN Center USA and Narrow Books present The Rattling Wall, Issue 4. The reading will begin at 7:30 PM and will feature contributors Ben Loory, Mehnaz Sahibzada, Ben Pack, Brady Hammes, Ron Gutierrez, George Ducker, and Erika Schickel.

The Rattling Wall, Issue 4, includes new writing by T. Duncan Anderson Jr., Arielle Bernstein, Laura Bogart, Corey Campbell, George Ducker, Megan Falley, David Francis, Leah Griesmann, Ron Gutierrez, Brady Hammes, Nathalie Handal, Dana Johnson, Joe Kelly, Anne-Marie Kinney, Hunter Liguore, Ben Loory, Ruth Nolan, Ben Pack, Minh Pham, Martin Pousson, Jeremy Radin, James Ragan, Mehnaz Sahibzada, Erika Schickel, Heather Simons, Susan Straight, Amber Tamblyn, Michael Tolkin, Bruce Weigl, and Wendy Xu.

Ken Garduno is the featured artist for The Rattling Wall, Issue 4. In 2006, Garduno graduated with honors in illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. After graduating, Ken pursued a career as a freelance illustrator/gallery artist. His work has been shown in galleries internationally, as well as in various publications, album art, and T-shirt designs.

Michelle Meyering is the founding editor of The Rattling Wall and Director of Programs and Events at PEN Center USA. Meyering has produced over 200 literary events across Southern California. She currently teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program in Los Angeles.

PEN Center USA, a literary nonprofit based in Beverly Hills, has a membership of more than 600 professional writers. PEN Center USA strives to protect the rights of writers around the world, to stimulate interest in the written word, and to foster a vital literary community among the diverse writers living in the western United States. PEN Center USA has a long, successful history of planning literary events in and around Los Angeles; special programming has taken place at The Hammer, The Hotel Café, Largo at the Coronet, The Echo, Actor’s Gang, The Pacific Design Center, and The Beverly Hills Hotel.

Narrow Books is an independent Los-Angeles-based publisher founded in 2005, publishing both art and literature. In addition to The Rattling Wall, their titles include: Hey Fudge, a giant collection of work by acclaimed artist Travis Millard (aka Fudge); Eat Hell, a book of stories by Los Angeles author Joseph Mattson; the Two Letters anthology collections; and several “unofficial,” and now out-of-print, handmade mini-books and zines.

For more information on The Rattling Wall, Issue 4: Reading & Release, please contact Michelle Meyering, Director of Programs and Events at PEN Center USA: michelle@penusa.org.

JAMES GREER reads from EVERYTHING FLOWS, FRANKI ELLIOT reads from KISS AS MANY WOMEN AS YOU CAN and CHRIS L. TERRY reads from ZERO FADE

Everything Flows     Kiss As Many Women As You Can    Zero Fade (Curbside Splendor)

Join us for a dynamic reading from Curbside Splendor as three writers present three very different works, a collection of experimental short stories, an art book with detachable pages and a YA novel set in the mid-90s.

James Greer is the author of the novels Artificial Light (LHotB/Akashic 2006) and The Failure(Akashic 2010), and the non-fiction book Guided By Voices: A Brief History (Grove Press), a biography of a band for which he played bass guitar. He’s written or co-written movies for Lindsay Lohan, Jackie Chan, and Steven Soderbergh, among others. He is a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and plays guitar and sings in a new band called Détective after the Godard film of that name. His new book, Everything Flows, is a collection of experimental stories with a foreword written by Robert Pollard, lead singer of Guided By Voices.

Franki Elliot is the author of Piano Rats (Curbside Splendor, 2011) and her newest book Kiss As Many Women As You Can (Curbside Splendor, 2013) is a beautiful book of "typewriter stories" - an art book with full-colored detachable postcards adorned with Chicago artist Shawn Stucky's ethereal paintings.

Chris L. Terry's debut novel Zero Fade is written for young adults and set in the heart of the 90s. It follows 13-year-old Kevin Phifer as he deals with "wack hair-cuts, bullies, last-year fly gear, his uncle Paul coming out as gay, and being grounded."

AMY SPALDING reads from INK IS THICKER THAN WATER

Ink Is Thicker Than Water (Entangled Publishing)

One of Skylight Books' favorite YA authors returns with a novel about the lengths we go to find out who we are.

For Kellie Brooks, family has always been a tough word to define. Combine her hippie mom and tattooist stepdad, her adopted overachieving sister, her younger half brother, and her tough-love dad, and average Kellie's the one stuck in the middle, overlooked and impermanent. When Kellie's sister finally meets her birth mother and her best friend starts hanging with a cooler crowd, the feeling only grows stronger.

But then she reconnects with Oliver, the sweet and sensitive college guy she had a near hookup with last year. Oliver is intense and attractive, and she's sure he's totally out of her league. But as she discovers that maybe intensity isn't always a good thing, it's yet another relationship she feels is spiraling out of her control.

It'll take a new role on the school newspaper and a new job at her mom's tattoo shop for Kellie to realize that defining herself both outside and within her family is what can finally allow her to feel permanent, just like a tattoo. 

Amy Spalding grew up outside of St. Louis. She now lives in Los Angeles with two cats and a dog. She works in marketing and does a lot of improv. She has more tattoos than she can count. Amy would love for you to visit her online at www.theamyspalding.com or on Twitter @theames. 

DANIEL MENAKER reads from MY MISTAKE

My Mistake (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In My Mistake Dan Menaker brings us a fresh perspective on life in those wonderfully fabled halls of The New Yorker—the office politicking, the romancing, the talent scouting—and beyond. Throughout his more than forty years in the publishing business, including successful tenures as an editor at Random House where he acquired classics like Primary Colors, Menaker gives an honest, no-holds-barred account of  a lifetime spent working to celebrate language and good writing.

He tells his own story here, too—with irrepressible style and wisdom—offering insightful observations on the devastating grief that comes from losing a sibling, the joys of adoption and raising a family, and the writing life. The result is a moving, life-affirming portrait of a man who has lived and learned among some of the best writers of our generation. A man who sees the beauty, fortune, and necessity of all the mistakes he has made along the way.

DANIEL MENAKER began his career as a fact checker at The New Yorker, where he became an editor and worked for twenty-six years. Formerly Editor in Chief of Random House, Menaker is the author of six books. He has also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper's, and many other publications. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Katherine Bouton. His website is http://danielmenaker.com/.

JARETT KOBEK discusses BTW with WILLIAM E. JONES

BTW (Penny-Ante Editions)

Another Skylight favorite, Jarett Kobek, returns with his most comic work yet, a love letter to Los Angeles and terrible relationships. For tonight's reading he will be joined by artist William E. Jones.

Bad relationships, interracial dating, cross-faith intermarriage, the endless pangs of love, reality television, Muslim fundamentalism, Crispin Hellion Glover, Internet pornography, Turkish secularism in the era of Erdoğan, the amorous habits of Thomas Jefferson, errant dogs, monogamous cheeseburger tattoos, alcoholics without  recovery, 9/11 PTSD, female Victorian novelists, the people who go to California to die. Jarett Kobek’s second novel, BTW, presents the tragicomedy of a young man in Los Angeles balancing a lunatic father, two catastrophic relationships, identity politics, and American pop culture at its most confused.

Praise for BTW:

“Moving from Williamsburg to Echo Park, Kobek’s account of post-NYU life in the aughts (so generic it can barely be lived, yet alone retold) is surprisingly disrupted as primitive identities of religion and race surface among this young, well-connected, smart and otherwise evolved group of friends. In this, his second novel, Kobek’s writing continues to impress."--CHRIS KRAUS, author of Where Art Belongs and I Love Dick

“Half of BTW is a coming of age novel about the narrator’s romantic entanglements, the most significant of which turns out to be with the city of Los Angeles; the other half is the real love story, played out between the narrator and his father. This father, who is by turns hectoring, profane, and tenderin phone conversations and voicemail messages from his native Turkey, counts as one of the great comic characters in recent fiction, the sort of eccentric with whom you spend a minute in an elevator but can't forget."--William Jones, author of Halstead Plays Himself

"Jarett Kobek’s deceptively artless prose responds like a flower to the sunlight of joy as to the cold rain of alienation. BTW is a book that could be as big as Bright Lights, Big City with the same general framework of a sharply experimental novel that yet can boast a big heart, a joke on every page, an overwhelming city magnificently delineated, and a handful of fascinating and all too real characters.--Kevin Killian, author of Spread Eagle and Impossible Princess

“It’s like Kobek keyed into John Kennedy Toole’s lost biorhythm and resurrected it amid the cosmopolitan absurdities of Los Angeles. Between Tabitha Brown, Khadija, the Butterfed Behemoth and the legendary Mehmet, BTW adds up to a funny and hyper-literate look at failing relationships.”--Ken Baumann, star of the television show The Secret Life of the American Teenager

Jarett Kobek is an American author and essayist living in California. His book ATTA (Semiotexte, 2011) is a fictionalized psychedelic biography of the lead 9/11 terrorist and If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? was published in 2012 by Penny-Ante Editions, both of which were longlisted for Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. His most recent criticism, «Je suis devenu un magicien noir», was published as a catalogue essay by White Cube of London.

William E Jones  is an artist and filmmaker born in Ohio and now living in Los Angeles.  He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) and many installations.  His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2010), the Austrian Film Museum and Oberhausen Short Film Festival (both 2011).  His group shows include the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), and “Untitled (Death by Gun)” at the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011). His books include Is It Really So Strange? (2006),Tearoom (2008),“Killed”: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010),Halsted Plays Himself (2011), and Imitation of Christ (2013).  His solo exhibition, Heraclitus Fragment 124 Automatically Illustrated, opens at David Kordansky Gallery in January 2014.

PRIYANKA KUMAR in conversation with JAMES RAGAN

Take Wing and Fly Here (Sherman Asher Books)

Join us for this evening of conversation based on the release of Priyanka Kumar's new novel, TAKE WING AND FLY HERE, the first in her trilogy about our changing relationship with the American West. James Ragan and Priyanka Kumar will touch on topics including land conservation, the influence of birding and nature on their creative projects, and a discussion of perspective in their writing, whether it's screenwriting, poetry, or fiction. Kumar will also share images of her fine art birding photography and clips from her documentary, The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese, Ismail Merchant, and Ravi Shankar.

Praise for Take Wing and Fly Here:

"Kumar has the most unique talent. She is one of the most gifted writers I know. Her storytelling gifts make all of us sit up and take notice."--Joan Tewekesbury, author of Ebba and the Green Dresses of Olivia Gomez in a Time of Conflict and War, and screenwriter of Nashville.

Priyanka Kumar is the award-winning writer, director, and producer of the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road on Satyajit Ray, starring Martin Scorsese, Ismail Merchant, and Ravi Shankar, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and is in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' permanent collection. Kumar's awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, the New Visions/New Mexico Award, an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences fellowship, a Panavision Filmmaker Award. She taught filmmaking at the University of S. California, Santa Cruz. 

MIKE MADRID reads from DIVAS DAMES & DAREDEVILS

Divas Dames & Daredevils (Exterminating Angel Press)

Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s. But many heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Through twenty-eight full reproductions of vintage Golden Age comics, Divas, Dames & Daredevilsreintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds.

Each spine-tingling chapter opens with Mike Madrid’s insightful commentary about heroines at the dawn of the comic book industry and reveals a universe populated by extraordinary women—superheroes, reporters, galactic warriors, daring detectives, and ace fighter pilots—who protected America and the world with wit and guile.

In these pages, fans will also meet heroines with striking similarities to more modern superheroes, including The Spider Queen, who deployed web shooters twenty years before Spider Man, and Marga the Panther Woman, whose feral instincts and sharp claws tore up the bad guys long before Wolverine. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but their influence on popular culture, and the heroes we’re passionate about today, is unmistakable. Includes a foreword by Maria Elena Buszek, PhD.

Praise for Divas Dames & Daredevils:

"Mike Madrid gives these forgotten superheroines their due. These 'lost' heroines are now found--to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere." --Stan Lee

"In one beautifully designed collection, [Mike Madrid] reprints the blood-and-thunder stories of twenty-eight Golden Age comic book heroines. . . . Lovers of comics and strong women everywhere thank you, Mike Madrid!" --Trina Robbins, author of Pretty in Ink: Women Cartoonists 1896-2013.

"Madrid's meticulous and passionate research provides a window into a seemingly lost "herstory" of patriotism, bravery, and progressive ways of thinking about female agency and adventure. This collection, and the engaging context provided throughout, ensure that these divas, dames, and daredevils will not be forgotten." --Jennifer K. Stuller, author of Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology.

Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics(Exterminating Angel Press) and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. Madrid, a San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, also appears in the documentary "Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines."