Skylight Books Podcast Series

Down, Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (University of Chicago Press) In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, a...

Psyche Unbound (Tule Publishing) The celebrated beauty of Roman princess Psyche has enraged Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty. As punishment, Psyche is left naked on the beach to be sacrificed to a monster. When Cupid, the God of Love, swoops her up and flies her to the monster’s palace, Psyche mistakenly wraps her legs around his waist, looks into his eyes, and falls in love.   Blindfolded an...

Beneath the Coyote Hills (Spuyten Duyvil Press) Please join us this afternoon for the official launch of local author William Luvaas's exciting new novel Beneath the Coyote Hills! “They say you never get more than you can handle. So how do we explain suicide, then, or divorce, or crimes of passion, or parents who murder their children, or fall to pieces after having them? How do we explain people...

Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint) Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a "Community Baby." Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to...

Mischling (Lee Boudreaux Books) Mischling is indeed a paradox. The intangible magic of Konar’s novel is this: While it is set against a backdrop of one of the most horrific episodes in human history, it is lyrical, poetic, and filled with hope. It is a story about the pervasiveness of nightmares and the staggering power of dreams. About how, despite the most banal of evils, one can find the abilit...

A Wife of Noble Character (Henry Holt & Company) Imagine Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart transported from the Gilded Age to present-day Houston. Her world would have less taffeta, more beer. Her search for love would take her to Texas-big parties, not velvet parlors. And the hush-hush small talk of New York’s drawing rooms would be replaced with Lone Star straight talk. This is the reimagined setting wr...

In the Not Quite Dark (Counterpoint Press) Following her prize-winning collection Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnsonreturns with a collection of bold stories set mostly in downtown Los Angeles that examine large issues like love, class, race and how they influence and define our most intimate moments. In "The Liberace Museum," a mixed-race couple leave the South toward the destination of Vegas, cr...

Questionnaire (Bloomsbury) Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of “the form as form,” from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By aski...

#RECURRENT, is a new series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, which launches two titles in 2016 and is edited by Janice Lee, author of Damnation,Reconsolidation, The Sky Isn't Blue, and Executive Editor of Entropy. The series will push the boundaries of narrative with books that seek to reconstruct, reimagine & expand on existing narrative spaces. Not bound to genre or category, #RECURRENT books will be...

Spectacular Illumination: Neon Los Angeles 1925-1965 (Angel City Press) Spectacular Illumination: Neon Los Angeles, 1925-1965 is a unique, and indeed, spectacular collection of vintage photos that showcases the glowing neon heritage of the City of Angels. L.A. has long been recognized as the most vibrant city in the U.S., with part of its radiance coming from the signs lining its streets during th...

My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor (Da Capo Press) Keith Morris is a true punk icon. No one else embodies the sound of Southern Californian hardcore. Short and sporting waist–length dreadlocks, Morris is known the world over for his take–no–prisoners approach on the stage and his integrity off of it. Over the course of his forty–year career, he’s battled diabetes, drug and alcohol addict...

The Last Days of Night (Random House) From Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and New York Times bestselling author of The Sherlockian, comes a thrilling historical novel—based on actual events—about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America. In 1888 New York, gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but electric light is in...

Break in Case of Emergency (Knopf) Jessica Winter's ferociously intelligent debut novel is a wry satire of celebrity do-goodism as well as an exploration of the difficulty of navigating friendships as they shift to accommodate marriage and family, and the unspoken tensions that can strain even the strongest bonds. Jen has reached her early thirties and has all but abandoned a once-promising painti...

You Will Know Me (Little Brown and Company) The audacious new novel about family and ambition from "one of the best living mystery writers" ("Grantland") and bestselling, award-winning author of The Fever, Megan Abbott.  How far will you go to achieve a dream? That's the question a celebrated coach poses to Katie and Eric Knox after he sees their daughter Devon, a gymnastics prodigy and Olympic ho...

Selfish Issue Four: Hot and Bothered Selfish, the feminist memoir magazine, is back with its fourth and boldest issue yet. Join us for a night of wine and the sweaty tension that comes from trying to become and trying to be. You know the one, don't you? Come hear six of the 30 contributors read about what has them feeling hot and bothered. Guaranteed to make you warm in some regard or another. And...

Join WriteGirl at 5pm to hear new creative voices by teen girls! Get inspired as WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original work. The reading will be the culmination of a series of five summer workshops that WriteGirl is holding July 20 through August 6 at The Huntington in Pasadena. Please RSVP at  rsvp@writegirl.org  or  www.writegirl.org . WriteGirl is a creative writing and ment...

LOVF (Fantagraphics) LOVF is the sketchbook companion of a man literally losing his mind. Homeless and broke after giving all his stuff to punk rock heroin dealers, he ends up off his meds and on a secret quest from Portland to Brooklyn, DC, LA, San Francisco, and Seattle. He throws himself into every experience like it was his last; like it should be his last. With wild energy, promiscuity, crimi...

Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World: Wandering the Globe from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar (OR Books) Tom Lutz is addicted to journeying. Sometimes he stops at the end of the road, sometimes he travels further. In this richly packed portmanteau of traveler’s tales, we accompany him as he drives beyond the blacktop in Morocco, to the Saharan dunes on the Algerian border, and east of Ankara into...

Summer Forgets to Wear a Petticoat (Finishing Line Press) Summer Forgets to Wear a Petticoat explores the author's passions & obsessions. These include subjects as varied as cooking, religion, fashion, and mystery novels. Set against the backdrop of Los Angeles, the poems in this chapbook suggest that to embrace the mystery of existence, one must play detective. Mehnaz Sahibzada was born in Pakist...

World of Warcraft (Boss Fight Books) At more than 100 million user accounts created and over $10 billion made, it is not only the most-subscribed MMORPG in the world, but the highest-grossing video game of all time. Ten years after its launch, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft is less a game and more a world unto itself, and it's a world Daniel Lisi knows well. More time in his high schoo...

Grace (Counterpoint Press) For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That’s what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. In Natashia Deón’s debut Grace: A Novel Naomi must leave behind her beloved Momma and sister Hazel and take refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a f...

Frackolopy: the Battle for the Future of Energy and the Enviornment (New Press) Over the past decade, a new and controversial energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed to the forefront of U.S. energy production. With fracking, millions of gallons of water, dangerous chemicals, and sand are injected under high pressure deep into the earth, fracturing hard roc...

Losing It (Riverhead Books) Losing It is the story of Julia Greenfield, a former collegiate swimming star who finds herself at age 26, stuck in a dead-end job, living in a city she hates, and, oh yeah, still a virgin. Determined to re-route herself from her stalled life – and lose that pesky V-card once and for all – Julia travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in a small to...

Please welcome ZYZZYVA's Southern California All-Stars! Though a San Francisco publication, ZYZZYVA has championed writers, poets, and artists from the Southland since its founding in 1985. Come hear recent contributors Lou Mathews, Melissa Yancy, Jim Gavin, David Hernandez, and special guest Dana Johnson read from their work, and find out whyZYZZYVA is considered one of the country's finest liter...

Neon Green (Unnamed Press) It's the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago: Forrest Gump is in theaters, teens are reeling from the death of Kurt Cobain, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. Welcome to Margaret Wappler's slightly altered 90s. Everything's pretty much the way you remember it, except for the aliens. When a flying saucer lands in the Alle...