Skylight Books Podcast Series

Peter, Paul and Mary: Fifty Years of a Music Life (Imagine Publishing) Peter Yarrow and Noel Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary celebrate the release of the first book to detail the intimate story of the trio and their music. Here is the first and only book that visually tells us the intimate story of Peter, Paul, and Mary and their music, with stirring images that follow their passionate fifty-year...

Grace's Guide: The Art of Pretending to be a Grown-Up (Touchstone Books) "One of the sharpest, funniest voices on YouTube" ("Forbes"), comedian Grace Helbig offers an irreverent and illustrated guide to life for anyone faced with the challenge of growing up. Face it--being a young adult in the digital era is one of the hardest things to be. Well, maybe there are harder things in life...but being a...

This Is A Book For Parents of Gay Kids (Chronicle Books) "An excellent and much-needed resource." −School Library Journal This important book is the first of its kind—it is currently the only book to speak to parents who want practical, straightforward advice on how to communicate and better parent their gay child. Authors Dannielle Owens-Reidand Kristin Russo have been dialoguing with lesbian, ga...

Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation (Dutton Books) A humorous philosophical investigation into the existence of Santa--from a co-executive producer of "The Big Bang Theory," the #1 sitcom on television. Metaphysics isn't ordinarily much of a laughing matter. But in the hands of acclaimed comedy writer and scholarEric Kaplan, a search for the truth about old St. Nick becomes a deeply in...

Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) When the San Jose mine collapsed outside of Copiapo, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. The entire world watched what transpired above-ground during the grueling and protracted...

Perfidia (Knopf) Please welcome back to Skylight one of L.A.'s most iconic crime writers, James Ellroy! The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. The United States teeters on the edge of war. The roundup of allegedly treasonous Japanese Americans is about to begin. And in L.A., a Japanese family is found dead. Murder or ritual suicide? The investigation will draw four people into a totally Ellroy-ian...

Stray (Greenwillow Books)A cross between The Handmaid's Tale and Wicked, with a dash of Grimm and Disney thrown in, Stray is part coming-of-age story, part fairy tale, part adventure, part sweet romance. Princess Aislynn has long dreamed about attending her Introduction Ball, about dancing with the handsome suitors her adviser has chosen for her, about meeting her true love and starting her happil...

The Book With No Pictures (Dial Books for Young Readers) We're delighted to present the Los Angeles launch event for The Book With No Pictures, the new children's book from actor and author B.J. Novak (One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories). NOTE: As with all Skylight Books events, this reading is free and open to the public (first come, first served). But, because we're expecting a large crow...

Walker on Water (Unnamed Press)  Join us for a very special event as one of Skylight Book's favorite local presses, Unnamed Press. A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband's brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the wor...

Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe (Adams Media) Please join us as one of Skylight Books' favorite (and best-selling) artists celebrates the launch of her newest book. Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe erases the boundaries of the standard self-help book and sets you free on a visual journey of self-discovery. Inside you will find nine metaphysical less...

10:04 (Faber & Faber) For tonight's event Ben Lerner will be joined by one of Skylight's favorite local authors, Rachel Kushner! A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire, Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels . . . of his generation" (Lorin Stein, "The New York...

The Betrayers (Little Brown and Company) Please welcome back to Skylight Books David Bezmozgis, the award-winning author of Free World and Natasha and Other Stories. His latest, The Betrayers is a compact saga of love, duty, family, and sacrifice from a rising star whose fiction is "self-assured, elegant, perceptive . . . and unflinchingly honest" (New York Times) These incandescent pages give us...

Women in Clothes (Blue Rider) Skylight Books is thrilled to present three phenomenal writers -- Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), Heidi Julavits (The Vanishers), and Leanne Shapton (Important Artifacts) -- for a discussion on their highly anticipated new book, Women in Clothes. This event will feature a clothing swap!  Attendees are encouraged to bring one special item of clothing that you’d...

This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books) Join us tonight for a very special reading from one of our generation's most celebrated writers, Junot Diaz! Junot is visiting Los Angeles for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles' 22nd Anniversary Celebration, during which he will receive the Los Angeles Public Library's 2014 Literary Award. To learn more about the work of the Library Foundation, visit ...

Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) A revelatory synthesis of cultural history and social psychology that shows how one-to-one collaboration drives creative success. Weaving the lives of scores of creative duos--from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--Joshua Wolf Shenk iden...

We are proud to present a performance by celebrated singer-songwriter Kath Bloom! Kath Bloom is a legendary American singer-songwriter from Litchfield, Connecticut. In the 1970s she collaborated with Bruce Neumann and recorded with avant-garde guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors releasing multiple albums of fragile, simple folk and blues melodies that play heart strings and raw nerves like a shaman...

The Moor's Account (Pantheon) Tonight's reading is part of the Los Angeles/Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI). From the author of Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits comes  The Moor's Account, the imagined memoirs of the New World's first explorer of African descent, a Moroccan slave known as Estebanico. In 1527, Panfilo de Narvaez sailed from Spain with a crew of six hundred men, intendi...

Tomboy (Zest Books) Razorcake and Skylight Books are teaming up to present graphic novelist Liz Prince, presenting her new graphic memoir Tomboy!  Growing up, Liz Prince wasn’t a girly girl, but she wasn’t exactly one of the guys either (as she learned when her little league baseball coach exiled her to the distant outfield). She was somewhere in between. But with the forces of middle school, high...

A Death in Vegas (White Whisker Books)  Love Will Make YOu Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late At Night (White Whisker Books) Join us tonight for a very special eventing with local publisher White Whisker Books! In A Death in Vegas, the president of a company that specializes in beneficial bugs for organic gardeners discovers a young woman dead in his Las Vegas hotel suite. She had worked as a sexy la...

Anatomy of A Misfit (Harper Teen) From bestselling adult novelist Andrea Portes comes her Young Adult debut: Anatomy of a Misfit (Harper Teen), an emotionally resonant story that Publishers Weekly raves is “instantly endearing” with a “highly memorable heroine” and voice.   Anika is the third most popular girl in her high school--despite feeling she doesn’t fit in with the popular crowd in her sma...

The Lotus and The Storm (Viking Books) An epic tale of love, loyalty, and war from the acclaimed author of Monkey Bridge.   Alternating between the voice of Mai, a Vietnamese-American woman and law librarian in the DC area and her father, Minh, a former commander of the airborne brigade in the South Vietnamese army, The Lotus and the Storm transports us to one family’s past in Saigon during the wa...

Ham on Rye, Post Office, and The Women (new editions from Ecco)  To celebrate what would have been the 94th birthday of literary legend Charles Bukowski (born August 16, 1920), we're throwing a party featuring Jerry Stahl, Richard Lange, and Dan Fante, reading excerpts of their favorite Bukowski works.  A birthday cake and tasty beverages will also be served, thanks to our sponsor, Ecco, who just...

Beware Beware (Minotaur Books)  Please join us for a very special launch event for Skylight favorite, Steph Cha! Juniper Song--an unforgettable new crime heroine hailed as "young, sharp, and worldly-wise" by New York Times bestselling author Meg Gardiner--returns in this smart, fast-paced follow-up to Steph Cha's critically acclaimed debutFollow Her Home. Working as an apprentice at a P.I. firm, J...

Forest of Fortune (Tyrus Books) Skylight Books is very excited to welcome Vermin on the Mount's very own, Jim Ruland! Something’s not right at Thunderclap Casino… While working the floor at the casino on the ultra-rural Yukemaya Indian Reservation, Alice is visited by a mysterious woman. Alice wants to believe her new epilepsy meds are causing her to hallucinate, but the apparition keeps coming ba...

Gnarr: How I Became the Mayor of a Large City in Iceland and Changed the World (Melville House) Former Reykjavík mayor and longtime comedian Jón Gnarr will discuss and sign his memoir about his satirical campaign turned actual mayorship in Iceland's largest city. In the epicenter of the world financial crisis, a comedian launched a joke campaign that didn't seem so funny to the country's leading p...