Skylight Books Podcast Series

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper) A triumphant literary debut with notes of both The Art of Fielding and The Flamethrowers, which introduces the striking figure of Owen Burr, a gifted Olympics-bound athlete whose dreams of greatness are deferred and then transformed by an unlikely journey from California to Berlin, Athens, Iceland, and back again. Owen Burr, a towering athlete at Stanford Un...

We Dropped A Bomb On You: A City and Its Stories: Los Angeles: The Best of Slake I-IV (Rare Bird Books) Cofounded by former LA Weekly editor Joe Donnelly and current Los Angeles Times Arts and Entertainment editorLaurie Ochoa, Slake is a literary journal that sets a new template for the next generation of print publications -- collectible, not disposable; destined for the bedside table instead of...

Last Stories and Other Stories (Viking Books) In this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic. NOTE: We're expecting a big crowd for this event.  As always, our events are free and open to the public, but we will be issuing numbered singing line tickets to ke...

 The Great Glass Sea (Grove Press)   In The Course of Human Events (Soft Skull Press) Join us for a captivating reading from two dynamic writers of fiction. Josh Weil’s critically acclaimed 2009 novella collection The New Valley was the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” selection, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. He follows this success...

The Todd Glass Situation (Simon & Schuster) A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man--and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman. Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And...

California (Little Brown and Company) A former Skylight staffer comes home to read from her much anticipated debut novel! You might recognize this book is you're a regular viewer of The Colbert Report -- this is the novel Sherman Alexie and Stephen Colbert  recommended  on the June 3 show! (You can pre-order it from us, too. Just click the Add to Cart button below.) The world Cal and Frida have al...

Take This Man (Simon & Schuster) Join us this evening and welcome back an icon of literary Los Angeles, Brando Skyhorse! From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of "The Glass Castle "or "The Tender Bar," the true story of a boy's turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers and the mother who was determined to give her son everythin...

Fourth of July Creek (Ecco) Smith Henderson, author of one of the most anticipated debut novels of the season, discusses his work with novelist Brian McGreevy (Hemlock Grove). In this shattering and iconic American novel, PEN prize-winning writer, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violen...

 Home Leave (Grand Central Publishing) Chris Kriegstein is a man on the move, with a global career that catapults his family across North America, Europe, and Asia. For his wife, Elise, the hardship of chronic relocation is soothed by the allure of reinvention. Over the years, Elise shape-shifts: once a secretive Southern Baptist, she finds herself becoming a seasoned expat in Shanghai, an unapolo...

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made (Simon & Schuster) Join us tonight for a very special event as we, along with cast and crew, step inside The Room, the movie Patton Oswalt referred to as "modern-day Plan 9 From Outer Space." As part of tonight's event we'll be celebrating the release of the audiobook version of The Disaster Artist and will be screening...

The Vacationers (Riverhead Books)  Skylight Books is proud to welcome back one of our favorite authors, Emma Straub! For the Post family, a luxurious vacation to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is meant as a celebration of Franny and Jim’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and their daughter’s graduation from high school.  The sunlit beaches, mountains, tennis and tapa...

Four Corners (Soft Skull Press) Writing under the pen name of Wally Rudolph, writer/actor Walter Wong (best known for his role as Chris 'V-Lin' Von Lin on Sons of Anarchy) drops readers into the bare-knuckled world of Frank Bruce, a 37-year-old meth addict tangled up crime, drugs, and his far-too-young fiancé, Maddie. Struggling to be a decent man and leave his toxic life behind, Frank's attempt t...

Now and Yesterday (Kensington Publishing) In the three decades since Peter first moved into his Brooklyn apartment, almost every facet of his life has changed. Once a broke, ambitious poet, Peter is now a successful advertising executive. He's grateful for everything the years have given him--wealth, friends, security. But he's conscious too of what time has taken in return, and a busy stream of i...

On the eve of Los Angeles Pride, Skylight Books presents its third annual celebration of LGBT writing.  The work of James Baldwin, Eloise Klein Healy, Oscar Wilde, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jerome Stueart will be explored by some of our favorite writers including Jervey Tervalon, Naomi Hirahara, Ali Liebegott and Wendy Ortiz.  Curated by Noel Alumit

Mabel and Me (Angel City Press) Join us tonight for a very special event from local publisher and friend of the store, Angel City Press. Mabel and Me is a novel about the Movies—a sharply observed, historically accurate, deliciously intimate story set in the earliest days of motion pictures. Beautifully told, this is a tale of Jack, his coming of age with the Movies, and his passionate, destructiv...

The City Under The Skin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map. A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that’s not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can’t quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he’s just purchased is the ticket to a new li...

An Untamed State (Grove Press) Roxane Gay is a powerful new literary voice whose short stories and essays have already earned her an enthusiastic audience. In An Untamed State, she delivers an assured debut about a woman kidnapped for ransom, her captivity as her father refuses to pay and her husband fights for her release over thirteen days, and her struggle to come to terms with the ordeal in it...

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (Three Rivers Press) Kristin Newman spent her 20s and 30s dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead st...

The Snow Queen (Farrar Straus Giroux) Skylight Books is very excited to welcome to Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. NOTE: We're expecting a big crowd for this event.  As always, our events are free and open to the public, but we will be issuing numbered singing line tickets to keep the line organized (the number is your place in line).  To get a ticket to go thro...

Off Course (Sarah Crichton Books) Skylight Books is proud to welcome two legendary authors for one legendary evening. "A bear climbs onto a cabin's deck, presses his nose to the sliding door. Inside, a young woman stands to face him. She comes closer, and closer yet, until only the glass stands between them . . ." The year is 1981, Reagan is in the White House, and the country is stalled in a rece...

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 charact...

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 s...

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-tal...

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...

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.