Skylight Books Podcast Series

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 ...

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 in...

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 America...

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 m...

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...

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...

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 c...

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 belov...

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 Wash...

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."...

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...

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...

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 disco...

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 ess...

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...

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 m...

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 p...

Happy Mutant Baby Pills (Harper Perennial) About Happy Mutant Baby Pills: Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to recite and minimize"—sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render t...

Hyperbole and A Half (Simon and Schuster) Skylight Books is excited, stoked, and over-the-moon ecstatic to be hosting Allie Brosh, creator of the award-winning blog "Hyperbole and a Half." Never heard of "Hyperbole and A Half" and the book it spawned? Let Allie tell you about it. "This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I...

The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole (SourceBooks/Jabberwocky) Join us tonight for the launch party of local author and actor Eric Pierpoint's middle grade novel, The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole. Epic in scope, populated by unforgettable characters, this debut wild west adventure novel by popular Hollywood character actor Eric Pierpoint will thrill young readers.  Caleb O’Toole and his two sisters are le...

Rookie Yearbook Two (Drawn + Quarterly) "Rookie" is an independent online magazine made by and for teenage girls. It was created by Tavi Gevinson in 2011, when she was just fourteen years old; today, about a third of the magazine's staff are teenage writers, photographers, and illustrators. Rookie Yearbook Two features exclusive content from Lena Dunham, Judy Blume, Grimes and Mindy Kaling. The bo...

Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive On Ideas Alone (Grand Central Publishing) Bo Burnham, one of America's most popular young comedians (chosen by Vulture as one of the “50 Comedians You Should and Will Know”) has accomplished quite a lot -- considering he’s only 23-years-old.  With three Comedy Central Records albums and an MTV series under his belt, Bo is no doubt a rising star -- and tonight he brin...

White Girls (McSweeney's)  White Girls, Hilton Als's first book since The Women fourteen years ago, finds one of "The New Yorker's" boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them--an expansive but precise cat...

Traveling Sprinkler (Blue Rider Press) We're very excited to host acclaimed and best-selling novelist Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine, The Anthologist, House of Holes) at Skylight for his new novel, Traveling Sprinkler!  Baker will be in conversation with Los Angeles Times book critic (and author himself) David Ulin. As with all Skylight Books events, this discussion is free and open to the public...

The Color Master (Doubleday) One of Skylight Books' favorite authors returns with a fabulous new short story collection! You're not going to want to miss this reading. Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “...