Skylight Books Podcast Series

The Cranes Dance (Vintage) Novelist Meg Howrey returns to Skylight to launch her latest, The Cranes Dance, set in the ultra-competitive world of professional ballet. “Howrey’s engaging new novel exposes the competitive world of professional ballet through Kate Crane, a charmingly sarcastic ballerina at a crossroads. . . . Kate is an ideal guide to an unfamiliar world, from her irrevere...

Dust to Dust (Ecco Press) Skylight Books is pleased to host author Benjamin Busch, reading from his acclaimed memoir, Dust to Dust. "Elegaic, funny, wistful, deep, and wonderfully human, Dust to Dust moved me to laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously... . After reading this book, you will want to go outside and really look at our world." --Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn and...

The Shyster's Daughter (Etruscan Press) by Paula Priamos Elsewhere, California (Counterpoint) by Dana Johnson L.A.-based writers Paula Priamos and Dana Johnson read and sign their powerful new books: The Shyster's Daughter, a memoir by Priamos about her deeply flawed father; and Elsewhere, California, a coming-of-age novel set in Los Angeles from Johnson, the award-winning author of Break Any Woma...

Wildcat Play (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Acclaimed novelist Helen Knode will discuss her new thriller Wildcat Play with her ex-husband and crime fiction writer extraordinaire James Ellroy. Praise for Wildcat Play: "I fell in love with the people, the place and most of all the words." —Michael Connelly "Drawing on her family's history in oil exploration, Helen Knode has created a riveting mystery t...

Ross Altman May Day is the international worker’s holiday, dating back to 1886 and the Haymarket Square strike in Chicago. This May Day, Skylight Books welcomes LA labor troubadour Ross Altman to lead a program of sing along labor songs, with a little history behind the songs, for t...hose who want to carry on the tradition of Joe Hill, the IWW and Woody Guthrie—now in his Centennial year. This is...

Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon Books) Skylight welcomes back Los Angeles author Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, to launch his new short story collection, Sorry Please Thank You. Praise for How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: "Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a...

Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing (William Morrow & Company) Neal Stephenson, the beloved and bestselling author of modern speculative fiction classics including Reamde, Anathem, and Snow Crash, will discuss and sign his brand-new collection of essays, Some Remarks. "Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself as a writer whose imagination knows no limits." —Salon Neal Stephenson is the autho...

Jerusalem (Drawn & Quarterly) Acclaimed graphic memoirist Guy Delisle returns with his strongest work yet—a thoughtful and moving travelogue about life in the Holy City. Guy Delisle expertly lays the groundwork for a cultural road map of contemporary Jerusalem, utilizing the classic stranger in a strange land point of view that made his other books, Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Burma Chronicles requir...

Death by Sunshine (Writers Tribe Books) Novelist Allison Burnett (Christopher, The House Beautiful) visits Skylight to read and sign the third and final book in his B. K. Troop series, Death by Sunshine. "Like Truman Capote, Allison Burnett knows how to pull up a chair and whisper a juicy story into his lucky reader's ear. Death By Sunshine is a quickly paced tale inhabited by fascinating and funn...

Celebrate poetry month at Skylight Books with Los Angeles poets reading from Walt Whitman's magnificent Leaves of Grass on Sunday, April 1st from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Walt Whitman began Leaves of Grass: "I celebrate myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belong to you." Leaves of Grass celebrates the open road, camraderie, freedom, equality: "I am the p...

New American Haggadah (Little, Brown and Company) Author Jill Soloway (Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants) presents a discussion with Eileen Levinson and Caroline Libresco on New American Haggadah, a new translation by Nathan Englander of the story of Exodus, with additional essays and commentaries edited by Jonathan Safron Foer. Jill Soloway is a writer/director and community organizer. She recently cofo...

The Big Town (Fantagraphics) Monte Schulz returns to Skylight Books to launch the last book in his Jazz Age trilogy, The Big Town. "Monte Schulz's The Big Town exposes decadence, wealth and consumption in Jazz Age America as spiritual myopia — where desperate, haunting characters hinge their lives on impossible dreams. This lyrical, gripping novel is as close to 1920s America as it gets, and...

The Man Who Quit Money (Riverhead) Mark Sundeen visits Skylight to discuss and sign his book The Man Who Quit Money, the fascinating true story of Daniel Suelo, a man who left his life savings in a phone booth ten years ago and hasn't earned, received, or spent a penny since.  Daniel Suelo will be attending the event and is available to answer questions and sign books! “Maybe it's just this odd, p...

Pity the Billionaire (Metropolitan Books) Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?) returns to Skylight Books to discuss and sign his new book Pity the Billionaire, in which he takes an insightful and sardonic look at the way our dire economic circumstances have brought an unexpected resurgence of conservatism. "No one fools Thomas Frank, who is the sharpest, funniest, most intellectually vora...

One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road (Viva Editions) In celebration of what would have been Jack Kerouac's 90th birthday, we're presenting biographer Gerald Nicosia (Memory Babe), who will be discussing and signing his new book One and Only, about the woman who started Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the journey that inspired On the Road. "This is the missing back-story of the back-story...

Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (Harper) Acclaimed short story writer Kevin Moffett (Permanent Visitors) will read and sign his new story collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. "Kevin Moffett's stories are stealth heartbreakers, as well as wonders of sly detail and perfect tone. He's writing some of the best short fiction around." --Sam Lipsyte "The first thing you no...

Snowflake/Different Streets (Wave Books) Celebrated poet Eileen Myles visits Skylight Books to read and sign her highly anticipated new poetry collection Snowflake/Different Streets. "One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature—honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it." —Dennis Cooper "[Myles' writing] comes across simultaneously as ef...

These Dreams of You (Europa Editions) We're thrilled to present Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and editor of the literary journal Black Clock, who will read and sign his new novel These Dreams of You. "In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times." --Boston Globe "Erickson's seemingly fractured...

When the Killing's Done (Penguin)  Acclaimed novelist T.C. Boyle (The Women) returns to Skylight to read and sign this new paperback edition of his latest novel, When the Killing's Done, a fictional take on real-life battle between the National Park Service and animal welfare activists over invasive species in the Channel Islands. With vividly drawn characters and heart-pounding plot twists, Boyle...

At Last (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Acclaimed British novelist Edward St. Aubyn (Mother's Milk, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) will read and sign his new novel At Last. "Sparkling... With the wit of Wilde, the lightness of Wodehouse, and the waspishness of Waugh, [St. Aubyn] wraps his fancy prose style around the self in extremis ('suffocated, dropped, born of raped as well as born to be ra...

When We Were Outlaws by Jeanne Cordova (Spinspters Ink) Dr. Chris Freeman riffs off the style of hard-hitting PBS interview host Charlie Rose, and tosses the tough questions to Jeanne Cordova, author of When We Were Outlaws: a memoir of Love and Revolution Delve back in time to the early 1970s birth of activism in the lesbian & gay movement.   Get the nuts and bolts on... Lesbian separatism, Advoc...

All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps (Penguin Press) Dave Isay, founder of the revolutionary oral history project StoryCorps (as heard on NPR's Morning Edition), will discuss and sign his new collection of tales from the project, All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps. Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards...

The Flame Alphabet (Knopf) Ben Marcus (Notable American Women) will read and sign his highly anticipated new novel, The Flame Alphabet. In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families. A terrible epidemic has struck the country and...

Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House) Acclaimed anthropologist and author David Graeber Direct Action) visits Skylight Books to discuss and sign his fascinating new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a timely study of the ancient origins of our system of credit and debt. Praise for David Graeber: "I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world....

The Marbled Swarm (HarperCollins) Cult-favorite writer Dennis Cooper (Ugly Man; God, Jr.) returns to Skylight to read and sign his new novel, The Marbled Swarm! "Disquieting, humbling, and sadly beautiful in the way only Dennis Cooper can be, The Marbled Swarm is a mystifying and courageous novel that represents his finest work to date." —Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers and Ablution...