Skylight Books Podcast Series

Join us to hear fine new works by UC Irvine MFA Students.  Fiction writers Blake Kimzey and Justin Lee, and poets Josh Cornwell and Meagan Cooney will be at Skylight for the final stop of their off-campus reading series.  Come out, support and enjoy great new work. http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mfareading/ THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON MAY 18, 2013.

Angel Baby (Mulholland Books) A woman goes on the run in this intense and cinematic thriller by an award-winning writer. To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan. Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband is El Principe, a key player in a high-powered drug cartel, a business he runs with the same violence he has used to keep Luz his perfect, obedient wife. With the pace and relentless force of a Scorsese film, ANGEL BABY is the newest masterpiece from one of the most ambitious and talented crime novelists at work today. "Richard Lange has a PhD in badass, and in Angel Baby he leads the reader through every can't-look, can't-look-away corner of treachery and sleaze, violence and danger. Lange stands out as the greatest young crime writer of his generation, precisely because he doesn't write crime--he writes literature." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight "Angel Baby is a bone-crushing nightmare parable: bad people doing the wrong things for love." --Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, which received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the novel This Wicked World. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles. Photo by Beth Coller THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON MAY 17, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780316219822

The Accursed (Ecco Press) We couldn't be more excited to have legendary author Joyce Carol Oates coming to Skylight to read from and sign her new novel, The Accursed. The Washington Post calls The Accursed "spectacular. . . With its vast scope, its mingling of comic and tragic tones, its omnivorous gorging on American literature, and especially its complex reflection on the major themes of our history, The Accursed is the kind of outrageous masterpiece only Joyce Carol Oates could create." A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)--an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned. Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man-a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up. When the bride's brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the university and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain-all plagued by "accursed" visions. An utterly fresh work from Oates, The Accursed marks new territory for the masterful writer. Narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect. "The Accursed is a unique, vast multilayered narrative; a genre bending beast of a book, utterly startling from start to finish, compulsive and engaging, the writing crackling with energy and wit. This is an elaborately conceived work."--New York Review of Books. Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo by Star Black THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MAY 6, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE:  http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/%5Bmodel%5D-240

Wholly Falsetto With People Dancing (Otis Books) An older man's not-so-divine comedy, Vangelisti's FALSETTO is in three parts, corresponding to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise: namely, "Westernmost," the Los Angeles of a poet's daybook; the fool's purgatory of "An Italian Journal," some three weeks up & down the peninsula; and finally, "Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing," an alphabetical memoir of that invisible country of dead poets and loves that are no more. The trips through the first two territories in the work, Los Angeles and Italy, are documented more or less "on the run," in stark contrast to the contemplative nature of the final section of recollections. Among the several subjects interwoven throughout the narrative is Vangelisti's exploration of an 'un-American' literary tradition, set up against that of the dominant Anglo-American culture. Paul Vangelisti is the author of some twenty books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. In addition to his new book, Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing, an older man’s not-so-divine comedy, his most recent book of poems, Two, appeared from Talisman House in 2011. In 2006, Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the  PEN-USA Award for Translation. In 2010, his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 won the Academy of American Poets Raizzis/de Palchi Book Prize for Translation. From 1971-1982 he was co-editor, with John McBride, of the literary magazine Invisible City and, from 1993-2002, edited Ribot, the annual report of the College of Neglected Science. He worked as a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter (1972-1974), and as Cultural Affairs Director at KPFK Radio (1974-1982). Currently, with Luigi Ballerini, he is editing a six-volume anthology of U.S. poetry from 1960 to the present, Nuova poesia americana, for Mondadori in Milan. Vangelisti is Founding Chair of the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MAY 11, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/event/paul-vangelisti-reads-wholly-falsetto-people-dancing

Gawky: Tales of an Extra Long Awkward Phase (Seal Press) Some tall girls grow up to have perfect posture and are later seen gracing the pages of magazines. Some are natural athletes with toned legs that mask their overlarge feet. Then there are "other" tall girls: the ones who are always tripping over themselves; who never look normal in any size of clothing; who literally don't fit in. Comedian Margot Leitman was one of these awkward giants, and "Gawky" is the painfully funny chronicle of her experiences growing up tall. Reaching five feet six inches in fourth grade--and approaching six feet in high school--Leitman realized early on that she'd always stand out from the crowd. To cope, she developed a thick skin and a sharp sense of humor, and instead of forever trying to blend in, she decided to embrace her center-of-attention status. Leitman wears funky, Ziggy Stardust-era jumpsuits (in the 90s); takes up any cause she can find (whether saving the public beaches or protesting prom); and generally makes as much use of her big presence as humanly possible. Leitman's memoir is a hilarious celebration of growing up gangly. Endearing and encouraging, "Gawky" is a cathartic release of everything awkward girls endure--and a tribute to a youth larger than life. "If Judy Blume and Chelsea Handler had a baby, and that baby was a book, it would be "Gawky.""--Rachel Dratch Margot Leitman's humorous, autobiographical writing has been published in Playgirl Magazine and The NY Press, as well as online at LifetimeTV.com, theFrisky.com, CollegeHumor.com, and 236.com (the comedy division of the Huffington Post). Her former monthly column, “From Behind the Bar,” was a reminiscence of bartending at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre and was featured multiple times on Comedy Central Insider, BrooklynVegan.com, and Gawker. She is a regular monologist at Assscat (UCB Theatre’s long running improv show hosted by Amy Poehler), Heeb Magazine’s Storytelling, Moonwork, Jill Soloway’s Sit N Spin, and Comedy Central’s Crash Mansion, among others. In 2012, Margot was nominated for an ECNY Award (Excellence in Comedy, NY) for “Best Storyteller.” Margot Leitman lives in Los Angeles. Visit her online at MargotLeitman.com. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON MAY 9, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781580054782

Odds Against Tomorrow (Farrar Straus Giroux) NEW YORK CITY, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe--ecological collapse, global war, natural disasters--he becomes obsessed by a culture's fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell's predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost? At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be. "This literary thriller is blessed with a propulsive plot, macabre humor, several richly developed characters, and serious ethical and philosophical issues, all lightly clothed in skillful writing."--Booklist Praise for The Mayor's Tongue: "A brilliantly told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny." --Stephen King "An author who could well become one of the defining writers of his generation." --The Sunday Telegraph "A spare masterpiece." --The Boston Globe Born in New York City, Nathaniel Rich now lives in New Orleans. He is the author of The Mayor’s Tongue. Photo by Meredith Angelson THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS, MAY 8, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780374224240

A new nonprofit venture sponsored by PEN Center USA, Phoneme Media is an LA-based film and publishing house, published by Skylight's own Chris Heiser and founded by local poet and translator David Shook. Mario Bellatin, the leading experimental novelist in contemporary Latin America, introduces the neglected work of Shiki Nagaoka to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Bellatin’s highly stylized biography recounts Nagaoka’s early life, including his failed first attempt at love, his decision to enter the monastic life, and his family’s disavowal of him. It contextualizes his untranslatable masterwork, his early use of narrative photography, and his influence on other important world writers, including Juan Rulfo and José María Arguedas. And of course he portrays Nagaoka’s incredible nose, the deformedly large appendage that determined his life path. Read excerpts at Two Lines Online and World Literature Today, read about the book in the New York Times, or read an interview on Molossus. The New York Times calls Bellatin “…one of the leading voices in experimental Spanish-language fiction.” “Mario Bellatin has indisputably become one of the literary stars of the Latin American scene.” —Radar Libros (Argentina) “One of the most original figures of recent Latin American fiction.” —ABC (Spain) “Bellatin’s unusual narrative world doesn’t need to exceed the conventional limits of the short novel in order to take possession of mind of the reader, who’s left seduced by the turbid and convulsive beauty of his stories.” —El País (Spain) Mario Bellatin has published dozens of novellas on major and minor publishing houses in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. His English-language translations include Beauty Salon (City Lights, 2010) andChinese Checkers: Three Fictions (Ravenna Press, 2009). His current projects include Los Cien Mil Libros de Bellatin, his own imprint dedicated to publishing 1,000 copies each of 100 of his books. David Shook is a poet and writer in Los Angeles, where he editsMolossus and Phoneme Media. His debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON MAY 7, 2013.

The Mango Bride (New American Library) Two women, two cultures, and the fight to find a new life in America, despite the secrets of the past... Banished by her wealthy Filipino family in Manila, Amparo Guerrero travels to Oakland, California, to forge a new life. Although her mother labels her life in exile a diminished one, Amparo believes her struggles are a small price to pay for freedom. Like Amparo, Beverly Obejas--an impoverished Filipina waitress--forsakes Manila and comes to Oakland as a mail-order bride in search of a better life. Yet even in the land of plenty, Beverly fails to find the happiness and prosperity she envisioned. As Amparo works to build the immigrant's dream, she becomes entangled in the chaos of Beverly's immigrant nightmare. Their unexpected collision forces them both to make terrible choices and confront a life-changing secret, but through it all they hold fast to family, in all its enduring and surprising transformations. "Writing with sensitivity and humor, Marivi Soliven creates a brilliantly detailed picture of Philippine life at home and in America in this panoramic story of one Manila family."--Drusilla Campbell, author of When She Came Home Marivi Soliven has taught creative writing at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, the Ayala Museum and the University of California at San Diego. Short stories and essays from her fifteen books have appeared in anthologies and textbooks on creative writing. She was awarded a Hedgebrook writing residency in August 2012 for her work on The Mango Bride and its advocacy of women’s issues. Prior to publication, this novel won the Grand Prize for the Novel in English at the 2011 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippine version of the Pulitzer Prize. You can reach her online at www.facebook.com/marivi-soliven, www.marivisoliven.com, and http://marivisoliven.blogspot.com. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON MAY 4, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/%5Bmodel%5D-239

A Guide To Being Born (Riverhead Books) We are honored and excited to have Ramona Ausubel back for another book launch.  We hosted the launch for her stunning debut novel, NO ONE IS HERE EXCEPT ALL OF US, which was hailed by The New Yorker as "An absorbing and unpredictable novel . . . Ausubel’s original voice combines fresh, clear observation.”  Join us to hear stories from her new collection, which is already gretting great buzz. “Ausubel has a gift of language so rich that even the most mundane events are invested with poetry, and many of her characters are in need of all the poetry they can muster.”--Kirkus “These stories reminded me of branches full of cherry blossoms: fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly.  I eagerly read from one story to the next.”--Aimee Bender Whimsically beautiful and delightfully strange, A GUIDE TO BEING BORN charts the life cycle from Birth to Motherhood to Death.  Each of the eleven stories is organized around the stages of life—birth, gestation, conception, love—and the transformations that happen as people encounter deeply altering life events: falling in love, becoming parents, approaching the end of life.  Reminiscent of Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, Ausubel’s imagination and humor are deeply moving and provocative, allowing readers to see the familiar world in new ways. Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She was a finalist for the Pushcart Prize. Photo by Teo Gosse THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MAY 2, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/%5Bmodel%5D-237

MARBLE SEASON (Drawn & Quarterly) Join beloved cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez (LOVE & ROCKETS) as he launches his new D+Q http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781770460867