Skylight Books Podcast Series

A Rhumba in Waltz Time (Five Star) Mystery novelist Robert S. Levinson (The Traitor in Us All) returns to Skylight to launch his latest novel, A Rhumba in Waltz Time, set in Depression-era Hollywood. "Sharp-edged noir... Blanchard [is] a character Chandler would recognize." --Publishers Weekly "More fun than peeking through keyholes in the Golden Age of Hollywood before World War II. . . a nostalgic, wisecracking, action-packed romp." --Joseph Wambaugh THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 8, 2011.

Twin Cities (Penguin) California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes returns to Skylight to read and sign her new poetry collection, Twin Cities. Carol Muske-Dukes is the current Poet Laureate of California and a professor at the University of Southern California. She is also a co-editor of two anthologies and an author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two essay collections.  She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. Her work appears everywhere from the New Yorker to L.A. Magazine and she is anthologized widely, including in Best American Poems, 100 Great Poems by Women and many others.  She is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.  She has received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 7, 2011.

Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving (HarperCollins) Novelist and poet Dan Fante will discuss and sign his new family memoir Fante, covering the lives of his Italian-born grandfather, his famous-writer father John Fante (Ask the Dust), and his own life, writing, and personal struggles. "If writing is fighting, then Dan Fante goes fifteen rounds and stays standing. This is a fascinating story about two hard-edged men, survival and the passion to live and to write."--Michael Connelly Dan Fante is the son of novelist John Fante. He was born and raised in Los Angeles. At nineteen he hitchhiked across the country, eventually ending up in New York City where he was a cab driver for seven years and held a hundred other jobs in order to survive. Fante battled with alcoholism for many years and was arrested many times for his numerous stupidities. After getting sober, and in hope of remaining permanently indignant, Fante took up writing novels in his mid-forties. Today Dan Fante is sober and lives in Los Angeles with his wife Ayrin and his six-year old son Michelangelo Giovanni Fante. Fante is the author of the novels 86’d, Chump Change, Mooch, Spitting Off Tall Buildings, the short story collection Short Dog; two books of poetry, and the plays “The Boiler Room” and “Don Giovanni.” He continues to write every day. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS SEPTEMBER 2, 2011.

The Fire in Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries (White Crane Books) Selected contributors will read from their pieces in the important new anthology The Fire in Moonlight, including anthology editor Mark Thompson, Stuart Timmons, associate editor Richard Neely, Allen Page, David Cohen, Trebor Healey, Michael David, and Ian MacKinnon (schedule permitting). The most valuable possession a people have is their story...their history. Many years in the making, with over fifty contributors from around the world, Fire in the Moonlight is the first anthology of its kind. Beginning with Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter in the nineteenth century and moving through the liberation movements of the late twentieth, Fire in the Moonlight speculates far into the twenty-first. It offers a timely compendium of culture wisdom, provocative wit and challenging sensuality. This collection gives witness to a groundbreaking movement that painstakingly emerged from the Gay Liberation era. Rooted in the history of radical visionaries, this little known, essential community informs the modern world with new meaning, offering fresh definitions of faith, identity, purpose and gender. Fire in the Moonlight is a series of personal reflections on who the Radical Faeries are, where they've been and where they are going: Radical Faeries in their own words. It is about how a movement has changed lives--and how Radical Faeries contribute to healing a fractured Earth. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS AUGUST 13, 2011.

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (Faber & Faber) Simon Reynolds, one of Skylight's favorite music critics (and the author of Rip It Up and Start Again), will discuss and sign his new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. "Peering deeply into pop’s ever-expanding history and the technology that makes every part of it eternally accessible all at the same time, Reynolds wonders if culture can survive in conditions of limitlessness. . . . A restless, omnivorous intellectual, Reynolds roams far and wide. . . . His book is crammed with entertaining arguments." --The Telegraph (UK) "Retromania deserves to be very widely read." --The Observer (UK) Simon Reynolds is the author of seven books including Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 and Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (a/k/a Generation Ecstasy). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, The Wire, and Slate, among other publications. Born in London, Reynolds now lives in Los Angeles. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 31, 2011.

Memoirists and novelists James Brown (This River), Seth Greenland (Shining City), Diana Wagman (Skin Deep), and Leslie Schwartz (Angels Crest) will discuss the art and craft of fiction versus narrative nonfiction, in a panel discussion moderated by Meghan Daum (Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House).  This is sure to be a fascinating discussion among terrific local writers, and should not be missed! James Brown is the author of several novels, including Lucky Town, and the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries, and This River.  He received a Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  His work has appeared in numerous publications, including GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine.  Brown teaches in the MFA Program at Cal State San Bernardino. Seth Greenland is the author of the novels The Bones, Shining City, and The Angry Buddhist (Spring 2012). He was one of the original bloggers on the Huffington Post. www.sethgreenland.com Leslie Schwartz is the author of two novels, Jumping the Green, which won the James Jones Award for best first novel, and Angel’s Crest which was an L.A. Times Bestseller, a Book Sense 76 pick and was translated into 13 languages. She is the founder of a literary magazine: Charlotte: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and Art. Her second novel, Angel’s Crest has been adapted for the screen and debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. She is currently at work on her third book, a collection of personal essays. Diana Wagman is the author of three novels.  Her second, Spontaneous, won the PEN West Award for Fiction.  Her short stories have been published in Black Clock, Electric Literature and elsewhere.  She has a personal essay in this summer's Colorado Review and often writes opinion pieces for the Los Angeles Times. Meghan Daum is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times and the author, most recently, of the memoir Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House. She has contributed to numerous magazines and to public radio programs such as Marketplace and Morning Edition. She is also the author of the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Misspent Youth. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 6, 2011.

Slake Issue #3 Contributors to the third issue of this great Los Angeles literary journal will read from their selected pieces! We're pleased to welcome the following readers, who will be reading their work: Hillel Aron Lucy Engleman Jim Greer Ernest Hardy Paul Sbrizzi John Waldman THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 21, 2011.

Other People We Married (FiveChapters Books) Brooklyn-based author Emma Straub reads her much buzzed-about short story collection, Other People We Married. “It is rare that I will love every story in a collection but I did love each of the twelve stories in this collection both individually and also as a whole collection with a distinctive shape. Each story was intimate and engaging and really, really clean. I never found a word or idea out of place, nothing that pulled me from the stories or the people and places borne of Straub’s imagination.”–Roxane Gay, HTMLGIANT “These quiet epiphanies in Straub’s stories place her in the company of Beattie and Moore, and the voices she creates are contemporary. When I finished reading this exquisite collection, I flipped back to the beginning of the book and stared at the table of contents. The book was suddenly heavier in my hands—suddenly filled with the weight of all these character’s silent fantasies, side-thoughts and careful revelations. Other People We Married is a captivating first collection of short stories for this writer; I look forward to her future work.” –Bracha Goykadosh, The Rumpus Emma Straub is the author of the short story collection Other People We Married and the forthcoming novel Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Slate, and Tin House, among many other journals. She lives in New York City and on Twitter @emmastraub. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 27, 2011.

Compression & Purity (City Lights Books) Poet Will Alexander returns to Skylight Books to read and sign his new poetry collection, Compression & Purity. "Born in South Central Los Angeles, and a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Alexander, who got his start publishing in Clayton Eshleman's groundbreaking journal "Sulfur" in 1981, is vastly under-appreciated--an important avant-garde poet, who deserves a wider audience." -- Huffington Post "Compression & Purity works well as an introduction to Alexander's black surrealist oeuvre while still engaging and challenging his longtime readers. Though emotionally cold and detached, the poems more than make up for it with a genuine love of language and its power to effect change." --The San Francisco Bay Guardian Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal Callaloo in 1999. Author of ten books (including ABOVE THE HUMAN NERVE DOMAIN, COMPRESSION & PURITY, EXOBIOLOGY AS GODDESS, and TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD), Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JUNE 25, 2011.

The Rattling Wall Contributors to this exciting new literary journal will read from their included work! Readers and authors include: James Greer Lou Mathews Jessica Garrison Kathleen Tyler Lisa Giaffo Find out more about this new Los Angeles based journal at: http://therattlingwall.com/ THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JUNE 23, 2011.