My Hollywood (Knopf)

Acclaimed Los Angeles novelist Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here) will read from and sign her long-awaited novel My Hollywood -- her first in ten years!

"Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson's latest is well worth the wait." --Publishers Weekly

Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of the Chicago Tribune.
She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila
Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude (Harper Perennial)

Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind the Pollacks and Alternadad, will discuss and sign his new memoir, Stretch.

"Neal Pollack has a well documented history of putting himself into
ridiculous positions, but never so literally… If Eat, Pray, Love had
been written by a sweaty, aging, male smartass, then that book might be
called Stretch, and Elizabeth Gilbert would be named Neal Pollack." —John Hodgman

Neal Pollack is the author of the bestselling memoir Alternadad and several acclaimed books of satirical fiction, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature and the rock-n-roll novel Never
Mind The Pollacks. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, Salon.com, Slate.com, and many other magazines and websites. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

Citrus County (McSweeney's) by Brandon; The People of Paper (McSweeney's hardcover, Houghton Mifflin paperback) by Plascencia

John Brandon will read from and sign his acclaimed new novel, Citrus County, with special guest Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper!

"With Citrus County John Brandon joins the ranks of writers like Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Mary Robison and Tom Drury, writers whose wild flights feel more likely than a heap of what we’ve come to expect from literature, by calmly reminding us that the world is far more startling than most fiction is.”  —New York Times Book Review (cover review)

John Brandon was raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. During the writing of this book he worked at a Frito-Lay warehouse and a Sysco warehouse. During the revising he was the John & Renee Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at University of Mississippi. His favorite recreational activity is watching college football. His first book was Arkansas, a novel.

Salvador Plascencia is the author of the novel The People of Paper,
which was named a best book of the year by San Francisco Chronicle, The
Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, and Boldtype. The novel  has been
translated into a dozen languages. His fiction and reviews have
appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2010,
Poets and Writers named Plascencia one of the Fifty of the Most
Inspiring Authors in the World.

Termite Parade by Mohr; The Orange Eats Creeps by Krilanovich (both published by Two Dollar Radio)

Joshua Mohr, whose last novel (Some Things That Meant the World to Me) was a staff favorite, and Grace Krilanovich, whose debut novel (The Orange Eats Creeps) is the only one to be excerpted twice in Black Clock, will read from and sign their new novels!

Praise for Termite Parade:
"The book is similar to Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment': the most crucial action serves as a portal to and wellspring for the various psychologies of its characters. But Mohr's storytelling is so absorbing that Termite Parade does not read like an analytical rumination; if he is examining the very nature of these characters under a microscope, he at least lets the specimens speak for themselves." --San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for The Orange Eats Creeps:
"A 'vampire' novel as Celine might have written, with dashes of Blake and
Burroughs: hallucinatory, poetic, passionate, excessive, sexually charged,
hardcore in all the best senses of the word. Twilight this is not." --Steve
Erickson

Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be excerpted twice in Black Clock.

Joshua Mohr is the author of the novel Some Things that Meant the World to Me, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and one of Oprah Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009. His second novel, the newly released Termite Parade, has been called "No small achievement" by The New York Times Book Review. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as 7×7, the Bay Guardian, Zyzzyva, The Rumpus, Other Voices, the Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades, among many others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing. Please visit him at joshuamohr.net.

So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems by Moldaw (Etruscan Press); Masque by Byrne (Tupelo Press)

Poets Carol Moldaw and Elena Karina Byrne will read and sign their recent poetry collections.

Carol Moldaw’s most recent book, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems was published in the spring of 2010 by Etruscan Press. She is the author of four other books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through the Window, Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken from the River, as well as a novel, The Widening. Her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. It has also been anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Moldaw lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and daughter. In the spring of 2011 she will be the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.

Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance teacher, editor, collage artist, Poetry Consultant/Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a reviewer for ForeWord's Clarion Reviews and Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. Forthcoming in Now Culture, Blackbird, Chaparral, Drunken Boat, and The Kenyon Review, her publications include 2009 Pushcart Prize XXXIII Best of the Small Presses, Best American Poetry 2005, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, APR, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, The Journal, Ploughshares, Agni, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, Verse and Volt. Books include The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press/Tupelo Press 2002), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008) and the forthcoming  Burnt Violin (poetry, 2011); works in progress include Voyeur Hour (poetry chapbook) and Beautiful Insignificance (essays).

Half Upon a Time (Aladdin)

A launch party for local author James Riley and his first book, a middle readers fairy tale mash-up called Half Upon a Time!

Life's no fairy tale for Jack. After all, his
father's been missing ever since that incident with the beanstalk and
the giant, and his grandfather keeps pushing him to get out and find a
princess to rescue. Who'd want to rescue a snobby, entitled princess
anyway? Especially one that falls out of the sky wearing a shirt that
says "Punk Princess," and still denies she's royalty. In fact, May
doesn't even believe in magic. Yeah, what's that about? May does need
help though -- a huntsman is chasing her, her grandmother has been
kidnapped, and Jack thinks it's all because of the Wicked Queen . . .
mostly because May's grandmother might just be the long-lost Snow White.
Jack and May's thrillingly hilarious adventure combines all the classic
stories -- fractured as a broken magic mirror -- into one epic novel for
the ages.

Photo of the author by Maarten de Boer.

Strange Cargo

Nine alumni of the PEN Center USA's Emerging Voices fellowship who have been published in the Emerging Voices anthology Strange Cargo will read from their selected pieces. Janet Fitch (White Oleander), who wrote the anthology's introduction, will introduce the event!

PEN Center USA's
Emerging Voices is a literary fellowship program that aims to provide
new writers, who lack access, with the tools they will need to launch a
professional writing career.  Over the course of the year, each Emerging
Voices fellow participates in a professional mentorship hosted Q&A
evenings with prominent local authors, a series of Master classes
focused on genre, and two public readings.

Janet Fitch is the author of the novels White Oleander and Paint
It Black.  Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals
such as Los Angeles Noir, Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Black
Warrior Review. She teaches creative writing in the MPW program at USC, and is writing a novel set during the Russian Revolution. Photo credit: Claudia Kunin.

Natashia Deón is a 2010 Bread Loaf Scholarship recipient, PEN Emerging Voice Fellow, Highlights Foundation Scholarship recipient, and award-winning screenwriter. She is penning her debut novel, The Spinning Wheel, a dark journey of three outcast women who, on the eve of the Civil War, are fighting the battle of their lives. Deón is a California native, practicing attorney and the first generation of her family to be born outside of East Tallassee, Alabama, since American slavery.

Cara Chow was a 2001 Emerging Voices Fellow. "Fall Dance" will appear in the novel Bitter Melon in Spring 2011, published by Egmont USA. A native of Hong Kong, Cara grew up in the Richmond District of San Francisco, where this story is set. She currently resides in the Los Angeles area with her husband and son. 

Davin Malasarn is a writer and microbiologist from Sherman Oaks, California. In 2008, he was an Emerging Voices Fellow, a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest, and first runner-up in Opium Magazine’s 500-Word Memoir Contest. Two of his stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His fiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Night Train and other literary journals, and he is a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Pireeni Sundaralingam was born in Sri Lanka and is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (U. Arkansas Press, 2010).  Her own poetry has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today and The Progressive, as well as anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008). It has been translated into 5 languages and been published in Sweden, Ireland, England, and the U.S. A cognitive scientist, Pireeni
has given papers on the connections between the human brain and poetry at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (San Francisco) and Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). She was a PEN Emerging Voice Fellow in 2003. Photo credit: Ibarionex Perello.

Monica Carter lives in Los Angeles, California, and is a 2010 Emerging Voices Fellow. Her work will appear in the forthcoming issue of Pale House II. She is the owner and curator of her own website dedicated
to international literature, Salonica World Lit. Ms. Carter is working on Eating the Apple, a psychological novel set in Manhattan in the 1930s.

Marytza Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California. She was a 2008 Emerging Voices Fellow and received a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in 2010. She writes about Latinas, voodoo and animals. http://www.marytzakrubio.com/

Sylvia Sukop writes about art, faith, community and other good causes. Her memoir, Difficult Light, is framed by the death of her
youngest brother, Alex, within an intentional community of organic farmers in eastern Washington. The memoir grew out of an extensive series of photographs documenting Alex’s life and is in part a meditation on the role of photography in intimacy, loss and memory. A first-generation American raised in rural Pennsylvania, Sylvia is a graduate of Bucknell University and of NYU/International Center of Photography, and a grateful recipient of the 2009 Emerging Voices Fellowship. She co-founded MMIX Los Angeles Writers with her EV
cohort in 2009, and is a contributing writer to Flaunt and Exposure magazines and the political blog The Huffington Post. 
Photo credit: Bonnie Kaplan.

Denise Uyehara is an award-winning performance artist, writer and playwright whose work has been presented in London, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vancouver and across the United States. She is the recipient of numerous recognitions of excellence which include a mid-career COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and funding from the Asian Cultural Council. She was also a Poets & Writers "Writer on Site" at Beyond Baroque and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her book Maps of City and Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara (Kaya Press) documents her recent works. Uyehara is a frequent lecturer at the University of California, Irvine and a founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls. She was a PEN Emerging Voice Fellow in 1999. http://www.deniseuyehara.com/. Photo credit: Jen Long.

Mehnaz Turner was born in Pakistan and raised in southern California.
She was a 2009 Emerging Voices Fellow.  Her poems have appeared in: The Journal of Pakistan Studies, Cahoots Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Asia Writes and An Anthology of California Poets. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection, Tongue-tied: A Memoir in Poems.

The Dandelion Clock (Tinfish Press)

Acclaimed Los Angeles poet Daniel Tiffany will read from and sign his latest collection, The Dandelion Clock.

"Each of the poems in The Dandelion Clock is a pearl strung together with music from the origin of human sounds. This book has the stillness of haiku and the raw power of Beowulf. Daniel Tiffany is a revolutionary poet." —Wang Ping

"Daniel Tiffany’s 'pocket rhapsodies' are gorgeously spring-loaded, micro-tuned, and aching with time, time lost, syllabic time, dreamtime, time the conqueror. The Dandelion Clock is a burning fuse and a wonderful book."  —Peter Gizzi

Daniel Tiffany has published translations of Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named one of the "Best Books of 2000" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2009). His first volume of poetry, Puppet Wardrobe, was published in 2006 by Parlor Press; a second book of poems, The Dandelion Clock, appeared from Tinfish Pess in 2010. His poems, which have won the Chicago Review Annual Poetry Prize, as well as the John Billings Fiske Prize, appear in journals including Tin House, Boston Review, and the Paris Review. His third book of poetry, Privado, is due to be published in 2011 by Action Books. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Vampires Don't Sleep Alone (Ulysses Press) by D.H. Altair and Elizabeth Barrial

When Werewolves Attack (Ulysses Press) by Del Howison

Del Howison (who also writes under the pseudonym D.H. Altair) and Elizabeth Barrial will discuss and sign their new books on handling encounters with supernatural creatures of the night! Vampires Don't Sleep Alone is a tongue-in-cheek dating guide for vampire-loving women (as well as an alternate history of vampires and their tribes), and When Werewolves Attack is a pocket field guide to identifying and avoiding attacks by werewolves. Get ready for Halloween early this year -- study up with tips from the experts!

Elizabeth Barrial is a freelance writer and the co-owner
of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, the world's first dark perfume house, whose
thematic focus is literature and gothic cultural anthropology.D.H.
Altair is the vampire nom de plume of Del Howison, a
three-time nominated Bram Stoker Award–winning editor and author. He has been
nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, a Rondo Hatton Award, and the Black Quill
Award. His own short stories have appeared in various anthologies throughout the
years and his tale "The Lost Herd" was converted into a script by Mick Garris
and filmed as the premiere episode of the NBC horror anthology series Fear
Itself.

Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius (Da Capo Press)

Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber will discuss and sign their new biography, Becoming Jimi Hendrix. They're also bringing an electric guitar to raffle off at the event, so be sure to buy your copy of the book here to get a raffle ticket! 

Steven Roby is the author of Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix and he worked for the Hendrix family as editor and publisher of the international Hendrix fanzine, Experience Hendrix. He lives in San Francisco.

Brad Schreiber is a journalist, author, and screenplay writer who has won numerous awards and fellowships from such organizations as the Edward Albee Foundation and the National Press Foundation. He lives near Los Angeles.

Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge (Chelsea Green Publishing)

Gordon Edgar will discuss life as a cheesemonger in San Francisco's Rainbow Grocery Cooperative and sign copies of his new irreverant and funny book Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge. Plus, there will be a cheese tasting! 

Gordon Edgar loves cheese and worker-owned co-ops, and has been combining both of these infatuations as a cheesemonger at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative in San Francisco for more than 15 years. Edgar has been a judge at cheese competitions, a board member for the California Artisan Cheese Guild, and, since 2002, has blogged at www.gordonzola.net. Surrounded by his vast and decaying collection of zines and obscure punk 7-inches, he lives in San Francisco with his girlfriend and their imaginary white miniature schnauzer.

Black Clock 12

Richard Rayner, Nina Revoyr, Samantha Dunn, Tod Goldberg, Paul Cullum, and Skylight's own Monica Carter -- six contributors to the latest issue of this great literary journal -- will read from their selected pieces.

Born in England, Richard Rayner now lives in Los Angeles. His books include the nonfiction book A Bright and Guilty Place, the memoir The Blue Suit and the novels The Cloud
Sketcher, L.A. Without a Map, and Murder Book. His work has appeared in
the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other publications.

Nina Revoyr is the author of three novels, including Southland, a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of 2003," and The Age of Dreaming, a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  Her new novel, Wingshooters, will be published in 2011. (photo of the author by Leslie Barton)

Samantha Dunn is the author of several books, including the novel Failing Paris and the memoir Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life. She teaches in the UCLA Writers Program.

Tod Goldberg is the author of seven books of fiction, including the
novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize, Fake Liar Cheat, and the popular Burn Notice series, as well as
the short story collections Simplify and, most recently, Other Resort
Cities. He lives in La Quinta, CA, where he directs UC-Riverside's low
residency MFA program in Creative Writing & Writing for the
Performing Arts.

Paul Cullum is a freelance writer living in the Silver Lake region of Los Angeles. He has written extensively for the L.A. Weekly, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Stop Smiling, Arthur, and hundreds of tiny magazines that pay comically little. His Los Angeles Times West Magazine story on the Mexican Midget Rodeo was anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing 2007, published by Houghton Mifflin.  His essay "Why I Hate Sports" is his first for Black Clock.

Monica Carter, a 2010 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow and 2010 Lambda Emerging LGBT Voices Fellow, has also been published in Pale Fire.  She is working on her novel, Eating the Apple, set in 1930s Manhattan, which tells the story of an aging, alcoholic lesbian writer caught in a love triangle.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon)

Local author and 5 Under 35 winner (for the short story collection Third Class Superhero) Charles Yu will read from and sign his debut novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Unvierse.

"[An] exhilarating blend of time travel and literary theory and family dynamics." --Wired.com

Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and he has also received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Mississippi Review, and the Mid-American Review, among other journals.  He lives in Los Angeles.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocodor from World War II to Hip Hop, the Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling Books)

Dave Tompkins will discuss and sign his fascinating history of the vocodor! The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

"How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love:
It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of
high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. ... [Tompkin's] biggest and
most perilous adventure in How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the
plunge deep into the throbbing radioactive heart of his own prose—a
hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy
Collins."
— New York Magazine

"Achieves what the best music writing does—it opens doors, tears off
tarps and digs in the dirt to reveal the stunning variety and potential
in popular music."
— The Nation 

Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently about hip-hop and popular music. His work has appeared in Vibe, The Village Voice, The Believer and Wax Poetics. As
a child growing up in North Carolina, he wrote stories about Mud Men,
shot football cards with his dad’s .38, and was forced into speech
therapy. His grandfather ate the microfilm, somewhere over Moscow.

Photo of the author by Michael Waring.

The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide to the Sustainable Food Revolution (Process)

Deborah Eden Tull will discuss and sign her new, simple, revolutionary guide to mindful, sustainable food shopping, planning, preparation, cooking, and eating in the city. The Natural Kitchen picks up where The Urban Homestead books leave off and brings the lessons of sustainable living into the kitchen, where the daily choices we make involving food have a profound impact both on our lives and the world at large.

Deborah Eden Tull is a sustainability consultant who has been traveling to, living in, or teaching about sustainable communities internationally for the last 17 years, including seven years as a monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center. She teaches workshops throughout Los Angeles County, and is certified in Permaculture Design, Bio-Intensive Organic Gardening, and Compost Education. Her approach to sustainable living is a unique combination of peace and environmentalism that emphasizes the interconnection between personal and planetary wellbeing.

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (Knopf)

James Ellroy returns to Skylight to discuss and sign his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse!

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. quartet -- The
Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz -- were
international bestsellers. American Tabloid was Time's Novel of the Year
in 1995; his memoir My Dark Places was Time's Best Book and a New York
Times Notable book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New
York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. He
lives on the coast of California. 

Photo of the author by Marion Ettlinger.

3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale (Exterminating Angel Press)

Musician Danbert Nobacon (Chumbawamba) and filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) will discuss and sign their for-adults illustrated fairy tale book 3 Dead Princes!

"This is a beautiful book. The illustrations are wonderful. It definitely rocks! I ought to know." —Iggy Pop

Danbert Nobacon, singer, songwriter, comedian, and “freak music legend” (sepiachord, Nov 2009), was a founding member of the anarchist punk rock band Chumbawamba. His career has been long (thirty years), wild, and always imaginative. Not to mention mischievous and political—he famously dumped a bucket of ice water over John Prescott, the British deputy prime minister, at an awards ceremony in London in 1998, to protest the Blair government’s treatment of striking dockworkers. He loves children and animals. This is his first book.

Alex Cox is best known for his filmmaking skills (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Revengers Tragedy, Searchers 2.0), his presentation of the BBC's Moviedrome, his writing for various magazines and newspapers, his books (X Films, 10,000 Ways to
Die), and his acting abilities. Now he's a book illustrator, and a damn good one, too. Who knows what will be next?  Also, he loves monsters.

The French Revolution (Soft Skull Press)

Matt Stewart will read and sign his whimsical new novel, loosely based on the titular uprising, and set in the much more local San Francisco.

The book was originally published in 3,700 tweets (@thefrenchrev).  We can guarantee that buying the book here will make for an easier reading experience.

Matt Stewart's debut novel, The French Revolution, has been called "wildly imaginative," "brilliant," and "an excellent achievement." He’s mildly infamous for releasing the novel on Twitter first. His stories have been published in Instant City, McSweeney's, Opium Magazine, and more, and he blogs for the Huffington Post. Grab his free French Rev iPhone app on matt-stewart.com.

Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (Free Press)

On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Hoover Dam, join Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times journalist and author Michael Hiltzik for a discussion and book signing of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century.

"[Colossus is a] detailed and vividly written study – destined to be the standard history for decades to come." --Washington Post

"With a runaway oil well fouling the Gulf of Mexico for weeks on end—and both government and industry seemingly helpless to stop it—Michael Hiltzik's Colossus, is a welcome reminder of the engineering genius that built America. Mr. Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, tells the Hoover Dam story in the grand tradition of David McCullough, who more or less invented the idea of popular and historically sophisticated books about stupendous engineering achievements.... Mr. Hiltzik clearly explains the technological and physical difficulties posed by the dam project, but he also fixes the endeavor in its time and captures the personalities of the people involved." --Wall Street Journal

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who has written about business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for three decades. Currently the Times’s business columnist, he has also served as a financial and political writer, an investigative reporter, and a foreign correspondent in Africa and Russia. His previous books are The Plot Against Social Security (2005), Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (1999), and A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julia Ward (1991).

Richard Yates (Melville House)

We're thrilled to have Tao Lin here for the first time, to read and sign his new novel, Richard Yates (yes, named after the famous author of Revolutionary Road). Several of his books have staff recommendations here, and we're really looking forward to this new one!

Tao Lin was born in 1983, and raised in Orlando, Florida. In 2007 Melville House published his first two works of fiction, the short story collection Bed, and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, simultaneously. And in 2008, published his poetry collection, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. It has been assigned
as a text book in several college-level psychology courses. In 2009,
Melville House published his novella Shoplifting From American
Apparel. His books have been translated into German, Spanish,
Japanese, Norwegian, and Serbian. He lives in Brooklyn.

Photo of the author by Noah Kalina.

Half a Life (McSweeney's)

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, will discuss and sign his heartbreaking memoir about how one outing in his father's Oldsmobile during his last month of high school resulted in the death of
a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author.

“Half a Life is the best anything I’ve read—novel, memoir, story—in a very long time. Incredibly, it’s also the most moving."  —David Lipsky, author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

“This book will break your heart. It’s a great and moving book about a boy becoming a man, and it belongs on the shelf with just a precious few others—The Catcher in the Rye, The Moviegoer, Joe Gould’s Secret. It should be read and re-read. It’s a treasure.”  —Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews and Sweet and Low

Darin Strauss is the best-selling author of Chang & Eng, The Real
McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim
Fellowship in fiction writing and -numerous other awards, Strauss’s
work has been translated into fourteen langauges, and published in over
twenty countries. He is a Clinical Associate professor of Writing at
New York University.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (HarperPerennial)

Sara Marcus will discuss and sign Girls to the Front, her new book on the fascinating history of Riot Grrrl.

The last great underground cultural movement of the pre-Internet age, Riot Grrrl revolutionized girlhood itself. In the early 1990s, young women were realizing that the equality they’d been promised was still elusive, and a newly resurgent right wing was turning feminism into the ultimate dirty word. Riot Grrrl roared into the spotlight in 1991: an uncompromising movement of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. They published zines, founded local groups, and organized national conventions, while fiercely prophetic punk bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill helped spread the word across the US and to Canada, Europe, and beyond.

Sara Marcus is a writer and musician living in New York. She has written for TimeOut New York, The Advocate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, UtneReader, and Heeb, where she was the politics editor from 2002-2007. Marcus received her MFA from Columbia University.

Take Me Home (Harper)

Brian Leung, author of Lost Men and World Famous Love Acts will return to Skylight to read and sign his latest novel, Take Me Home.

Praise for Lost Men:
"This is a novel of enormous wisdom and emotional weight." --Dan Chaon

Praise for World Famous Love Acts:
"If it's possible to be dubbed a "master storyteller" this early in one's career,
then Leung's enchanting debut short story collection most assuredly has earned
him the title." --Booklist

Brian Leung is the author of the novel Lost Men and the collection World Famous Love Acts. He was born and raised in San Diego County, and currently lives in Louisville, KY, where he is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville.

Photo of the author by John Nation.

Her and Me and You (Simon Pulse)

A launch party for local young adult author Lauren Strasnick and her second YA novel, Her and Me and You!

Lauren Strasnick grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, now lives in
Los Angeles, and is a graduate of Emerson College and the California Institute of the Arts MFA Writing Program. She wrote her first short story, “Yours Truly, The Girls from Bunk Six,” in a cloth-bound 5x4 journal, in the
fifth grade. Simon Pulse published her first novel, Nothing Like You, in
October 2009.  Find out more at www.laurenstrasnick.com.

The Reversal (Little, Brown & Co.)

Michael Connelly returns to Skylight to read from and sign his new novel The Reversal, in which lawyer Mickey Haller and LAPD detective Harry Bosch reunite for another case!

Michael Connelly is the bestselling author of the Harry Bosch mystery novels as well as the recent #1 bestsellers The Lincoln Lawyer, The Brass Verdict, and The Scarecrow. He is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He divides his time between California and Florida.

Photo of the author by Miriam Berkley.

Here Comes Another Lesson: Stories (Free Press)

Stephen O'Connor will read from and sign new short story collection, Here Comes Another Lesson.

"The main lesson of this book is that there are still fiction writers out
there brave enough to take serious risks. For O'Connor, the risks pay
off lavishly. Here is a collection of great feeling, range and power." —Sam Lipsyte (The Ask)

Stephen O’Connor is the author of three previous books: Rescue (collection
of short fiction and poetry), Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (work of
memoir and social analysis), and Orphan Trains (narrative history). His
fiction, poetry, and journalism have appeared in The New England Review,
Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. O’Connor is
the recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from
Columbia University, the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists
and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society, and the DeWitt
Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. He has received a
BA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of California at
Berkeley, both in English Literature. He currently teaches at the MFA programs
of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence, and lives in New York City with his
wife and daughter.

Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (OR Books)

Eileen Myles will return to Skylight books to read from and sign her new novel, Inferno (A Poet's Novel). 

Set against the backdrop of New York in its punk heyday, Inferno is
the story of a female artist coming of age in the world of poetry, and
not only coming to terms with being an outsider, but embracing it, both
on a creative and sexual level.

"Eileen Myles debates her own self identity in a gruffly beautiful, sure voice of reason. Is she a 'hunk'? A 'dyke'? A 'female'? I’ll tell you what she is––damn smart! Inferno burns with humor, lust and a healthy dose of neurotic happiness." – John Waters

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 and soon began reading her poems publicly, taking workshops at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York’s East Village and publishing in little magazines, zines and larger journals such as Partisan Review and Paris Review. Her books of poems include Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree. With Liz Kotz, she co-edited the notorious The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, responding to the short-lived gay and lesbian publishing boom in the ’90s. Her first fiction was Chelsea Girls (1994), followed by Cool for You (a nonfiction novel) in 2000. She directed the writing program at the University of California at San Diego for five years, returning to New York in 2007. In San Diego she wrote the libretto for the opera Hell (composed by Michael Webster), performed in 2004-06. During that time she also wrote much of Inferno. For the last three decades she’s been writing reviews, articles, essays and blogs, most recently in Art Forum, Parkett, Vice, AnOther Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. Her essays were collected in The Importance of Being Iceland (2009). In 2010, the Poetry Society of American awarded Myles the Shelley Memorial Award. In the same year, she was the Hugo Writer at the University of Montana at Missoula. She lives in New York.

Kind of Blue (Oceanview Publishing)

Miles Corwin returns to Skylight to read from and sign his fourth book (and his first novel) Kind of Blue.

Miles Corwin spent the first years of his life living with his family in the Rosslyn Hotel, which his grandfather owned, located at 5th and Main streets in downtown Los Angeles, at the edge of Skid Row. He
graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara and received
an M.A. at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He spent more than 5 years as a Los Angeles County beach lifeguard. Corwin, a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of three non-fiction books:  The Killing Season, a national bestseller; And Still We Rise, the winner of the PEN West award for nonfiction and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and Homicide Special, a Los Angeles Times bestseller.  Kind of Blue is his first novel. Corwin lives in Altadena with his family and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Mary Ann in Autumn: A Tales of the City Novel (Harper)

Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City novels, returns to Skylight to read from and sign his latest, Mary Ann in Autumn!

"Perhaps
the most sublime
piece of popular literature America has ever produced … As
with the Beatles, everyone seems to like Maupin's Tales
– and, really, why would you want to find someone who
didn't?"
--Laura
Miller, The Salon.com
Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors

Armistead Maupin is the
author of the Tales of the City series, of which Mary Ann in Autumn is the
eighth book and which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City,
Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You and
Michael Tolliver Lives. Three television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and
Laura Linney were made from the first three Tales novels. Maupin is also the
author of Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener, the latter of which became a
feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. A stage musical version
of Tales of the City will have its world premiere at San Francisco’s American
Conservatory Theater in May 2011. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his
husband, Christopher Turner.

Photo of the author by Christopher Turner.