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Moto Beach Classic 2026 — Huntington Beach

Coming Soon

47 Gathering

14 days away

Moto Beach Classic 2026 — Huntington Beach

In 14 days · Oct 17 Bolsa Chica State Beach, Huntingto…

Flat track racing on the sand. Custom motorcycles gleaming in the Pacific sun. And a crowd that knows the difference between a tracker and a scrambler, even if most of them rode here in an SUV. The Moto Beach Classic is a free, family-friendly motorsport festival on Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach — organized by Roland Sands Design and built around the Super Hooligan TT flat track races. Beyond the racing: custom motorcycle displays, e-bike demos, stunt shows, art installations, vendors, food, and live entertainment. The whole thing runs 10 AM to 6:30 PM with the Pacific Ocean as the backdrop. October 17, 2026. Bolsa Chica State Beach, Huntington Beach, CA. Free admission. This is the event that makes people who don't ride motorcycles start thinking about riding motorcycles. That's the point.

Alexander Maksik w/ Scott Burton, "Passengers"

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16 days away

Alexander Maksik w/ Scott Burton, "Passengers"

Oct 19, 2026 ✨ New Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Anyone who has moved far enough from home knows the strange arithmetic of it: the further you get, the more of yourself you have to leave behind as collateral. Maksik writes people in transit - between countries, between marriages, between the person they were and whoever is about to be issued the passport - and he writes them without the consolation most novels offer at the end. The new one puts strangers in motion together and refuses to make them friends. Burton joins him in conversation, which at Skylight means a real back-and-forth rather than a script; the store has been running these long enough that the authors mostly stop performing about twenty minutes in. Forty chairs, poetry shelves at your shoulder, the roll-up door open to Vermont Avenue if the night is warm. The thing worth knowing is that Monday readings here draw the smallest and most serious crowd of the week, which is exactly why the questions are better. Free, RSVP requested. If you own a passport with a stamp you have never explained to your family, this one is addressed to you.

Alicia Malone w/ Ben Mankiewicz, "Murder at the Movies"

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17 days away

Alicia Malone w/ Ben Mankiewicz, "Murder at the Movies"

Oct 20, 2026 ✨ New Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

If you have ever stayed up past one in the morning because the host said something about a film you had never heard of and now you had to see it, you already belong to this. The two people who do that to you on Turner Classic Movies will be in a bookstore in Los Feliz, in a room with about forty chairs, talking about the place where old Hollywood meets actual murder - the real crimes the studios buried, and the pictures that kept circling them anyway. Malone wrote the book; Mankiewicz sits across from her, and anyone who has heard the two of them together knows it turns into argument quickly and affectionately. This is the crossover night: the classic-film people who can date a print by its title cards, sitting next to the true-crime people who know the Bugsy Siegel address by heart, discovering they have been the same audience all along. The store keeps a surprisingly deep film-criticism section a few feet from where they will be sitting. Go look at it before it starts. Free, RSVP, Tuesday evening.

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17 days away

John Stephens, "Age of Fury"

Oct 20, 2026 ✨ New Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

The kids who were handed a fat fantasy paperback at the right age did not read it so much as move into it, and they are adults now with the sequels still outstanding in their heads. Stephens writes that kind of book - the enormous, plot-dense, siblings-against-an-unfair-cosmos kind - and he came to it after a career writing television, which shows in the pacing and in how little patience he has for a slow chapter. The Pasadena crowd for this skews younger and more enthusiastic than the usual weeknight author event, which changes the texture of the questions entirely: fewer people asking about process, more people asking what happens to a particular character and refusing to accept a non-answer. Vroman's has been in business since 1894 and has the oldest bookstore charter in Southern California, and the second-floor room where this happens still has the feel of a place where the staff decide the programming rather than a publisher. Free, open to anyone, seven o'clock on a Tuesday. Bring the kid who will not stop talking about the first one, or come alone and admit it is for you.

Sally Hayden, "This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World"

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17 days away

Sally Hayden, "This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World"

Oct 20, 2026 ✨ New Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Most foreign correspondents write the cruelty because the cruelty is the story, and then spend the rest of their lives quietly unable to explain why they kept going back. Hayden has written the other half of it. She is the reporter who broke open what was happening in the Libyan detention centres - the book that came out of it won most of the prizes there are - and this one is about the goodness she kept finding in places where the reporting said there should be none. It is not a consoling book and it is not a cynical one, which is a narrow line to walk. The evening is co-presented with the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles, which tells you something about who will be in the room: the Irish community here is large, old and almost invisible to the rest of the city, and it turns out for its own writers. Free, on the Sunset Strip, a Tuesday at seven. Thirty chairs between the shelves. Come if you have ever wondered what the people who go there actually carry home.

Cal Hoffman in conversation with Penelope Ann Miller, "Judah Can't Tell"

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18 days away

Cal Hoffman in conversation with Penelope Ann Miller, "Judah Can't Tell"

Oct 21, 2026 ✨ New Free (RSVP) Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

The secret you kept as a child to protect an adult is the one that follows you longest. You learn early how to manage a room, and then you are forty and still doing it without noticing. Hoffman's novel sits inside a boy holding something he has decided nobody can be told, and it gets the arithmetic of that right - the small lies required to keep the big one standing. Miller joins him in conversation, which is a genuinely odd and good pairing: she has spent a career playing people with something withheld, from Carlito's Way to The Artist, and she reads a scene differently than a critic would. Wednesday evening on the Strip, free, RSVP requested, in a store that has been selling books to people who work in the industry since 1975 and treats a first novel with the same seriousness as a memoir by somebody famous. The staff recommendation cards here are handwritten and worth reading on their own. Thirty chairs between the shelves and no microphone worth speaking of, so sit close.

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18 days away

Barbara Kingsolver, "Partita"

Oct 21, 2026 ✨ New Ticketed Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 …

Some novels arrive and reorganise the argument the country is having with itself, and the person who wrote the last one to do that is coming to Pasadena. Demon Copperhead put Appalachia and the opioid years in front of readers who had been comfortably ignoring both, won the Pulitzer, and sold in numbers that novels are not supposed to reach any more. The new book is a different swing entirely, and she will talk about it in a church hall rather than a bookstore because the bookstore cannot hold the people who want in. Worth knowing before you buy: this one is explicitly a no-signing event, so come for the talk and not for the autograph line. That is the trade Vroman's makes when the author is this big - you get a real hour of her thinking instead of ninety minutes of queue. Kingsolver in conversation is unhurried and slightly combative about politics in a way her prose only hints at. Ticketed, Wednesday evening, several hundred seats on Colorado Boulevard. The kind of night you remember having gone to.

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20 days away

Rigoletto

Oct 23, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

A father would burn the world down to protect his daughter. In Verdi's hands that love becomes one of the most devastating things ever set to music, and it spares nobody in the room. The story follows a court jester whose bitter tongue and hidden, ferocious devotion set a curse in motion he cannot call back. It also contains melodies so famous you will recognize them the instant they rise, even if you have never sat through an opera in your life — which is the trapdoor, because by the time you place the tune you are already inside the tragedy. A baritone in the title role, the symphony live in the pit, the whole overwhelming machinery of grand opera aimed straight at your chest. Only three performances exist. If you have always meant to try opera, this is the one. Go with anyone who has ever loved someone enough to be frightened by it.

Gorillaz — The Mountain Tour at Kia Forum

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12 Gathering

21 days away

Gorillaz — The Mountain Tour at Kia Forum

Oct 24, 2026 Kia Forum, 3900 W Manchester Blvd,…

Four animated musicians who do not exist have somehow outlasted half the bands who do — and now they are bringing a mountain to Inglewood. Gorillaz play the Kia Forum on October 24, 2026, touring behind their ninth studio album with a show that collapses the line between concert, art installation, and fever dream. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's virtual band has spent two decades proving that a cartoon can headline an arena if the songs hit hard enough, and the live show has always been the proof — a full band translating what should be impossible into something that shakes the floor. Little Simz and Deltron 3030 open, which means the evening starts strong before it gets strange. The Kia Forum at 3900 West Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood holds 17,500 for concerts. Doors open at 7:30 PM. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. If you have ever wanted to see a gorilla play bass in person, this is the closest you will get, and it will be enough.

Ben Ehrenreich w/ Sesshu Foster, "Hold Still"

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23 days away

Ben Ehrenreich w/ Sesshu Foster, "Hold Still"

Oct 26, 2026 ✨ New Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

This city does not let you grieve it properly, because it keeps rebuilding over the part you were grieving. A block you loved becomes a block you cannot find. Ehrenreich writes Los Angeles with that specific ache - the desert underneath the lawn, fire season as a fact of character rather than weather - and putting him across from Sesshu Foster is the real reason to come. Foster has been writing East LA for decades, from the inside, in poems that treat Boyle Heights as a civilisation rather than a neighbourhood being discovered. Two writers who love the same city from opposite ends of it, arguing gently in a Los Feliz back room on a Monday night. It is the kind of conversation this city almost never stages and that nobody bothers to record. The detail the regulars know: Skylight's Los Angeles shelf is to the left as you come in, and it is the best-curated collection of local writing in the county, out-of-print titles included. Arrive twenty minutes early and read the spines. Free, RSVP requested.

Susan Orlean discusses "Joyride: A Memoir"

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23 days away

Susan Orlean discusses "Joyride: A Memoir"

Oct 26, 2026 ✨ New Ticketed First Congregational Church of Los…

Thirty years of writing about orchid thieves and taxidermists and a Rin Tin Tin obsession, and the one subject she kept refusing was herself. That is what makes this book a genuine event rather than another stop on a tour. Orlean more or less invented the register that every magazine feature has borrowed since - deadpan curiosity about a person who cares far too much about one small thing - and the memoir turns that instrument around on her own life, including the drinking and the divorce and the newsroom she came up in. She is also, in person, funnier than the prose lets on. Note the venue, because it is not the bookstore: this one is at the big church on Commonwealth, which Book Soup uses for the handful of authors whose rooms run into the hundreds, and it is ticketed. Worth the ticket for the Q and A alone - she answers like a reporter, with specifics, and tends to ask the questioner something back. A Monday night in a cathedral-sized room on the edge of Koreatown. Not a bad way to spend the worst night of the week.

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

Daily

24 days away

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

Every day · Next Oct 27 2910 La Jolla Village Dr, La Jolla…

After 300,000 years on the clock, the Grim Reaper is finally done. The question is what happens when his daughter Diana discovers she would rather fall in love with life than carry on the family business. GRIM is a world premiere musical running at La Jolla Playhouse from October 27 through November 29 on the Mandell Weiss Theatre stage. It is irreverent, heartbreaking, and funny in the way only a show about death can be — because the people who made it clearly love being alive. The creative team has built something that feels like it was written for the person who ugly-cries at Pixar movies and then pretends they didn't. First look previews run October 27 through November 1, with the official opening on November 8. Performances run Tuesday through Sunday — the theatre is dark on Mondays. La Jolla Playhouse is the only authorized ticket seller. Subscriber packs of three or more shows start at $167 and include free parking and free exchanges. The Playhouse has premiered more than 30 productions that went on to Broadway, including Jersey Boys and Come From Away. GRIM is the kind of show you see before it leaves San Diego — and then tell people you were there first.

Monthly

24 days away

Coyotes Fiction Book Club

Monthly · Next Oct 27 ✨ New Free Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

The fourth Tuesday of the month, half past seven, ninety minutes, and nobody checks whether you finished it. That low bar is deliberate and it is why this one has lasted. A fiction book club in the back of a Los Feliz bookstore sounds like the most predictable thing in the city until you are in it and realise the people there are not performing their taste at each other - they are a dozen regulars who have been reading in the same room long enough to know who always defends the unlikeable narrator. Skylight shelves its fiction alphabetically and without genre walls, which tells you something about how the conversations go: the group will follow a thread from a translated novella into science fiction without anybody announcing a category change. It is free. It runs until nine. It happens whether eight people come or twenty. If you have been meaning for two years to find somewhere to talk about books out loud and have kept not doing it because every option looked like homework, this is the one with no homework. Fourth Tuesday, every month, ongoing.

Monthly

25 days away

Vroman's Fiction Reading Group

Monthly · Next Oct 28 ✨ New Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Reading alone is fine until you finish something enormous and realise there is nobody in your life you can say the last page to. That is the hole this fills, on the fourth Wednesday of every month, upstairs, for an hour, for free. No application, no reading list you have to have kept up with, no requirement beyond having read the book or being willing to sit there while people who did talk about it. October's is Lincoln in the Bardo, which is George Saunders at his strangest - a graveyard, a grieving president, a hundred and sixty-six narrators interrupting each other - and it is precisely the kind of book that works better out loud with other people than it does alone in a chair. The group skews across four decades of age, which is unusual and is the best thing about it; the retired teacher and the twenty-four-year-old disagree about the same paragraph and both turn out to be right. It is one hour. It meets whether or not you came last month. Second floor of the oldest bookstore in Southern California, every fourth Wednesday, indefinitely.

Marcy Kelly w/ Colin Campbell, "The Porcelain Heart: A Mother's Memoir of Unexpected Loss"

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25 days away

Marcy Kelly w/ Colin Campbell, "The Porcelain Heart: A Mother's Memoir of Unexpected Loss"

Oct 28, 2026 ✨ New Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Grief has a social problem: everyone wants to help for about three weeks, and then the casseroles stop and the thing itself is still there, permanent, and you learn to stop mentioning it at parties. Books like this exist for the part after the casseroles. Kelly has written about losing a child, and she is in conversation with Colin Campbell, who lost two and then wrote the book that a lot of bereaved parents in this city hand to each other. That pairing is the whole point and it is not accidental - these events function as something closer to a meeting than a reading, and the people who come are frequently carrying the same thing. It is not a comfortable evening and it is not meant to be. Free, Wednesday at seven, a narrow aisle in a bookstore on Sunset with thirty chairs in it. If you are the person everyone has stopped asking about, or you love someone who is, this is a room where you would not have to explain yourself.

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

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26 days away

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

Oct 29, 2026 ✨ New Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

You can stand at the corner of Spring and Third in downtown Los Angeles and not know that the ground under you was owned, in the 1860s, by a woman who had walked to California behind a wagon as someone else's property and then sued her way free in a Los Angeles courtroom. Biddy Mason bought that lot, became one of the wealthiest landowners in the city, founded the First African Methodist Episcopal church in her own home, and then was mostly written out of the story of how this place was built. Waite is a historian at Durham who works on slavery in the American West - the part of the history that the national narrative keeps placing somewhere else - and he has reconstructed her life from the court records. This is the rare local-history event that is genuinely news rather than nostalgia. Free, upstairs at Vroman's, a Thursday evening in Pasadena. There is a memorial wall to her downtown on the alley that bears her name, and almost nobody who walks past it knows what it commemorates. After this you will.

K-Ming Chang w/ Carribean Fragoza, "Needlemouth"

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26 days away

K-Ming Chang w/ Carribean Fragoza, "Needlemouth"

Oct 29, 2026 ✨ New Free Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Families pass down stories the way they pass down illnesses - unevenly, without explanation, and usually to the person least equipped to carry them. Chang writes that inheritance as something closer to body horror than to memoir: grandmothers who will not stay dead, daughters who grow teeth where teeth should not be, Taiwanese myth bleeding into American suburbia. She is one of the genuinely strange voices in American fiction right now and she is still young enough that the room will be small. Fragoza across from her is the reason to prioritise this one over the rest of the week: she writes South El Monte with the same willingness to let the uncanny in, and the two of them put Taiwanese-American and Chicana literature in the same conversation, which almost never happens on a stage in this city. Free, Thursday at seven, back room at Skylight, forty folding chairs. If you have ever felt that your family's stories were slightly haunted and that nobody else would believe you, this is the room.

Portland Book Festival 2026 — Portland, OR

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24 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 30 days away

Portland Book Festival 2026 — Portland, OR

Every day · Next Nov 2 1219 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 972…

Portland doesn't have a literary scene. Portland is a literary scene — a city where the world's largest independent bookstore employs more people than some towns, where poets perform to sold-out rooms, where the kid at the coffee shop is reading Borges without irony. The Portland Book Festival is the annual proof, and in 2026 it expands for the first time into a full week: November 2 through 8, stretching across the South Park Blocks, the Portland Art Museum, McMenamins Mission Theater, Mississippi Studios, and Lan Su Chinese Garden. The main gathering on November 7 fills the South Park Blocks with more than 100 local, regional, and nationally acclaimed authors — readings, panels, pop-up writing workshops, a massive book fair, and, because this is Portland, food trucks parked on every corner. But the real expansion is in the surrounding days: evening events at music venues and restaurants, cross-disciplinary programming that pairs authors with live music and visual art, culinary experiences built around books about food, and late-night programming that turns what used to be a single-day book fair into a cultural festival with literature at its center. If you're the kind of person who keeps a running list of books you want to read that's longer than any list of books you've actually finished — who gets unreasonably excited when a favorite author announces a new title, who has talked about starting a novel but never quite has — this is the week where your people gather. The Oregon Symphony and Mississippi Studios provide the soundtrack. Lan Su Chinese Garden provides the setting for conversations that feel like they're happening in a novel rather than at a festival. The South Park Blocks provide the November air that makes holding a warm cup of coffee while carrying three new books feel like the only correct way to spend a Saturday. What to know before you go: Portland in November is gray, wet, and beautiful. Bring a rain jacket and a tote bag large enough for impulse buys at the book fair. Powell's City of Books is a fifteen-minute walk from the main festival grounds and is the obvious pre- or post-festival pilgrimage. Events range from free to ticketed. Full schedule at literary-arts.org. The Portland Book Festival is the Pacific Northwest's largest literary event, and its expansion to a full week is itself a statement: that books are not a niche interest but a way of moving through the world, and that the people who organize their lives around words deserve more than an afternoon.

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