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Skylight Books 11 results for Skylight Books

Everything at Skylight Books — including past events

William T. Vollmann, "A Table For Fortune"

Coming Soon

4 days away

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William T. Vollmann, "A Table For Fortune"

In 5 days · Oct 12 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Some writers you read; this one you survive. Seven volumes on violence, a National Book Award, a career spent walking into places where the reporting could plausibly have killed him - and he keeps turning up at bookstores with almost no ceremony, reading in a flat voice from pages he seems faintly embarrassed by. That contrast is why people who care about American letters clear a Monday for this. There is no version of Vollmann that comes packaged. He answers questions longer than the questions deserve, goes down tangents about trains and about the people he met on them, and treats a room of forty as though it were a room of four hundred or of four. The Los Feliz regulars have learned to bring the book they most want signed rather than the newest one, because he will sign anything and talks about the old work with more heat than the new. Free, RSVP requested, back room, folding chairs. For a certain kind of reader this is the single most interesting thing happening in Los Angeles on the second Monday of October, and almost nobody outside that reader knows it is happening.

Brian Evenson w/ Nghiem Tran, "Phantom Limb"

Coming Soon

5 days away

Brian Evenson w/ Nghiem Tran, "Phantom Limb"

In 6 days · Oct 13 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

The books that got under your skin worst were never the ones with monsters in them. They were the ones where the body quietly stopped being reliable, where something was missing and the narrator could not say what. Evenson has spent thirty years writing in that exact register, and the people who love him love him the way you love a band nobody at work has heard of. He holds a World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award and still reads to rooms of forty in Los Feliz. This one is the long-awaited return to the world of Last Days, picking Kline back up after he dismantled an underground amputation cult and went to prison for it, now tangled with a splinter faction of the same church. Tran, across from him, is a Vietnam-born novelist whose debut landed on NPR's year-end list, which makes this a genuine pairing rather than a publicist's. If you have ever handed someone a paperback and said only that they should read the first thirty pages, this is your congregation, in person, free, on a Tuesday. Bring the beaten-up copy. He will sign it.

Designing Books for Babies with Jon Klassen and Jess Hannigan

Coming Soon

6 days away

Designing Books for Babies with Jon Klassen and Jess Hannigan

In 7 days · Oct 14 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

The book your kid makes you read for the fourteenth time is never the one you would have picked. It is almost always the one where the pictures are doing something the words refuse to confirm - a hat that is obviously stolen, an animal looking just slightly off to the left. Klassen built a Caldecott career on exactly that withheld joke, and tonight he and Hannigan talk about the actual craft of it: how you design a page for a person who cannot read, how much you can imply with an eyeline, why the funniest thing in a picture book is usually the thing nobody says out loud. This is the rare event that is genuinely for two audiences at once - the illustration and design people who study his negative space, and the parents who have the whole text memorised against their will. Skylight keeps a children's annexe next door, and the staff there will tell you which of his books survives the fortieth reading, which is a different and more useful list than the award list. Free, RSVP, seven o'clock, a Wednesday. Come whether or not you brought the kid.

Monthly

7 days away

Rabbit Hole Nonfiction Reading Club

Monthly · Next Oct 15 Free Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Reading the news alone all month is a way of slowly going mad, and the cure turns out to be ninety minutes in a room with a dozen people who read the same long difficult book and came to different conclusions about it. This is Skylight's politics, history and current-affairs club, and the name is doing honest work - the whole premise is the rabbit hole, the book that sends you looking things up at midnight. Third Thursday of every month, half past seven until nine, in the store. What makes it different from arguing on the internet is that everyone in the room has actually finished the thing, which removes about ninety per cent of the usual bad faith. The group is a mix of people who work in policy, people who teach, and people who simply read a great deal, and the disagreements stay civil because next month they will all be back in the same chairs. There is no cover charge and no vetting. If you have been carrying around an argument you have nowhere to put, bring it here. Third Thursday, monthly, indefinitely.

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

Coming Soon

12 days away

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

In 13 days · Oct 20 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.

Alexander Maksik w/ Scott Burton, "Passengers"

Coming Soon

11 days away

Alexander Maksik w/ Scott Burton, "Passengers"

In 12 days · Oct 19 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.

Ben Ehrenreich w/ Sesshu Foster, "Hold Still"

Coming Soon

18 days away

Ben Ehrenreich w/ Sesshu Foster, "Hold Still"

Oct 26, 2026 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.

Monthly

19 days away

Coyotes Fiction Book Club

Monthly · Next Oct 27 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.

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

Coming Soon

21 days away

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

Oct 29, 2026 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.

This Happened

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne w/ Special Guests, "What Feeds Below"

Today · Oct 7 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Everybody from a small town carries a version of it that nobody back home would recognise. The fields look different once you have left them; the quiet that felt like suffocation starts, at a distance, to feel like something you miss. Schlote-Bonne writes the Midwest from exactly that double position, and her debut is full of the kind of menace that does not announce itself - a basement, a hunger, a family that loves you in a way that costs something. She reads with guests she has not named in advance, which at a store like this usually means other debut writers from the same small-press orbit, the ones who have not been reviewed anywhere yet. That is the actual draw. You are in the room before the consensus forms. Skylight runs these in the back, under the skylight the store is named for, with the shelves rolled aside and the chairs too close together. Admission is free and they want an RSVP. A Wednesday in October is the emptiest night on this city's calendar, and this is forty people choosing to spend it listening to someone's first book out loud.

This Happened

Laleh Khadivi w/ Edan Lepucki, "Female Life on Planet Earth"

Oct 6, 2026 Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

Somewhere in a drawer you still have the notebook where you tried to explain yourself to yourself, and the sentences all came out sounding like someone else's. That gap between the life being lived and the language available to describe it is the whole subject of this night. Khadivi writes about women who are watched constantly and understood almost never, and she writes it in prose that refuses to make the watching comfortable. Lepucki is the right person across from her: a novelist who built her own career on the domestic detail nobody else thought worth recording. What happens in the back room at Skylight is not a reading in the dutiful sense. The authors talk, then the audience talks, and the questions go somewhere unguarded because only about forty folding chairs fit back there and everyone can see everyone. The regulars know to come early and sit near the poetry section, where the store cat has been known to settle on a stack of unsold hardcovers mid-sentence. Free, though they ask you to RSVP so they know how many chairs to unfold. Doors at seven on a Tuesday, which is the night this city has the least to offer.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

Portland Book Festival 2026 — Portland, OR

Daily

25 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 25 days away

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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.

Coming Soon

41 days away

Mark William Lewis

Nov 18 – Nov 19, 2026 Pappy & Harriet's, 53688 Pioneerto…

Songwriting stripped back to voice and guitar leaves nowhere to hide, and the writers who choose it anyway tend to be the ones with something specific to say rather than something general to gesture at. This is a quiet booking on a quiet night, which is exactly the kind of show the high desert does better than a city — no line, no crush, a room where the between-song silence is part of the performance. Wednesday in Pioneertown means locals rather than weekenders, and the audience out here has a long-established habit of showing up for whoever is booked regardless of whether they know the name. Music at 9:00 PM, past Yucca Valley. Half the reason people move to the Morongo Basin is that a room like this exists within driving distance and books something almost every night.

Minty Boi Presents: Boy2000 in Los Angeles

Coming Soon

56 days away

Minty Boi Presents: Boy2000 in Los Angeles

Dec 3, 2026 ✨ New El Cid, 4212 Sunset Blvd, Los Ange…

Thursday at six is a strange hour for a dance floor. It is also the only hour that lets in the kid who found this music down a two-in-the-morning rabbit hole and cannot legally be anywhere else in this city after dark. El Cid was built as a flamenco tablao. The stage is small, the walls are red, and the room still behaves like somewhere people came to watch rather than to be seen. Minty Boi books it like a living room instead of a club: lo-fi house, a little synthwave, breaks that sound like a VHS tape dubbed one generation too many times. By eight the light on the Sunset side has gone and nobody has looked at a phone in a while. All ages means somebody's older brother drove. It also means the floor is honest, because nobody on it is drunk enough to fake it. El Cid, 4212 Sunset Blvd. Thursday, December 3, 6pm to 10pm.

Monthly

3074 Gathering

5 days away

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Los Angeles Pinball League — Monthly Tournament

Monthly · Next Oct 13 Various venues, Los Angeles, CA

Somewhere in this city tonight there is a back room where the pinball never stopped — machines everyone assumed died with the arcades, lined up, lit up, and played for blood by people who know each ruleset cold. You thought it was nostalgia. They kept it a sport. Once a month the league runs a real tournament: matchplay, a new opponent and a random machine every round, points stacking across the night. It is IFPA-sanctioned, but that is not why the regulars come. A good table is the most honest machine there is. It does not care who you are, only whether you can read the ball. Here is what outsiders never expect: this crowd wants you to get good. Show up knowing only how to keep a ball alive and someone ranked will lean over between rounds and show you where the safe nudge is, when to let it drain on purpose. Venues rotate. Check the league's Facebook group and the IFPA calendar for this month's location. All-ages at most stops, 21+ at the bars.

LoL Worlds 2026 — Play-In Stage (Los Angeles)

Coming Soon

1445 Gathering

7 days away

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LoL Worlds 2026 — Play-In Stage (Los Angeles)

In 8 days · Oct 15 – Oct 18 Riot Games Arena, 12181 Bluff Cree…

Every region sends its dark horses, and most of them go home in the first week. That is what makes the opening stage the most nervous, least predictable stretch of the whole tournament. The Play-In Stage is where teams that did not walk in with a guaranteed bracket spot have to earn one, on foreign soil, against opponents they have only ever studied on video. Nothing is safe and nobody is comfortable. Upsets that reshape the entire championship happen here, in front of a few hundred people, before the broadcast audience has fully tuned in. Riot Games Arena is the tightest, loudest room in North American esports — small enough that crowd noise reaches the stage, close enough to watch a player's posture change when a fight goes wrong. From inside that building it is a different sport. Riot Games Arena, 12181 Bluff Creek Dr, Playa Vista. October 15-18. Tickets through lolesports.com. If you have only ever watched it on stream, this is the one to go to.

Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Coming Soon

810 Gathering

266 days away

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Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Jul 1 – Jul 4, 2027 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

You will be tired in a way that feels earned. Four days, a hundred thousand people, and not one of them needs you to explain what you are talking about. The largest anime convention in North America takes the Los Angeles Convention Center over Fourth of July weekend and spills into the JW Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton beside it. Industry panels, screening rooms, autograph sessions with voice actors and composers, concerts that sell out weeks ahead. Studios from Japan use this as their main North American announcement stage — if a sequel or adaptation is being revealed, it often happens in a room you could be standing in. The exhibit hall carries imported merchandise and collaboration exclusives that surface nowhere else on the continent. Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St. Thursday through Sunday. Badges run from top-tier early-access down to single-day passes. Book the connected hotel corridor months out. Everyone who tells you that learned it the hard way.

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