Skylight Books Events

Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027

Here is what is coming up at Skylight Books, and what has already happened there. Concerts, games, festivals and the smaller nights that never surface in a generic search — no account needed.

Coming up 9 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.

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.

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.

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.

Previously at Skylight Books 2

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.

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