WOOL AND THE GANG

NEW HIGH MART, the amazing soul, art, commerce, designer mash up of a store, has just helped launch Wool and the Gang in Los Angeles. Co-owner T-RIK got me all excited about these handsomely packaged kits that include everything you need to make a bunch of different luscious and beautiful pieces of wearable art. I like them because they seem a very nice mix of creativity and utilitarianism. The company uses the finest wool from a family of Peruvian animals and the designs are created by forward thinkers that want to be your muse. Check it out at New High Mart at 1720 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027 - right down the street.

323-638-0271

THEE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA BAND

Give:

to present voluntarily and without expecting compensation; bestow. Here is a song:

CONTEST! Guess our Fiction Top Five, & Win Signed Hardcovers!

We're having a contest! For the last month, we have been revealing (via Twitter and Facebook) the top selling titles since 1996 for every section in the bookstore. It was a pretty interesting cross section of who Skylight is -- its staff and its customers. However, close observers may have noticed one section that we left out -- in fact the section that we frankly could not survive without:


So, we want to give you, our loyal readers, customers, and fans, a chance to guess our 5 top selling Fiction/Literature titles since 1996. To be fair, one of those 5 is not technically fiction, but we've always shelved it in fiction with the author's other books. We've done our best to aggregate sales so that all editions are included in our numbers: paperback, hardcover, movie tie-in, etc. Audio books are NOT included.

Here's how it will work: the contest will begin on Monday, December 14th. You may submit a number of different ways:

On Twitter via @skylightbooks

On our Skylight Books Facebook page -- become a fan and write on our wall!

Comment on our blog (scroll to the bottom of the page -- duh!)

or email emily@skylightbooks.com.

Please format your submissions so that the first title is your guess for #1, second title is your guess for #2, etc. The order WILL count, especially in the event of a tie. Submissions must be in by midnight on Saturday, December 19th. We will announce the winners and the top 5 titles before Christmas. The winner will be the first person to guess all 5 correctly, or the person who gets the most out of 5 after the week is done. The winner and the runners-up must have a shipping address in the U.S. Current and former Skylight staff and immediate family members are not eligible.

And finally, the good part: PRIZES.

The winner gets 2 signed hardcovers from authors in our top 5 + a gift card.

2 runners-up get a copy of our #1 fiction bestseller + a gift card.

Skylight's Staff Favorites of 2009 (Part II)

Our favorites of 2009 are a pretty good indicator of what you'll find at Skylight: zines, award winners, bestsellers, edgy fiction, a little snarky, a little anarchy, graphic novels, small presses, Los Angeles book, art, music, film, poetry. Of course we have more than these things, but these are nearest to our hearts. Perhaps there are some titles here you've overlooked. If so, come find us. We'd love to tell you more about them. They are, after all, our favorites!

GUSTAVO'S FAVORITES






JUSTIN'S FAVORITE
Irene's 3rd Annual Winter Wonderland Bash January 15, 1962 (zine)


KATE'S FAVORITES



KERRIE KB'S FAVORITES



KEVIN'S FAVORITES



LIZ'S FAVORITES



MARY'S FAVORITES




MONICA'S FAVORITES





STEVE'S FAVORITES

Guest Post: What Bolaño Read: His top 5, and his top 5,000

Here's a little something new for the Skylight Blog: some guest content! Last year at the ABA Winter Institute in Salt Lake City, I was on a panel with Tom McCartan, then a bookseller at the now-closed Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, MI. He's now an intern at Melville House Publishing.

When he contacted me about hosting some pieces he's written, here was my thought process: "Tom is cool, and a former bookseller. Bolaño is cool, and The Coyotes Book Club is reading 2666 right now. Melville House is cool -- an indie press with a great blog that I'm all for supporting." And so here we are. Tom's posts are great -- they teach us about Bolaño, but they also invite us, as readers, to think about why we read what we read. Below is the first installment in full, and also a link to subsequent posts. Enjoy!

What Bolaño Read IN FULL on the Melville House Publishing blog MOBYLIVES

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Over the next two weeks, we’ll be hosting “What Bolaño Read,” a series of posts by Tom McCartan charting the reading habits of Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist, poet, and short story writer. Bolaño was a prolific writer, the author of numerous books, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, but he was also a dedicated reader. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. (And recently excerpted by the New York Times here.) Click here to read all posts in this series.

Roberto Bolaño read almost everything. Understanding his dedication to reading is fundamental to understanding him as an author and, more importantly, as a person.

Take this: “In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.”

When Mónica Maristain interviewed him in 2003 for Mexican Playboy (in what would be his last interview) she asked him to name five books that marked his life:

“In reality the five books are more like 5,000. I’ll mention these only as the tip of the spear: Don Quixote by Cervantes, Moby Dick by Melville. The complete works of Borges, Hopscotch by Cortázar, A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. I should also cite Nadja by Breton, the letters of Jacques Vaché. Anything Ubu by Jarry, Life: A User’s Manual by Perec. The Castle and The Trial by Kafka. Aphorisms by Lichtenberg. The Tractatus by Wittgenstein. The Invention of Morel by Bioy Casares. The Satyricon by Petronius. The History of Rome by Tito Livio. Pensées by Pascal.”

A behemoth list of wonderfulness spanning centuries and continents.

In a 2002 interview for Bomb magazine Carmen Boullosa asked him to list his literary genealogy. Note his use of the word “obvious.”

“As to my idea of a canon, I don’t know, it’s like everyone else’s — I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, it’s so obvious: Francisco de Aldana, Jorge Manrique, Cervantes, the chroniclers of the Indies, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Rubén Darío, Alfonso Reyes, Borges, just to name a few and without going beyond the realm of the Spanish language.”

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be plunging into these lists, trying to understand what Bolaño found in these writers and how they influenced his work.

Runner Up!

Harvard University Press chose our display for their amazing book A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus as Runner Up in their contest! I'm so proud. (The display was much more intricate than it appears in the photo above. Look closely and you can see there were orange ribbons creating a post-modern web of connections and reading strategies.) Read all about it and find out who won on their blog. Hey! Maybe Greil Marcus will include us in the Real Life Top Ten column he pens for The Believer!

Five-Minute Gift Guide Part II

Here are more gift ideas for those of you who are on the run and just need to pick up something quickly. Check out this post for other gifts.

Fiction
Big Machine by Victor Lavalle, $25.00
His second novel which has critics comparing Lavalle to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, $13.95
A National Book Award finalist in 2004, an intricate and absorbing collection of eight interconnected stories about Beatrice Hempel, a middle school English teacher.

Cookbooks
Southern Italian Table: Authentic Tastes from Traditional Kitchens by Arthur Schwartz, $32.50
Visit the South of Italy with this easy to use cookbook. The recipes are simple, don't require lots of ingredients nor take hours to make.

Coco: 10 World-Leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs by Phaidon Press, $50.00
100 of the world's best chefs as chosen by 10 culinary masters. Includes a short bio of each chef as well as a sample menu. A combo platter of cookbook, photo book and Zagat guide.

Los Angeles Books
Los Angeles Portrait of a City by Jim Heimann and Kevin Starr, $70.00
A beautiful 572-page book about the city we all know and love. A pictorial history of LA starting from 1862 all the way up to present day.

Canyon of Dreams - The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon by Harvey Kubernik, $29.95
An inside look at over 80 years of music and culture (and counter-culture) in the neighborhood that helped create the sounds of the Doors, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds and many other bands.

Kids Books
Kids Go! by They Might Be Giants, $19.99
The band They Might Be Giants returns with their second kids book which features dancing monkeys and dogs and of course kids who just GO, GO, GO! Also includes animated DVD.

Higher! Higher! by Leslie Patricelli, $15.99
How high can one little girl on a swing set go? Higher than clouds? Higher than an airplane? How about high enough to see a cute little space alien. Awfully cute.

Last, Last, Last Minute Gifts
Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus, $30.00
A complete history of poker from James McManus, the Harper's journalist who parlayed his reporter's paycheck into a fifth place finish at the 2000 Main Event at the World Series of Poker.

Super Freakonomics - Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubnerm, $29.99
The second book from the team that brought you the gigantic mega-hit Freakonomics. Topics covered include: What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common? Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands, and how much good do car seats do?

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell, $ 27.99
This book collects the best of Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker pieces and fits them all under one roof. Essays include profiles of the inventor of the birth control pill, and famous Dog Whisperer Cesar Milan, as well as intelligence tests, hindsight bias and many other interesting works.

And Here's the Kicker- Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks, $17.99
Interviews with 21 top comedy writers including Stephan Merchant (The Office, Extras), Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development), David Sedaris (Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day) and Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show with Bob and David)


Please shop responsibly.