Interview with Mary Williams, General Manager for Skylight Books in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is a staff pick at the store, and currently on their best-seller shelf.
What makes Skylight stand out as a bookstore? Aside from the amazing skylight in the middle of the store?
We work really hard to curate a selection of books that serves our specific clientele. So, we really emphasize literary fiction and graphic novels. We also have a section on anarchy and conspiracy theories, which is something not a lot of bookstores have. And we also really focus on regional books, we have a lot of books on Los Angeles history and culture too.
People don’t really think of LA as a publishing town, even though it has this rich literary history that includes Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and so many other great LA writers. How would you describe the current literary scene in LA today?
I would say it’s very robust. I think people have a stereotype of LA as being superficial, or being perhaps more of a film and TV town than a literary town. But that’s not been my experience at all. Not only do we have a very rich culture and history of literature as you just mentioned, but we also to this day have the biggest book festival in the country, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. No other city has a book fair that even comes close to rivaling it. We have many great independent bookstores that are here, and we also have a lot of authors who live in Los Angeles. Enough that each of the bookstores here has a very full event schedule of local authors. And everyone turns out to each other’s events. There’s a lot of sense of community in Los Angeles.
How did you get into bookselling?
After college I moved to New York and worked in book publishing, briefly, but I wanted to move back to California. After that, I was sort of thinking back to what jobs I had enjoyed the most and I worked at the Strand when I first moved to New York, and as crazy a place as the Strand is, it was really fun. So, I got a job here, I was lucky they were hiring, and I’ve been working my way up the chain.
Are there any books from the past year that you’d like to recommend to our readers?
I really enjoyed Redployment by Phil Klay, that just won the National Book Award. What I really liked about it is that it’s a series of war stories all told from different voices and different perspectives, usually people who served in the armed forces and then just write from their own perspective. It had a great variety, which I liked.
I really liked the Jon Krakauer book Missoula that just came out. I’m a huge fan of his writing in general and this is definitely an intense read, and it’s pretty detailed, but I found it really compelling and it raises a great issue. And related to that, also non-ficiton, is Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, which is also super good. I read it in three hours, I just could not put it down.
Back to fiction, I think the one I’m most into recommending right now is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. It’s a really good story but it also brings in elements of Zen Buddhism and quantum physics at the same time and just has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of time and how we perceive ourselves as living beings in the world. A fun, cool novel.