Thursday, August 20, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
Infinite Summer - Celebrating INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace at 30 Please join us to celebrate the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece INFINITE JEST! Former Los Angeles Times Books editor, David L. Ulin, and David Foster Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, will kick the night off with a conversation about the publication of INFINITE JEST in 1996 and how it resonates with our current moment 30 years later. Celebrated authors Allie Rowbottom, Ben H. Winters, and Ivy Pochoda, and award-winning journalist Kelly McEvers will read from their favorite passages of INFINITE JEST. Co-presented by Little, Brown and Company and Los Angeles Review of Books. Allie Rowbottom is the author of Aesthetica [https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/Et5XCERX6RU4JVQ9uNfyf7fjj9?domain=penguinrandomhouse.com/] (2022), JELL-O Girls: A Family History (2018), and Lovers XXX, [https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/ZmDDCG6XQ6t3pKVYc7hPfBx8jn?domain=penguinrandomhouse.com/] published June 2026 in the United States and United Kingdom. Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Elle, The New York Times, Playboy, The Times, New York Tyrant, Forever Magazine, and elsewhere. Her short story “He Dreams About the Bunny Ranch” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in fiction; Aesthetica was short-listed for France’s Prix Sade. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing and lives in Los Angeles. Ben H. Winters is the Edgar Award winning, New York Times bestselling author of the LastPoliceman Trilogy and UNDERGROUND AIRLINES, among many other novels. He is also the creator of the TV show TRACKER and, as a comic book writer, the creator of the seriesBENJAMIN and the forthcoming THE EGO KNIFE. His most recent novel is the sci-fi thrillerBIG TIME. Ben lives in Los Angeles with his family. Bonnie Nadell represented David Foster Wallace for his entire career starting with his first novel The Broom of the System published in 1987 through the posthumous publication in 2011 of his unfinished novel, The Pale King. Infinite Jest has now been translated and published in twenty five languages including Vietnamese and Croatian. David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method and Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. In September, Library of America will publish his American Flash Fiction: An Anthology. Kelly McEvers is a two-time Peabody Award winning journalist and former host of NPR’s flagship daily news magazine, All Things Considered. She is the creator of NPR’s award-winning Embedded podcast – recently named one of Time magazine’s “100 Best Podcasts of All Time.” She currently teaches journalism and storytelling at the California Institution for Women and hosts the Atlas Obscura podcast. She spent much of her career as an international correspondent, reporting from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. She has reported for the BBC World Service, Marketplace, The World, and This American Life. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, Foreign Policy, Time, The New Republic, Slate, The Washington Monthly, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She began her career at the Chicago Tribune. Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, Ecstasy, and Sing Her Down which won the LA Times Book Prize. She has also won the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, the International Thriller Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, Ivy has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles where she helped found Skid Row Zine. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.