Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
Thirty Cabins brings together some of contemporary fiction's brightest voices to reimagine a century-old book of vacation cabin blueprints. Inside, you'll find 30 vacation cabins, each with its own short story. Plus a comic! Contributors include LA based writers Tom Comita, Rachel Khong, Kim Samek, Claire Stanford, and Lena Valencia, as well as Hilary Leichter, Ed Park, Kate Folk, and many others. Former Washington Post book critic Ron Charles writes: “Thirty Cabins is alternately charming and creepy, witty and sad, as diverse as the buildings that inspired it. What's most striking, though, is how quickly these writers can create a scene, a collection of characters, a mood. In the cramped space of just two or three pages, they conjure up whole worlds. “Like a little house in the woods, each one is a quirky marvel of engineering.” Kim Samek is the O. Henry Prize-winning and Pushcart Prize-winning author of the debut story collection I AM THE GHOST HERE (The Dial Press, 2026), named a most anticipated book by Lit Hub, The Seattle Times, The LA Times, and others. It was also named a best debut of the 2026 by Debutiful (so far). Her stories can be found in Zyzzyva, Story, The Threepenny Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She works as a TV writer and producer, with credits including WordGirl and Catfish and others, and her writing has been nominated for an Emmy Award. A native of Seattle, she studied Creative Writing and German Literature at Stanford University. She lives in Los Angeles. Claire Stanford is the author of the novel Happy for You, which which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and awarded the 2023 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Loyola Marymount University. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books). Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Baffler, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School and is the director of educational programming at One Story. She lives in Los Angeles.