Friday, July 10, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **Set against the neon-lit porn world of 1980s Los Angeles, a raw and evocative portrait of sex, friendship, and the perilous edge of liberation for two young women—from the author of _Aesthetica._ For fans of Mary Gaitskill, Emma Cline, and Rachel Kushner.** Los Angeles, 1982. Jude is eighteen, newly out of reform school and hungry for more than her small-town past can offer. Searching for her best friend, Winnie, she instead falls under the spell of Laird, an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger. What begins as escape soon unravels into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges. Then Jude finds Winnie, reinvented as Velvet at a Sunset Strip club. Together, the two girls imagine a future: bartending, dancing, writing the novels they dream of, building a home of their own. But the same world that promises glamour and freedom is poised to consume them, and survival demands that they navigate the men who offer love, power, and escape—always at a cost. With Joan Didion’s eye for California’s allure and shadows, and told in a two-part structure reminiscent of Lauren Groff’s _Fates and Furies_, _Lovers XXX_ is a hypnotic novel of friendship and self-invention, of sexual identity beyond binaries, and of the costs of giving one’s body to the performance of sex. Above all, it is a love story like no other—between two ardent, vulnerable, and revelatory women. **Allie Rowbottom** is the author of the novel _Aesthetica_ and the memoir _Jell-O Girls_, a _New York Times_ Editors’ Choice Selection, Indie Next Pick, and _Real Simple_ Best Book of the Year. Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in _Vanity Fair_, Salon, Lit Hub, _No Tokens_, NY Tyrant, _The Drunken Canal_, _Alta Journal_, _Bitch_, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey. **Chelsea Bieker** is the author of the novel _Godshot_, which was a finalist for both the Oregon and California Book Awards, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Fiction Pick. Her writing has appeared in _The Paris Review_, _Granta_, _The Cut_, _McSweeney’s_, _Literary Hub_, _Electric Literature_, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.