Monday, May 11, 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.**_ In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, _Offseason,_ our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s _Bleak House_ to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong. Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind. Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, _Offseason_ reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love. **Avigayl Sharp** is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in _The Paris Review_, _Granta, New England Review,_ and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. _Offseason_ is her first novel. **Sarah Rose Etter** is the author of the chapbook _Tongue Party_ and _The Book of X_, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her work has appeared in _Time_, _Guernica_, _BOMB_, the _Bennington Review_, _The Cut_, _VICE_, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles.