Wednesday, June 17, 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.**_ **An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet** Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places. Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do? By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), _Earth 7_ is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers. **Deb Olin Unferth’s** next book, the novel Earth 7 will appear in 2026. She is the author of six other books, including the novel Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Granta, and New York Times Magazine. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers, the New Writers Project, and directs the Pen City Writers at a south Texas penitentiary. **Aimee Bender** is the author of six books of fiction, including the bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and NY Times Notable Book The Color Master. Her short fiction has been widely published in places such as Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and more, and she teaches creative writing at USC.