Thursday, February 26, 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.**_ **Twelve women confront the mounting existential terrors of modern life in this absurd, wryly hilarious debut story collection.** A woman's limbs disappear into “the cloud” during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else's reality show, forced to resolve her fraught relationship with her immigrant mother for the narrative. Succumbing to a widely denied pandemic, a gymnastics coach must carry her heart around in a Mason jar, using her disability to become an influencer. Two chronically single, chronically ill people become soulmates, only to discover their meeting was algorithmically orchestrated by ad tech. Other dramas unfold as icebergs melt and island-sized trash heaps burn. Threaded with sharp social commentary, these stories question the engineering of human connection through technology, social media, and reality television. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, _I Am the Ghost Here_ casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down. **Kim Samek** is a half-Thai Emmy-nominated writer and television producer whose credits include MTV’s _Catfish_ and PBS’s _WordGirl_. She studied German literature and creative writing at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in _Guernica_, _Ecotone_, _Electric Literature_, _North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, swamp pink, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, Story,_ and _ZYZZYVA_. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize. A native of Seattle, she lives in Los Angeles. **Steph Cha** is the author of four novels, including _Your House Will Pay_, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song Mysteries. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the _Los Angeles Times_, the _New York Times_, _USA Today_, and the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, where she served as noir editor, and she is the current series editor of the _Best American Mystery and Suspense_ anthology. She also writes for television, and is the co-creator of the series _Butterfly_.