Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 **A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral** At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home. For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables. But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship. **Sarah Wang** has written for _The New Yorker, The Atlantic_, the _London Review of Books_, _The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1,_ and _BOMB,_ among other publications. Wang is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020 Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award and a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City. **Chris Kraus** is a writer and critic. Her novels include _Aliens & Anorexia_, _I Love Dick_, _Torpor_ and _Summer of Hate_ and she has published three books of cultural criticism - _Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness;_ _Where Art Belongs_, and _Social Practices_. _I Love Dick_ was adapted for television and in 2017 her literary biography of Kathy Acker, _After Kathy Acker,_ was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. Her new novel THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER will be published in 2025. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020-2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. New York Times critic Dwight Garner has called her “a powerfully original writer,” and Index magazine described her as “one of the most subversive voices in American fiction.” Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen language. She lives in Los Angeles.