Sean Carswell, who PopMatters called the “J.D. Salinger for the Internet generation,” is the author of the novels Drinks for the Little Guy and Train Wreck Girl. He wrote the short story collections Barney’s Crew and Glue and Ink Rebellion. He co-founded the independent book publisher Gorsky Press and the music magazine Razorcake. He has been a regular contributor to Flipside, Ink 19, and Clamor. His writing has appeared in diverse places, including the skateboarding magazine Thrasher, tiny ‘zines like Zisk, and prestigious literary journals like The Southeastern Review and The Rattling Wall. He currently teaches writing and literature at California State University Channel Islands.

For the Madhouse Fog book release at Skylight Books, Jim Ruland and Cheryl Klein will join Carswell. Jim Ruland is a veteran of the Navy, author of the short story collection Big Lonesome, and curator of the irreverent reading series Vermin on the Mount. He is currently writing a book with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch called Giving the Finger, which will be published early next year. Cheryl Klein’s story collection The Commuters won City Works Press’s Ben Reitman Award and was published by that press in 2006. Her novel Lilac Mines was a Small Press Distribution monthly best seller. She directs the California office of Poets & Writers, Inc.

This rediscovered classic is an internationally bestselling novel, back in print and available in the U.S. for the first time in 45 years. Published in 1956 by Moore at age 18, this is the astonishingly candid story of a young girl's sudden, urgent awakening to love and desire.

Courtney Farrell is a disaffected, sexually precocious fifteen-year-old. She splits her time between Manhattan, where her father works in publishing, and Los Angeles, where her mother is a still-beautiful Hollywood actress. After a boarding-school crush on a female teacher ends badly, Courtney sets out to learn everything fast. Her first drink is a very dry martini, and her first kiss the beginning of a full-blown love affair with an older man. (Harper Perennial)

Whether passed out drunk at The New Yorker where she's interning; assigning Cliffs Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; getting banned from a fleet of Greek Island ferries while on vacation, or trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout--"I prefer to call them pink-outs, because I'm a girl"--Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter-life crisis to the shock of turning thirty, Iris Has Free Time charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age--one's twenties--when childhood is over, supposedly. (Soft Skull Press)

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most.

Philippa Mayall was born into her own gritty northern drama in Manchester, United Kingdom, in 1973. Her penchant for writing was discovered by her mother at an early age. She kept switching the lights on to write down nuggets of sentences and phrases she thought of in the night and didn’t want to forget. This made her very unpopular with her brother who shared the room (they remain good friends today). She moved to Los Angeles in 2000 and her time in America is enormously influential on her writing, as are her roots in Manchester. After realizing her real dream of wanting to write about her experiences, she moved back to England, where she studied for a Masters in Creative Writing at Kingston University. Phoenix is her first book. In the future, she hopes to write more. Philippa currently lives in Los Angeles.