Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Saturday Nov 19, 2022
SKYLIT: adrienne maree brown, ”FABLES AND SPELLS”
Saturday Nov 19, 2022
Saturday Nov 19, 2022
Fables and Spells is a vibrant selection of visionary works, both previously published and brand new. Included here is adrienne maree brown's most beloved story, "The River," as well as the two sequel tales of her Water Trio. The remaining sixty-seven pieces explore moments of beauty, conflict, and transformation that also weave deep, radical lessons. With narrative "fables" of speculative fiction and "spells" that play with the lines between poetry, instruction, song, and chant, Fables and Spells demonstrates how good writing can engage the present while providing expansive visions of the possible worlds humans can build.
Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Monday Oct 31, 2022
SKYLIT: ”IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET”
Monday Oct 31, 2022
Monday Oct 31, 2022
Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Friday Oct 14, 2022
LIVE ON CROWDCAST: ”Death in the Mouth” Roundtable
Friday Oct 14, 2022
Friday Oct 14, 2022
Death in the Mouth is a collection of horror stories and art showcasing BIPOC and ethnically marginalized storytellers from around the world. You’ll read stories featuring grotesque manifestations of dread, the enveloping sludge of grief, and the insectoid itch of deep-seated fear. Embodiments of mania and displacements of faith. Harrowing ecstasy and debilitating hope. Transgressions of the body, the spirit, and the community. Unique and terrifying alien mythology from the future. Quiet, creeping absurdities. Weird urban legends from secondary worlds. In this anthology, Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart bring you an incredible range of stories and illustrations that celebrate the voices of those overlooked to show you the terrifying and exquisite scope of what horror can be.
Join us for this round-table conversation with contributors Leong, Hart, Beatrice Iker, K-Ming Chang, and Karin Lowachee.
Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Tuesday Nov 30, 2021
SKYLIT: SUMMERTIME: ODES TO LA w/ Carlos López Estrada
Tuesday Nov 30, 2021
Tuesday Nov 30, 2021
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Aug 02, 2021
SKYLIT: "NEPANTLA FAMILIAS" Group Reading
Monday Aug 02, 2021
Monday Aug 02, 2021
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Sunday Jul 11, 2021
SKYLIT: WAYFINDING Poets
Sunday Jul 11, 2021
Sunday Jul 11, 2021
Wayfinding is a poetry anthology curated and edited by Amy Beth and Derek Wright, published by Finishing Line Press. More than 50 poets share moments of transformation and wonder that have been inspired by parks and public lands, alongside original photography by Derek Wright, and short essays by Amy Beth and Derek Wright. This is a striking color print book of poetry, and the perfect gift for outdoors enthusiasts and readers alike who enjoy the intersection of parks and poetry.
This episode features readings by Mary Ardery, Mike Good, Allyson Whipple, Kristin Bryant Rajan, and Pamela Hobart Carter.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday May 07, 2021
SKYLIT: Shaun Slifer and Josh MacPhee, "SO MUCH TO BE ANGRY ABOUT"
Friday May 07, 2021
Friday May 07, 2021
Emerging from the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at Marshall University, and working closely with organizer and poet Don West, Appalachian Movement Press made available an eclectic range of printed material, from books and pamphlets to children’s literature and calendars. Many of its publications promoted the Appalachian identity movement and “internal colony” theory, both of which were cornerstones of the nascent discipline of Appalachian studies. One of its many influential publications was MAW, the first feminist magazine written by and for Appalachian women.
So Much to Be Angry About combines complete reproductions of five of Appalachian Movement Press’s most engaging publications, an essay by Shaun Slifer about his detective work resurrecting the press’s history, and a contextual introduction to New Left movement publishing by Josh MacPhee. Amply illustrated in a richly produced package, the volume pays homage to the graphic sensibility of the region’s 1970s social movements, while also celebrating the current renaissance of Appalachia’s DIY culture—in many respects a legacy, Slifer suggests, of the movement publishing documented in his book.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Mar 12, 2021
LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Tod Goldberg, "THE LOW DESERT" w/ Mark Haskell Smith
Friday Mar 12, 2021
Friday Mar 12, 2021
With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, these spare, stylish stories from master of modern crime fiction Tod Goldberg assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar.
Witty, brutal, and fast-paced, these stories expand upon the saga of Chicago hitman-turned-Vegas-rabbi Sal Cupertine–first introduced in Gangsterland and continued in Gangster Nation–while revealing how the line between good and bad is often a mirage.
Goldberg discusses The Low Desert with Mark Haskell Smith.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Mar 05, 2021
LIVE ON CROWDCAST: "SPECULATIVE LOS ANGELES"
Friday Mar 05, 2021
Friday Mar 05, 2021
As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways.
In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.
As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you’ll find here.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Mar 05, 2021
SKYLIT: Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, "NEITHER SETTLER NOR NATIVE" w/ Dr. Gil Anidjar
Friday Mar 05, 2021
Friday Mar 05, 2021
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe's nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the "criminal" solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors--victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries--based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Dec 04, 2020
SKYLIT: Nana-Ama Danquah, "ACCRA NOIR" w/ Anniwaa Buachie
Friday Dec 04, 2020
Friday Dec 04, 2020
Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies (launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir) with Accra Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.
Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction. The telling of such tales--ones involving or suggesting death, with a protagonist who is flawed or devious, driven by either a self-serving motive or one of the seven deadly sins--is woven into the fabric of the city's everyday life...
Accra is more than just a capital city. It is a microcosm of Ghana. It is a virtual map of the nation's soul, a complex geographical display of its indigenous presence, the colonial imposition, declarations of freedom, followed by coups d' tat, decades of dictatorship, and then, finally, a steady march forward into a promising future...
Much like Accra, these stories are not always what they seem. The contributors who penned them know too well how to spin a story into a web...It is an honor and a pleasure to share them and all they reveal about Accra, a city of allegories, one of the most dynamic and diverse places in the world.
Editor and Contributor Nana-Ama Danquah is in conversation with actress, filmmaker, and writer Anniwaa Buachie.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Oct 30, 2020
SKYLIT: Johnny Ray Huston & Bradford Nordeen, "BECAUSE HORROR"
Friday Oct 30, 2020
Friday Oct 30, 2020
For over a decade, Johnny Ray Huston was Arts and Entertainment Editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As a writer, artist and curator he has read or shown work at venues including SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork, Artists’ Television Access and [2nd Floor Projects]. A book of stories, published by Straight to Hell, is due in 2021.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
Steffie Nelson, "SLOUCHING TOWARDS LOS ANGELES" w/ Contributors
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
In The White Album, Joan Didion wrote that “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively…loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” Cruising the freeways in her Daytona yellow Corvette, taking it all in behind dark glasses, Joan Didion claimed California for all time. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us. This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation—Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five—while bringing together some of the finest voices of today’s Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, coloring our own journeys in the process.
This evening's event will feature contributors DAN CRANE, JESSICA HUNDLEY, TRACY MCMILLAN, CAROLINE RYDER and MARGARET WAPPLER along with editor STEFFIE NELSON reading and discussing the book and Joan Didion's life and work.
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WRITEGIRL 4 Group Reading
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WriteGirl is an innovative nonprofit organization that empowers teen girls through creative writing. Join us for this special chance to hear WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original poetry and prose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be surprised—you won’t want to miss it!
In WriteGirl’s new award-winning anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl, 180 teens share stories, poems, memoirs, scripts and songs about their hopes and fears, loves and losses, amigas and pan dulce, as they navigate a challenging present and uncertain future with determination and grace. Their words inspire reflection and ignite action. The book includes a Creativity Starter Kit with 15 fresh writing activities to inspire young writers. This Moment is available for purchase at Skylight Books.
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, "BEYOND SURVIVAL" w/ Guests
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Read this book! Beyond Survival collects tools, strategies and personal stories of the struggle to create safety, justice and accountability beyond the criminal justice system.
This long-awaited and deeply necessary book documents some of the work of the transformative justice movement- collecting everything from personal stories of successful interventions in abuse and violence to guides to being accountable if you’ve been abusive, from strategies to support folks having emotional crises without calling 911 to toolkits for creating safer party spaces and community safety zones from ICE. Along the way, there’s plenty of personal essays and reflections from long time organizers on the state of the movement, and visions for the future we’re building that will bring us all home.
Editors Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha are in conversation with activist-contributors Amita Swadhin and Raquel Lavina.