Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Thursday Aug 24, 2023
Better Than the Movie, Ep. 6: MISERY w/ Mark Rennie
Thursday Aug 24, 2023
Thursday Aug 24, 2023
She's his number one fan. The hilarious and well-read Mark Rennie (TWO OLD QUEENS podcast) joins a reduced BTTM crew to discuss MISERY, the Stephen King novel and the Oscar-winning film from screenwriter William Goldman and director Rob Reiner. (And cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld!!) With a new documentary about King adaptations out in theaters, KING ON SCREEN, the fellas also discuss some other King faves on page and screen.
Produced by Justin Remer and Mick Kowaleski.
Opening music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire
Closing music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" by Elastic No-No Band
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
SKYLIT: Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Listen here, gumshoes and femme fatales, we’re gonna give you the straight story on the QT and very hush hush. Skylight’s own torpedo, Tyler, tangles with Charles Ardai, mystery writer and founder of Hard Case Crime, a publishing imprint re-releasing classics of the pulp underworld and modern takes on the time-tested genre. Charles spills the beans about his journey into the publishing world, what it’s like to meet and work with your literary heroes, how he writes his own fiction, and when he knew the whole endeavor would not only survive but thrive. Over nearly two decades, the beautifully hand-painted covers of Hard Case Crime paperbacks have become synonymous with a mark of quality and a stamp of approval for readers around the world. This is the inside scoop on how it all came to be.
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Produced by Mick Kowaleski and Tyler Austin
Music by Duck, the Piano Wire
Saturday May 08, 2021
SKYLIT: Sarah Berman, "DON'T CALL IT A CULT" w/ Ashley Ray Harris
Saturday May 08, 2021
Saturday May 08, 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.
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.
Saturday Jul 14, 2018
David Correia and Tyler Wall, "POLICE: A FIELD GUIDE"
Saturday Jul 14, 2018
Saturday Jul 14, 2018
Join author/activists David Correia and Tyler Wall for an in-depth discussion on the language that we use to talk about policing and police reform in the hopes that understanding the historical context of these terms will help us move beyond the limits of police reform and toward a society free from police violence and free from police entirely.
Police: A Field Guide is an illustrated handbook to the methods, mythologies, and history that animate today’s police. It is a survival manual for encounters with cops and police logic, whether it arrives in the shape of officer friendly, Tasers, curfews, non-compliance, or reformist discourses about so-called bad apples. In a series of short chapters, each focusing on a single term, such as the beat, order, badge, throw-down weapon, and much more, authors David Correia and Tyler Wall present a guide that reinvents and demystifies the language of policing in order to better prepare activists—and anyone with an open mind—on one of the key issues of our time: police brutality. In doing so, they begin to chart a future free of this violence—and of police.
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
Tod Goldberg, "GANGSTER NATION"
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
It’s been two years since the events of Gangsterland, when legendary Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Las Vegas Rabbi David Cohen. Now, in September of 2001, everything’s coming up gold for David—but Sal wants out. He only needs to make it through the High Holidays, and he’ll have enough money to slip away, grab his wife and kid, and start fresh.
Across the country, former FBI agent Matthew Drew is now running security for an Indian Casino outside of Milwaukee, spending his off-time stalking members of The Family, looking for vengeance for the murder of his former partner. So when Sal’s cousin stumbles into the casino one night, Matthew takes the law into his own hands— again—touching off a series of events that will have Rabbi Cohen running for his life, trapped in Las Vegas, with the law, society, and the post-9/11 world closing in around him.
With the wit and gritty glamour that defines his writing, Tod Goldberg traces how the things we most value in our lives—home, health, even our spiritual lives—have been built on the enterprises of criminals.
Mr. Goldberg is joined by David L. Ulin, author of Ear to the Ground.
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
Attica Locke, "BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD"
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
Sunday Jun 17, 2018
Attica Locke considers herself a Texan-in-exile, one with a complicated relationship to the truck-stop towns up and down Highway 59 in East Texas, where she sets Bluebird, Bluebird. It also happens to be where Attica’s entire family, on both sides, can trace their roots back to slavery. It’s a place that gave Attica’s family the values that mattered, even as it consistently broke their hearts. Many black Americans left towns just like those where Attica’s family lived to move north. But Attica will tell you that her family and their lives, then and now, are defined by the very fact that they stayed.
Everything that staying in East Texas meant for Attica and her family—and the intersection of that meaning with the current political climate—was the inspiration for Bluebird, Bluebird. Darren Mathews, a Texas Ranger with a tarnished badge, faces the issues that plague every black American who encounters law enforcement, never knowing quite when it’s safe to follow the rules. Mathews soon finds himself in the center of a murder mystery that turns the classic southern script about race inside out.
Tuesday Apr 17, 2018
CHRISTA FAUST AND GARY PHILLIPS READ FROM THEIR COMIC PEEPLAND
Tuesday Apr 17, 2018
Tuesday Apr 17, 2018
Times Square, 1986: the home of New York’s red light district where strip clubs, porno theatres and petty crime prevails.
When a chance encounter for Peepbooth worker Roxy Bell leads to the brutal murder of a public access pornographer, the erotic performer and her punk rock ex-partner Nick Zero soon find themselves under fire from criminals, cops, and the city elite, as they begin to untangle a complex web of corruption leading right to city hall.
Like The Naked City, there are eight million stories in The Deuce. This is one of them.
Praise for Peepland
"Don’t let the bright lights in PEEPLAND’s pages fool you into thinking this story is sweet. This graphic novel is rife with pain, suffering and death. There are some moments of rightful justice, tender warmth, and laugh-out-loud humor. PEEPLAND is a story that I would not hesitate to call beautiful. However, it’s not for the faint of heart. This story is surprisingly honest, realistic and harsh in how it handles the fate of its characters. Writers Christa Faust and Gary Phillips, along with artist Andrea Camerini, craft a beautiful work of art together. So, cash in your token and sit down. You’re about to read something you won’t forget."--Mya Nunnelly, Comicverse
Gary Phillips has published various crime novels, short stories, edited anthologies, written comics and radio scripts and whatever else he can to forestall his appointment at the crossroads.
Christa Faust a hardboiled crime writer who has worked in the Times Square peep booths, as a professional dominatrix, and in the adult film industry both behind and in front of the cameras. Born and raised in NYC, she is now living as an ex-pat in La La Land.
Monday Apr 16, 2018
RYAN GATTIS READS FROM HIS NEW NOVEL SAFE
Monday Apr 16, 2018
Monday Apr 16, 2018
A gritty, fast-paced thriller, Safe hurtles readers toward a shocking conclusion that asks the toughest question of all: how far would you go to protect the ones you love?
Ricky 'Ghost' Mendoza, Jr. is trying to be good. In recovery and working as a freelance safecracker for the DEA, the FBI, and any other government agency willing to pay him, Ghost is determined to live clean for the rest of his days. And maybe he could, if the most important person in his life hadn't gotten into serious financial trouble. To fix it, all Ghost has to do is crack a safe and steal drug money from under the noses of the gangs and the Feds without getting caught. Or killed.
Rudy 'Glasses' Reyes runs drugs and cleans up messes for the baddest of bad men. When Ghost hits one of his safes, Glasses must hunt him down or be held accountable. But Glasses is worried about more than just money. The heist puts everything in his life at risk--his livelihood, his freedom, even his family.
Ryan Gattis is the author of Kung Fu High School and All Involved, a novel about the 1992 L.A. riots. He lives in Los Angeles.