Skylight Books Podcast Series

JUSTIN HOCKING discusses THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD, in conversation with ANTOINE WILSON

The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (Graywolf Press)

Surfing in Far Rockaway, romantic obsession, and "Moby-Dick" converge in this winning and refreshing memoir. 

Justin Hocking lands in New York hopeful but adrift--he's jobless, unexpectedly overwhelmed and disoriented by the city, struggling with anxiety and obsession, and attempting to maintain a faltering long-distance relationship. As a man whose brand of therapy has always been motion, whether in a skate park or on a snowdrift, Hocking needs an outlet for his restlessness. Then he spies his first New York surfer hauling a board to the subway, and its not long before he's a member of the vibrant and passionate surfing community at Far Rockaway. But in the wake of a traumatic robbery incident, the dark undercurrents of his ocean-obsession pull him further and further out on his own night sea journey. With Moby-Dick as a touchstone, and interspersed with interludes on everything from the history of surfing to Scientology's naval ties to the environmental impact of the Iraq War, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld is a multifaceted and enduring modern odyssey from a memorable and whip-smart new literary voice.

KYLE MINOR discusses PRAYING DRUNK, in conversation with AMELIA GRAY

Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books)

Skylight Books is thrilled to welcome back Kyle Minor. For today's reading he'll be joined by another Skylight favorite,Amelia Gray.

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end.

Kyle Minor is a columnist at Salon and The Nation. His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial, Esquire, Volt and many others. He is the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction, the Tara M. Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, and is the author of In The Devil's Territory (Dzanc, 2008).

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She is the author of the novel Threats. She lives in Los Angeles.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY reads from PATTER

Patter (Red Hen Press)

From one of our favorite local presses comes one of our favorite local poets! Join us for an unforgettable evening.

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”  

LILIBET SNELLINGS reads from BOX GIRL

Box Girl: My Part Time Job as an Art Installation (Soft Skull Press)

When 22-year-old Lilibet Snellings moved to Los Angeles on a whim, she unintentionally became a "slash" to keep her head above water--a writer/waitress/actress/Box Girl.

One night each week, Lilibet would go to The Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, don a pair of white boy shorts with a matching tank, touch up her lip gloss, and crawl into a giant glass case behind the front desk. There, she could do whatever she wanted--check email, catch up on reading, even sleep--as long as she ignored the many hotel guests who would point and ask the staff, "Is she allowed to use the bathroom?" (Yes.)

Dog-paddling through her twenties, Snellings resisted financial bailouts (for the most part) from her sweet Southern mother and business-oriented dad, while pondering her peculiar position as a human art installation. Was she a piece of art or a piece of ass? Was she allowed to read both Walt Whitman and "US Weekly" as she lounged in an oversized, waterless aquarium behind a hotel concierge desk? From misinterpreting a modeling agency interview as a talent audition, to avoiding Bond-girl-style deaths at New Year's Eve parties, Snellings shares and laughs at her many mishaps while living in LA.

Lilibet Snellings was born in Georgia and raised in Connecticut. She earned her MFA from the University of Southern California and resides in Los Angeles and Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, LA Magazine, Anthem, Flaunt, and This Recording, among other publications.

ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ discusses and signs her cookbook ISA DOES IT

Isa Does It: Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week (Little, Brown & Company)

Bestselling vegan cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz visits Skylight to discuss and sign her latest cookbook, Isa Does It.

How does Isa Chandra Moskowitz make flavorful and satisfying vegan meals from scratch every day, often in 30 minutes or less? It's easy! In Isa Does It, the beloved cookbook author shares 150 new recipes to make weeknight cooking a snap. Mouthwatering recipes like Sweet Potato Red Curry with Rice and Purple Kale, Bistro Beet Burgers, and Summer Seitan Saute with Cilantro and Lime illustrate how simple and satisfying meat-free food can be.

The recipes are supermarket friendly and respect how busy most readers are. From skilled vegan chefs, to those new to the vegan pantry, or just cooks looking for some fresh ideas, Isa's unfussy recipes and quirky commentary will make everyone's time in the kitchen fun and productive. 

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the best-selling author of the hit books Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook,Vegan With a Vengeance, and many other titles. She is currently a Bust magazine columnist where she writes about cooking on a limited budget, and she has written for Vegetarian Times, Time Out NY, Natural Health and VegNews. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

JAY MARTEL reads from CHANNEL BLUE

Channel Blue (Head of Zeus)

From the executive producer of "Key & Peele" comes a comic novel that may strike a little too close to home. 

 

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy - the saviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way - just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's live.

But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.

Only one man can save our planet and he's hardly a likely hero...

Jay Martel is an executive producer and writer for "Key & Peele" on Comedy Central. He's created various TV shows, written screenplays with UCB cofounder Ian Roberts, gardened for Richard Nixon, and was once arrested for confronting Jeb Bush about Florida's death penalty program. He's also written comic pieces for "The New Yorker" and "Rolling Stone." Channel Blue is his first novel. For more info on Channel Blue and Jay's writing, please check out facebook.com/authorjaymartel.

UC RIVERSIDE MFA STUDENTS, joined by alum ERIC SHONKWILER reading from ABOVE ALL MEN

Above All Men (Midwestern Gothic)

Join us for a special evening as the members of Gather: The UC Riverside MFA reading series share their work alongside former student Eric Shonkwiler, reading from his debut novel.

Years from now, America is slowly collapsing. Crops are drying up and oil is running out. People flee cities for the countryside, worsening the drought and opening the land to crime. Amid this decay and strife, war veteran David Parrish fights to keep his family and farm together. However, the murder of a local child opens old wounds, forcing him to confront his own nature on a hunt through dust storms and crumbling towns for the killer.

ANNABELLE GURWITCH reads from I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT, with special guests

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (Blue Rider Press)

Is 50 the new 40 or is 50 still 50? Maybe. In this wickedly funny new collection of essays, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch explores the hazards of turning 50, outsourcing your endocrine system, and falling in lust at the Genius bar. From the woman the Washington Post calls “hilarious,” this new book is the ultimate coming-of middle-age story and a must-read for women everywhere.

The panic began to set in when Annabelle turned 49. The solicitations from the AARP began flooding her mailbox as she weighed going back to school, getting divorced and raising llamas. She couldn’t afford a vacation, so she was taking a lot of naps. A visit to her gynecologist ended not with one of his usual benign send-offs—stay healthy, stay happy, stay hydrated—but instead with the slightly ominous: "Stay funny."

In this new collection of essays, Annabelle Gurwitch has taken her gynecologist's advice to heart. Whether she's navigating the extensive anti-aging offerings in the department store beauty counter or negotiating the ins and outs of acceptable behavior with her teenage son, Gurwitch bravely turns an unflinching eye towards the myriad of issues women can expect to encounter in their middle years. 

For tonight's reading Annabelle Gurwitch will be joined by members of the Suite 8 Writer's Collective, Jillian Lauren, Heather Havrilesky and Joshua Wolf Shenk.

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress and author of You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up, a self-hurt marital memoir co-written with her husband, Jeff Kahn, now a theatrical play in its third national tour; and Fired! Tales of the Caned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. Her Fired! documentary premiered as a Showtime Comedy Special and played film festivals around the world. Gurwitch gained a loyal comedic following during her numerous years co-hosting the cult favorite, Dinner & a Movie; her acting credits include Dexter, Boston Legal, Seinfeld, Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Shaggy Dog and Not Necessarily The News on HBO. Most recently, she starred in the adaptation of Grace Paley’s A Coney Island Christmas by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies at The Geffen Playhouse. Live appearances include New York Comedy Festival, 92nd St Y, Upright Citizens Brigade and story salons in both New York and Los Angeles. She has served as a regular commentator on NPR and a humorist for TheNation.com. Her writing has appeared in More, Marie Claire, Men's Health, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. Gurwitch is a passionate environmentalist, a reluctant atheist, and lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.

Jillian Lauren is the author of the novel Pretty and the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Salon, The Rumpus and The Moth Anthology, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The Awl and Bookforum, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. You can also follow her on Twitter at @hhavrilesky.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist, author, and creative strategist based in New York City. He is a correspondent for Slate.com, and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey. 

RACHEL PASTAN reads from ALENA

Alena (Riverhead Books)

In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.

At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring young curator is given the career break of a lifetime when she meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. Would she like to take the reins at the museum—a position that has remained vacant since the tragic death of the charismatic Alena, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse? Shaking off her Midwestern past, our heroine—nameless, as is du Maurier’s original—jumps at the chance, only to find herself well beyond her depths. Like du Maurier’s Manderley, the Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the sinister, Mrs. Danvers-like business manager who was passionately devoted to Alena. The shadow of her predecessor hangs over the narrator as she tries to shift the Nauk away from the extreme art favored by Alena and to express her own sense of what art is. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, however, her loyalties, integrity, and courage are put to the test and shattering secrets come to the surface.

A delicious restaging of one of the most popular novels of the 20th century (later an Academy Award-winning Hitchcock film), Alena is also a stirring exploration of the role of beauty and the nature of originality.

Rachel Pastan is the author of two previous novels, Lady of the Snakes and This Side of Married, and has won numerous prizes for her short fiction. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, she is also Editor-at-Large for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she writes the blog Miranda.

KEM NUNN reads from CHANCE

Chance (Scribner)

When Kem Nunn’s debut novel Tapping the Source was published, the Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote: "Kem Nunn is the bright son of a very good family. His 'parents' include Hammett, Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and yes, Ross MacDonald. What Kem Nunn has done is what every good parent yearns for and is afraid of: he has surpassed them all." Now, with Chance, Nunn surpasses even himself. Half Coen Brothers, half Dashiell Hammett, Kem Nunn has written a gritty, twisted psychological thriller centered on a lonely, brilliant, forensic neuropsychologist in San Francisco.

Dr. Eldon Chance has a track record of becoming involved with the wrong women. As he enters a mid-life crisis brought on by the failure of his marriage, a series of bad decisions lead him into a relationship with Jaclyn Blackstone, a patient suffering an apparent dissociative identy disorder. And unfortunately her abusive husband, an Oakland homicide detective, is the jealous type. At the same time, Chance meets a young man named “D,” a self-styled Samurai who Chance thinks is a war veteran, but is really more of a deranged loner. As Chance finds his life twisting more and more uncomfortably into Jaclyn Blackstone’s world, D acts as Chance’s guide to the underbelly of San Francisco and his coach for the looming show-down with Jaclyn’s psychotic husband. In his own cool, gray City of Love, amid its fluid, ever-changing beauty and shifting fogs, Dr. Chance will be forced to live up to his name.

By turns horrific and darkly comic, suspenseful and thought provoking, Chance is a head trip through the fun house from “one of the most interesting writers working the coast” (San Diego Union Tribune) and confirms Kem Nunn’sreputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank. 

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian and the author of six novels, including the National Book Award NomineeTapping the Source, Tijuana Straits, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, and Unassigned Territory. In addition to writing novels, he writes screenplays for television and film, most notably John from Cincinnati which he co-created with David Milch, Deadwood, and currently, Sons of Anarchy. He lives in Southern California.

CECIL CASTELLUCCI reads from TIN STAR

Tin Star (Roaring Brook Press)

Skylight Books' very own Cecil Castellucci returns to launch her newest YA novel, a sci-fi adventure for the ages.  Cecil will follow a reading from her novel with a Q&A with JPL scientist Steve Collins!

On their way to start a new life, Tula and her family travel on the "Prairie Rose," a colony ship headed to a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. All is going well until the ship makes a stop at a remote space station, the Yertina Feray, and the colonist's leader, Brother Blue, beats Tula within an inch of her life. An alien, Heckleck, saves her and teaches her the ways of life on the space station.

When three humans crash land onto the station, Tula's desire for escape becomes irresistible, and her desire for companionship becomes unavoidable. But just as Tula begins to concoct a plan to get off the space station and kill Brother Blue, everything goes awry, and suddenly romance is the farthest thing from her mind.

Cecil Castellucci is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, an award-winning author of five books for young adults, and the YA and children's book editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in New York City, Cecil lives in Los Angeles. For the research of Tin Star, Cecil attended LaunchPad, a NASA funded workshop intended to teach writers of science fiction about the most up-to-date and correct space science.

Steve Collins is an Attitude Control engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Most recently Cruise ACS System Engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover, Steve has worked on numerous NASA/JPL missions including Epoxi, Dawn, Deep Impact, MER, Deep Space One, Galileo and Mars Observer.  In flight, Steve's job includes keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction, performing trajectory corrections and figuring out "what the heck just happened??"  When he's not flying a robotic spacecraft around the solar system, Steve can be found playing soccer, racing his Miata, jamming on the Theremin with the band Artichoke, or acting on-stage with TACIT, Caltech's resident theater company.

RON ATHEY presents PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (Intellect Books)

Ron Athey is a central figure in the development of performance art since the early 1990s, and this is the first book devoted to his practice. Pleading in the Blood (ed. by Dominic Johnson) foregrounds the prescience of Atheyʼs work, exploring how his visceral practice foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded sexuality, identity, and the body in art and critical theory in the late twentieth century. This landmark publication includes Atheyʼs own writings, and commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics. It showcases full-colour images of Atheyʼs art and performances since the early 1980s, including extensive documentation of solo performances and ensemble productions, and his photographic collaborations with other visual artists.

Pleading in the Blood also includes three newly commissioned essays on different aspects of Atheyʼs work by Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones, and Dominic Johnson. These scholarly essays are complemented by shorter texts byHomi K. Bhabha, Jennifer Doyle, Tim Etchells, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Matthew Goulish, Lydia Lunch, Juliana Snapper, Julie Tolentino, Alex Binnie, Catherine
(Saalfield) Gund, Bruce LaBruce and Catherine Opie, along with a hand-written text from Robert Wilson.

Including new pieces and hard-to-find archival texts. The publication is lavishly illustrated with full-colour images by photographers including Catherine Opie, Manuel Vason, Elyse Regher, Slava Mogutin, Dona Ann McAdams, Bruce LaBruce, Rick Castro, Sheree Rose, Edward Colver, Jennifer Precious Finch, and others, and includes a foreword to the publication written by Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons.

Praise for Pleading in the Blood:

"At long last, Dominic Johnsonʼs book begins the dauntingly exhilarating task of assessing the richly provocative art of Ron Athey. Incorporating Atheyʼs own prose version of his extraordinary childhood, astute critical essays, and moving appreciations from other artists, Pleading in the Blood advances Performance Studies and Art History by forging a mode of commentary expansive enough to address an artist who consistently works to expand the intricate drama of human embodiment. Atheyʼs art refuses the usual distinctions between pleasure and pain, or faith and doubt, and has been both blamed and celebrated for its radical inquiries into the limits and possibilities of queer bodies. Athey emerges from these pages as one of the most compelling theatre artists of our time."--Peggy Phelan, Standford University

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including: gender, sexuality, SM and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

EDMUND WHITE reads from INSIDE A PEARL: MY YEARS IN PARIS

Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris (Bloomsbury Publishing)

From the celebrated author of The Flaneur and City Boy, comes a fabulous new memoir from the iconoclastic Edmund White.

When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn’t speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he’d made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He’d also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he’d come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.

The book’s title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It’s a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

Edmund White is the author of two previous memoirs, My Lives and City Boy, and a previous book on Paris, The Flâneur. His many novels include the autobiographical A Boy’s Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes & His Friend. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. 

SCOTT O'CONNOR reads from HALF WORLD

Half World (Simon & Schuster)

A jaw-dropping page-turner based on real-life events, Half World by Scott O’Connor, a B&N Discover Great New Writers Award winner, is a riveting literary thriller from an author poised for a long and impressive career.

From its official sanction in 1953 to its shutdown in 1973, the CIA clandestinely conducted methods of mind control on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. This covert and illegal operation, Project MKUltra, made national headlines upon the declassification of thousands of documents in 2001. Inspired by these events, O’Connor came to write HALF WORLD, the gripping story of Henry March, a fraying CIA analyst who conducts secret mind-control experiments in San Francisco. With each passing day that Henry spends supervising the hapless men lured into his facility with no idea of what they’re about to endure, his controversial task weighs on him as he struggles between his duty to his country and his responsibility to his wife and children. When the point comes when he can no longer separate himself as the company man from the family man, he makes a decision to vanish into the night, abandoning his family forever and becoming a CIA mystery.

Two decades later, Dickie Ashby, a young, drug-addled CIA agent, is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals who claim to have been abused in a government brainwashing operation years earlier. While the members of the group can’t trust their memories, they know that they need to find Henry March, and that the only bridge to Henry is Hannah: Henry’s once-precocious, sensitive daughter who now owns a photography gallery in the city. Tempted to believe that the burglars are telling the truth, Dickie finds himself torn between doing his job and protecting Hannah, as he is dragged deeper and deeper into the stunning legacy of the Henry’s past experiments.

Scott O’Connor was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of an air-traffic controller and a preschool teacher. An alum of SUNY Brockport, Scott is a co-founder of GO Studios, a post-production and motion graphics design firm, and the author of two novels: Among Wolves and Untouchable, for which he was awarded the 2011 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for fiction. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. Discover more about Scott and Henry March at www.scott-oconnor.comand www.whoishenrymarch.tumblr.com.

WRITEGIRL reads from the anthology YOU ARE HERE

You Are Here (WriteGirl)

WriteGirl is a creative writing and mentoring organization that promotes creativity, critical thinking and leadership skills to empower teen girls. Founded in 2001, WriteGirl pairs under-served girls, ages 13-18, with professional women writers for one-on-one mentoring, workshops and college readiness activities. Through public readings and publication in award-winning, nationally-distributed anthologies girls develop critical writing and public speaking skills and the confidence to make an impact on the world around them.

In 2013, WriteGirl was honored with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the highest national honor awarded to such programs. Executive Director Keren Taylor and mentee Jacqueline Uy, age 16, personally accepted the award from First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.