Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Chavisa Woods, "100 TIMES" w/ Michelle Tea
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Friday Aug 30, 2019
Lambda-nominated and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Chavisa Woods presents one hundred personal stories of sexism, harassment, discrimination, and assault. Recounting her experiences with gender-based discrimination, unsolicited groping, and sexual violence--beginning in childhood, through the present--Woods lays out clear and unflinching vignettes that build in intensity as the number of times grows. Individually, and especially taken as a whole, these stories amount to powerful proof that sexual violence and discrimination are never just one-time occurrences, but part of a constant battle women and non-binary people face every day.
In these extraordinary pages, sexual violence and gendered-discrimination happen to people regardless of their age, in all parts of society, in rural and urban areas alike, in the US and abroad, from the time they are very young and through adulthood. Demonstrating how often people are conditioned to endure sexism and harassment, and how thoroughly men feel entitled to women’s spaces and bodies, 100 Times challenges the common, damaging belief that sexism and misogyny are no longer problems within our society.
Woods is in conversation with michelle tea, the author of the young adult novels Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as numerous books for grown-ups.
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
Susan Straight, "IN THE COUNTRY OF WOMEN" w/ Patt Morrison
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.
A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.
Straight is in conversation with Patt Morrison, a Los Angeles Times writer and columnist with a share of two Pulitzer Prizes.
Monday Aug 05, 2019
Lisa Taddeo, "THREE WOMEN" w/ Clarissa Cruz
Monday Aug 05, 2019
Monday Aug 05, 2019
Lina, a homemaker in suburban Indiana, is a decade into a passionless marriage when she embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming and transforms her life. Sloane, a glamorous entrepreneur in the northeast, is married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. Maggie, a high school student in North Dakota, begins a relationship with her English teacher that will have extraordinary consequences for them both—as well as the community in which they live.
For nearly a decade, Lisa Taddeo, an award-winning journalist and longtime contributor to New York magazine and Esquire, embedded herself with Three Women to write this deeply immersive account of their erotic lives and longings. The result—shocking, powerful, and timely—reads like George Packer’s The Unwinding, but for the state of female desire. Three Women is a major work from an exhilarating new voice.
Taddeo is in conversation with Clarissa Cruz, Features Editor at Entertainment Weekly.
Tuesday Jul 09, 2019
Darrel McLeod, "MAMASKATCH"
Tuesday Jul 09, 2019
Tuesday Jul 09, 2019
As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. There he is surrounded by her tales of joy and horror—of the strong men in their family, of her love for Darrel, and of the cruelty she and her sisters endured in residential school—as well as his many siblings and cousins, and the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea. And there young Darrel learns to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that will guide him throughout his life.
But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Sweet and eager to please, Darrel struggles to maintain his grades and pursue interests in music and science while changing homes, witnessing domestic violence, caring for his younger siblings, and suffering abuse at the hands of his brother-in-law. Meanwhile, he begins to question and grapple with his sexual identity—a reckoning complicated by the repercussions of his abuse and his sibling’s own gender transition.
Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch—“It’s a wonder!” in Cree—is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next, and an uplifting story of one individual who overcame enormous obstacles in pursuit of a fulfilling and adventurous life.
Tuesday Jun 18, 2019
Jen Pastiloff, "ON BEING HUMAN" w/ Lidia Yuknavitch
Tuesday Jun 18, 2019
Tuesday Jun 18, 2019
Jennifer Pastiloff shares the transformative experiences and challenges that have shaped her into the resilient, passionate woman she is today, including losing her father at an early age, battling an eating disorder and depression, reluctantly accepting her hearing loss, discovering the healing power of yoga, writing, and human connection, and learning to believe in herself and her ability to help others. She explores how thirteen years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.
Through her journey, Pastiloff conveys a powerful experience that most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told “I got you,” a sentiment that now lies at the core of her work. Her bold yet relatable ideas have won her a loyal social media following and thousands of devotees who often travel across the globe to attend her workshops and retreats.Exuberant, beautifully written, and extraordinarily brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt.
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Josh Levin, "THE QUEEN" w/ Julia Turner
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Slate editor Josh Levin's masterful account of the life and crimes of America's original "welfare queen" is "an invaluable work of nonfiction" (David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon).
On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship-after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody-not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan-seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery.
Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of the color of her skin. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. The Queen tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.
Levin is in conversation with Julia Turner, the deputy managing editor for arts and entertainment at the Los Angeles Times.
Wednesday Jun 12, 2019
Malaka Gharib, "I WAS THEIR AMERICAN DREAM" w/ Michael Nailat
Wednesday Jun 12, 2019
Wednesday Jun 12, 2019
One part Mari Andrew, one part Marjane Satrapi, I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir is a triumphant tale of self-discovery, a celebration of a family's rich heritage, and a love letter to American immigrant freedom. Malaka Gharib's illustrations come alive with teenage antics and earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised.
Malaka's upbringing will look familiar to anyone who grew up in the pre-internet era, but her particular story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dream s themselves, Malaka navigates her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.
Gharib is in conversation with Michael Nairat, aka Producer Mike, aka DJ waxstyles, who has zero formal training in DJing or producing, but is somehow still allowed to do both.
Monday Jun 10, 2019
Pat Thomas and Michael Heath, "MY WEEK BEATS YOUR YEAR"
Monday Jun 10, 2019
Monday Jun 10, 2019
My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed features 30+ interviews spanning his solo career, from the golden era of print rock-journalism, to the first online blogs. The compilation is one fan’s humble attempt to move beyond the Bangs canon, and delve deeper into the distance and intimacy, cactus and mercury, that constituted Lou’s post-Velvet Underground public media image.
This anthology will be an intimate portrait of Reed who, in addition to being notoriously prickly (to put it mildly), was also intelligent, articulate, and deeply passionate about what was important to him, both as a person and as a creative artist.
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, "LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT"
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.
Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes "Goodbye to All This" (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and "My Suicide" (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.
Wednesday Apr 24, 2019
T. Kira Madden, "LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS" w/ Allie Rowbottom
Wednesday Apr 24, 2019
Wednesday Apr 24, 2019
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.
With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.
Madden is in conversation with Allie Rowbottom, author of Jell-O Girls.