Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Saturday Jul 18, 2020
Saturday Jul 18, 2020
In the lucky number 13th episode of the podcast, Mick and Maddie let off a little bit of steam before we head over to her interview with Eden Hain of Junior High Los Angeles, an arts-centered non-profit.
Friday Jul 17, 2020
Friday Jul 17, 2020
Subduction by Kristen Millares Young
Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and a betrayal by her sister, in the throes of a midlife freefall, Latina anthropologist Claudia Ranks retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of her guide, a spirited hoarder named Maggie. But when, spurred by his mother’s failing memory, Maggie’s prodigal son Peter returns seeking answers to his father’s murder, Claudia discovers in him the abandon she craves. Through the passionate and violent collision of these two outsiders, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their imperfect attempts to find community on the Makah Indian Reservation.
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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.
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Marva Sheridan was born ready for this day. She's always been driven to make a difference in the world, and what better way than to vote in her first election?
Duke Crenshaw is so done with this election. He just wants to get voting over with so he can prepare for his band's first paying gig tonight.
Only problem? Duke can't vote.
When Marva sees Duke turned away from their polling place, she takes it upon herself to make sure his vote is counted. She hasn't spent months doorbelling and registering voters just to see someone denied their right.
And that's how their whirlwind day begins, rushing from precinct to precinct, cutting school, waiting in endless lines, turned away time and again, trying to do one simple thing: vote. They may have started out as strangers, but as Duke and Marva team up to beat a rigged system (and find Marva's missing cat), it's clear that there's more to their connection than a shared mission for democracy.
Romantic and triumphant, The Voting Booth is proof that you can't sit around waiting for the world to change?but some things are just meant to be.
Author Brandy Colbert is in conversation with Nina Lacour, author of the widely acclaimed Hold Still, The Disenchantments, and Everything Leads to You, and the Michael L. Printz Award-winner, We Are Okay.
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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.
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Mick and Maddie return to the Handsell after a couple weeks off to talk about the viral Chris Pine photo and use it to remind everyone to WEAR YOUR DAMN MASKS! Then Maddie interviews the Los Angeles Public LIbrary's Jennifer Siron about the legendary Street Fleet! Good ep, good ep.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger”; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.
Koestenbaum is in conversation with Maggie Nelson, author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, The Red Parts, and Jane: A Murder.
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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 Jul 03, 2020
Friday Jul 03, 2020
When ex-CIA agent Vera Kelly loses her job and her girlfriend in a single day, she reluctantly goes into business as a private detective. Heartbroken and cash-strapped, she takes a case that dredges up dark memories and attracts dangerous characters from across the Cold War landscape. Before it’s over, she’ll chase a lost child through foster care and follow a trail of Dominican exiles to the Caribbean. Forever looking over her shoulder, she nearly misses what’s right in front of her: her own desire for home, connection, and a new romance at the local bar.
In Vera Kelly is Not a Mystery, the exciting second installment of the Vera Kelly series, Rosalie Knecht challenges and deepens the Vera we love: a woman of sparkling wit, deep moral fiber, and martini-dry humor who knows how to follow a case even as she struggles to follow her heart.
The “splendid genre-pushing” (People) Vera Kelly series returns in full force as our recently out-of-the-spy-game heroine travels from Brooklyn to a sprawling countryside estate in the Caribbean in her first case as a private investigator.
Knecht is joined in conversation by Amy Stewart, best-selling author of the Kopp Sisters series, which are based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs and her two rambunctious sisters.
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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 Jul 03, 2020
Friday Jul 03, 2020
Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest divulges the clandestine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today.
Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli began the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits.
Rastrelli is in conversation with Janet Finch, author of White Oleander and teacher of fiction writing.
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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.
Wednesday Jul 01, 2020
Wednesday Jul 01, 2020
Skylight Events are now on Crowdcast!
Our Crowdcast debut features Sara Sligar (Take Me Apart) and Amy Jo Burns (Shiner) in conversation, discussing their respective books.
A young archivist’s obsession with her subject’s mysterious death threatens to destroy her fragile grasp on sanity, in a riveting debut novel of psychological suspense
When the famed photographer Miranda Brand died mysteriously at the height of her career, it sent shock waves through Callinas, California. Decades later, old wounds are reopened when her son, Theo, hires the ex-journalist Kate Aitken to create an archive of his mother’s work.
From Miranda’s vast maze of personal effects, Kate pieces together a portrait of a vibrant artist buckling under the pressures of ambition, motherhood, and marriage. As the summer progresses, Kate navigates vicious local rumors and her growing attraction to the enigmatic Theo, all while unearthing the shocking details of Miranda’s private life. But Kate has secrets of her own, and when she stumbles across a diary that may finally resolve the mystery of Miranda’s death, her curiosity starts to spiral into a dangerous obsession.
On a lush mountaintop trapped in time, two women vow to protect each other at all costs-and one young girl must defy her father to survive.
An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors-except for her mother’s lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren’s father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother.
But over the course of one summer, a miracle performed by Wren’s father quickly turns to tragedy. As the order of her world begins to shatter, Wren must uncover the truth of her father’s mysterious legend and her mother’s harrowing history and complex bond with her best friend. And with that newfound knowledge, Wren can imagine a different future for herself than she has been told to expect.
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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.
Monday Jun 29, 2020
Monday Jun 29, 2020
Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation-and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way. Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and others, the emphasis throughout is lucid writing, imagination, and brevity. Object Lessons paints a picture of the world around us, and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time.
Our readers are Dinah Lenney, Steve Mentz, Steven E. Jones, Rolf Halden, and Erik Anderson.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Saturday Jun 27, 2020
Saturday Jun 27, 2020
We're taking a break from producing Handsell episodes for a bit, so we're going to give you guys an extra Skylit episode to get you through the weekend!
On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis — the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company — may have committed murder.
The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than ten” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.
A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers’ tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. A Silent Fury is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.
Herrera is in conversation with John Gibler, author of TORN FROM THE WORLD.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Bethany C. Morrow's A Song Below Water is the story for today’s readers — a captivating modern fantasy about black mermaids, friendship, and self-discovery set against the challenges of today's racism and sexism. In a society determined to keep her under lock and key, Tavia must hide her siren powers.
Meanwhile, Effie is fighting her own family struggles, pitted against literal demons from her past. Together, these best friends must navigate through the perils of high school’s junior year. But everything changes in the aftermath of a siren murder trial that rocks the nation, and Tavia accidentally lets out her magical voice at the worst possible moment.
Soon, nothing in Portland, Oregon, seems safe. To save themselves from drowning, it’s only Tavia and Effie’s unbreakable sisterhood that proves to be the strongest magic of all.
Morrow is in conversation with Mark Oshiro, the author of Anger is a Gift.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
Publisher Pedro Jiménez and translator Matthew Gleeson get together to discuss the first-ever English translation of José Revueltas's "most accomplished and controversial novel," Earthly Days.
Like Joyce, Revueltas allows the reader to view the inner depths of his characters; like Proust, he meticulously examines memories, thoughts, and feelings; like Dostoyevsky, he focuses his gaze on the darkest passages of the soul; like Sartre, he dwells on the nausea of existence; and like Simone de Beauvoir, he reflects on the possibility of a new woman, leftist and liberated. Revueltas preceded writers of the Latin American boom such as Cort zar, Garc a M rquez, and even Juan Rulfo, authors who achieved the reputation and fame that Revueltas was denied. If one may have differences with his style or ideology, the structure of the book is impeccable. Each chapter is a perfect story, woven together by an Ariadne-like thread that unites all parts. To conceptually define the book, I would have to coin the oxymoronic term "existentialist Marxism," because Revueltas never ceased to be a disciple of Marx; nevertheless, his vision of humanity is brutally negative and ferocious. In a world bereft of God, all that was left for him to describe was our earthly days, "atrocious human life.
Monday Jun 22, 2020
Monday Jun 22, 2020
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Meredith Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community.
She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni’s Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.
Talusan is joined in conversation by Amber Tamblyn, an Emmy and Golden globe nominated actress, writer, director, and the author of six books.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Happy belated Juneteenth everyone! Mick and Maddie are joined by Yves to talk about the holiday and give an update on Skylight's new browsing policy. Later, Maddie interviews Lambda Literary's Deputy Director, William Johnson.
What We're Reading:
Maddie: Luster by Raven Leilani
Mick: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Yves: Whore Foods by L.A. Warman
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Friday Jun 19, 2020
Friday Jun 19, 2020
"Charles Flowers' long-awaited collection, The Idea of Him, evokes the implacable power of desire, from its earliest appearance in boyhood to the ache of adult experience. These wrenchingly honest, beautifully felt poems make clear nothing less than the soul hunger that lies deep in the body's dreams."—Joan Larkin
Flowers is in conversation with Blas Falconer, the author of Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, A Question of Gravity and Light, and The Perfect Hour.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.