Skylight Books Podcast Series

SKYLIT: Rebecca Fishow, "THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE" w/ John Colasacco

Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow's debut collection, THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A young woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life's curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths. 

Fishow is in conversation with writer John Colasacco.

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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.

SKYLIT: Nathan Elias, "THE REINCARNATIONS" w/ Alex Thurnher

These loosely connected stories are laced with the familiar and the uncanny, the real and the surreal, the ordinary and the fabulistic. A documentary filmmaker refuses to give up on finding his daughter who mysteriously disappears by the river. A small-time real estate agent recovers from a brief psychotic episode upon discovering his fianc e's affair. An actress struggles to grasp reality when the recordings of lucid dreams are used in movies instead of live performances. An eccentric teenager recounts his first romance from beyond the grave.

Spanning the boundaries of literary and speculative fiction, The Reincarnations revolves around multiple forms of Zenlike rebirth. Equal parts raw emotion and wild imagination, Nathan Elias's debut story collection ushers in an electrifying yet tender new voice in fiction.

Elias is in conversation with writer Alex Thurnher.

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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.

SKYLIT: Susan Buttenwieser, "WE WERE LUCKY WITH THE RAIN" w/ Lyman Clayborn

Susan Buttenwieser’s writing has appeared in numerous publications. We Were Lucky with the Rain is her first book. She teaches creative writing in New York City public schools and to incarcerated women.

Buttenwieser is in conversation with Lyman Clayborn.

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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.

SKYLIT: Abdellah Taïa, "A COUNTRY FOR DYING" w/ Colm Toíbín

Paris, Summer 2010.

Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Abdellah Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future."

 

Taïa is in conversation with renowned writer Colm Toíbín.

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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.

SKYLIT: Ruth Gilligan, "THE BUTCHERS' BLESSING" w/ Amber Starks

Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter. 

The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. For Úna, being a Butcher’s daughter means a life of tangled ambition and incredible loneliness. For her mother, Grá, it’s a life of faith and longing, of performing a promise that she may or may not be able to keep. For nonbeliever Fionn, the Butchers represent a dated and complicated reality, though for his son, Davey, they represent an entirely new world—and potentially new love. For photographer Ronan, the Butchers are ideal subjects: representatives of an older, more folkloric Ireland whose survival is now being tested. As he moves through the countryside, Ronan captures this world image by image—a lake, a cottage, and his most striking photo: a man, hung upside down in a pose of unspeakable violence.

Author Ruth Gilligan is in conversation with writer Amber Sparks.

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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.

SKYLIT: Sudeep Sen, "LITERATURES OF THE ATHROPOCENE" w/ Kiran Bhat

Sudeep Sen is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and "one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene." His prize-winning books include Postmarked India, Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, and many others. He is the editorial director of aark arts and the editor of Atlas.

Sen is in conversation with fellow writer Kiran Bhat.

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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.

SKYLIT: Jared Milrad & Jan West, "BELIEVE IN YOU"

In Believe In You, an intimate and revealing conversation between a mother and son, Jared Milrad and Jan West take a fascinating look at the experiences, moments, and people that have shaped their lives - both together and apart. From Childhood to Marriage to Family, Animals, Activism, Movies, Politics and just about everything in between, Jared and Jan hold no punches as they explore how life, love, and loss shaped their lives and fueled their connections with others. A former staffer for President Barack Obama and a filmmaker who has worked with leaders across Hollywood and beyond, Jared reflects on growing up in a single parent household, coming out as a gay man, pursuing multiple creative passions, and working at the highest levels of politics, nonprofit advocacy, and entertainment. In a free-flowing interview style, Jared explores his mom's remarkable life: growing up in a dysfunctional household, marching for civil and human rights, working through a divorce and difficult relationships, and raising two kids as a single mother on a secretary's salary. It's a conversation rarely had - and even less often recorded - between a parent and child, particularly with such raw honesty, thoughtful reflection, and considered insight into what makes a family's bond truly eternal.

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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.

SKYLIT: Nana-Ama Danquah, "ACCRA NOIR" w/ Anniwaa Buachie

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.

SKYLIT: Tauno Biltsted, "THE ANATOMIST'S TALE" & Caitlin Chung, "SHIP OF FATES"

Tauno Biltsted

Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship’s surgeon—until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar.

Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, Tauno Biltsted's The Anatomist's Tale relates one man’s brush with the heady freedom of outlaws—and the price of returning to “civilization.”

Caitlin Chung

In the gridlocked harbor of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, a ship hung with red paper lanterns draws crowds eager to gamble and drink. Aboard this red-lit ship, the fates of two young women will be altered irrevocably—and tied forever to that of an ancient lighthouse keeper who longs to be free.

Set against the backdrop of Gold Rush–era San Francisco's Chinese immigrant community, Ship of Fates is a coming-of-age fairy tale that stretches across generations.

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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.

SKYLIT: Matthew Medney and John Connelly, "BEYOND KUIPER: THE GALACTIC STAR ALLIANCE"

In Beyond Kuiper: The Galactic Star Alliance, an illustrated novel co- created & written by Matthew Medney (Heavy Metal Magazine CEO & NYU adjunct professor) and John Connelly (Lockheed Martin Aerospace Engineer), humankind acknowledges the vastness of time, the cyclical nature of civilization, and the obscurity of our own history. 

If our galaxy is so full of sentient life, why has no one said hello? We thought of a simple, logical reason: no one wants to. Stepping back and casting an objective eye on ourselves, it seems painfully obvious that humans lack a fundamental respect for our planet and for each other. We possess extremely short memories and long grudges, and the likelihood of receiving alien tools to hasten our expansion seems downright foolhardy.

The Galactic Star Alliance has been alive and well for millions of earth years. Hundreds of thousands of sentient worlds and trillions of beings walk, run, and crawl across the many home worlds of the Alliance. This revelation led to many questions: How is faster-than-light speed travel possible, and could cohesive, interstellar civilizations exist without it? Is it conceivable to govern a coalition not of different countries, but of different species? Each question led to another and each answer built our world, piece by piece until it spanned thousands of answers and millions of light-years. As for the title, from where would our judges watch us?

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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.

SKYLIT: Mauro Javier Cárdenas, "APHASIA" w/ Jeremy M. Davies

Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister—even though he knows he won’t be able to avoid thinking about his sister—because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what’s been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that’s allowed him to stay close to his two daughters.

In fact, he’s busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister’s state of mind without completely destroying his own.

Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought—scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard—Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.

Cárdenas is in conversation with writer and editor Jeremy M. Davies.

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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.

SKYLIT: Adam Goodman, "THE DEPORTATION MACHINE" w/ Romeo Guzmán

Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time.

In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms--formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations--and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, The Deportation Machine introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion.

Goodman is in conversation with academic, public historian, and cultural worker Romeo Guzmán.

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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.

SKYLIT: Emily Schultz, "LITTLE THREATS"

In the summer of 1993, twin sisters Kennedy and Carter Wynn are embracing the grunge era and testing every limit in their privileged Richmond suburb. But Kennedy's teenage rebellion goes too far when, after a night of partying in the woods, her best friend, Haley, is murdered, and suspicion quickly falls upon Kennedy. She can't remember anything about the night in question, and this, along with the damning testimony from a college boy who both Kennedy and Haley loved, is enough to force Kennedy to enter a guilty plea.

In 2008, Kennedy is released into a world that has moved on without her. Carter has grown distant as she questions Kennedy's innocence, and begins a relationship with someone who could drive the sisters apart forever. The twins' father, Gerry, is eager to protect the family's secrets and fragile bonds. But Kennedy's return brings the tragedy back to the surface, along with a whole new wave of media. When a crime show host comes to town asking questions, believing the murder wasn't as simple as it seemed, murky memories of Haley's death come to light. As new suspects emerge and the suburban woods finally give up their secrets, two families may be destroyed again.

Little Threats author Emily Schultz is in conversation with Skylight's own Agnes Borinsky.

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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.

SKYLIT: Stephanie LaCava, "THE SUPERRATIONALS" w/ Sasha Sagan

Over the course of a few days in the fall of 2015, the sophisticated and awkward, wry and beautiful Mathilde upends her tidy world. She takes a short leave from her job at one of New York's leading auction houses and follows her best friend Gretchen on an impromptu trip to Paris. While there, she confronts her late mother's hidden life, attempts to rein in Gretchen's encounters with an aloof and withholding sometime-boyfriend, and faces the traumatic loss of both her parents when she was a teenager.

Reeling between New York, Paris, Munich London, and Berlin, The Superrationals is an erotic and darkly comic story about female friendship, set at the intersection between counterculture and the multimillion dollar art industry. Mathilde takes short, perceptive notes on artworks as a way to organize her own chaotic thoughts and life. Featuring a bitchy gossip chorus within a larger carousel of voices, The Superrationals coolly surveys the international art and media worlds while exploring game theory, the uncanny, and psychoanalysis. Written in the “Young Girl” tradition of Michelle Bernstein's All The King's Horses, Bernadette Corporation's Reena Spaulings and Natasha Stagg's Surveys, The Superrationals confronts the complexity of building narrative in life and on the page and the instability that lies at the heart of everything.

Author Stephanie LaCava is in conversation with writer/filmmaker/TV producer/editor Sasha Sagan.

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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.

SKYLIT: Johnny Ray Huston & Bradford Nordeen, "BECAUSE HORROR"

BECAUSE HORROR is a collection of 13 essays (incl. one poem) that mixes critical writing and memoir to explore horror movies and how they haunt memory. Bringing the glee of fandom into cinema scholarship, BECAUSE HORROR promiscuously sways through titles like MESSIAH OF EVIL, PULSE, MANDY, DANTE'S COVE and SCRE4M, with prose that spreads sticky like louche gore over the history of a genre and its mutating sites of broadcast. 

 

Written between August 1 and September 14, 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, the chapbook was an exercise in immediacy and a breakneck volley of ideas between Huston and Nordeen who live in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. Huston’s chapters span The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, Tourist Trap, Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind, Mandy, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (Pulse) and its TIFF premiere on September 10 of 2001, and a survey of films that lead with the directive, Don’t… Nordeen’s essays broach Deathdream, Blood Diner, Play It As It Lays vs. Messiah of Evil, horror movie posters in the video rental market of the 1990s, what Scre4m looks like on ketamine and an original poem inspired by the gay supernatural soap opera Dante’s Cove. The chapbook features original artwork by Hedi El Kholti, who also penned an afterward, concerning hotel horror. Still lives by Abdi Taslimi.

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.

 

Bradford Nordeen is a writer, curator and founder of the non-profit organization, Dirty Looks Inc. He has written for Frieze, Art in America and Butt Magazine, and is a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. His publications include FEVER PITCH, CHECK YOUR VERNACULAR and four issues of the Dirty Looks Volume series (editor).

 

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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.