Skylight Books Podcast Series

Laila Lalami, "THE OTHER AMERICANS" w/ Charles Finch

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami comes The Other Americans, a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant--at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

Late one spring night, as Driss Guerraoui is walking across a darkened intersection in California, he's killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. 

As the characters--deeply divided by race, religion, and class--tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love--messy and unpredictable--is born.

Lalami is in conversation with Charles Finch, bestselling author of the Charles Lenox mysteries.

Sally Rooney, "NORMAL PEOPLE" w/ Karolina Waclawiak

Sally Rooney’s award-winning and critically lauded debut novel, Conversations with Friends, introduced her as a fiercely intelligent new voice in literary fiction and set the book world buzzing. Praised by the likes of Zadie Smith, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Celeste Ng, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award–winning author has been hailed as “the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love and late capitalism.” Now, Rooney brings her remarkable psychological acuity and sharp, exacting prose to her highly anticipated second novel, Normal People.

Marianne and Connell grow up in the same small town in Ireland, but they live in different worlds. Connell is the school’s top football player, a star student, popular and admired. Marianne is a stubborn outcast, uninterested in winning the affection of her peers. Unbeknown to their classmates, Marianne’s family employs Connell’s mother as a cleaner. Despite the gulf separating their social and economic lives, the teenagers share an undeniable connection, and the two embark on a relationship that will test the limits of what they know about each other—and themselves. When Connell and Marianne are both accepted to study at Trinity College, their dynamic is turned upside down. Marianne thrives in the rarefied social life she finds on campus, while Connell hovers on the periphery, fumbling to find his footing. As they confront the power and danger of intimacy throughout their years in college, they are forced to find out how far they will go to save each other.

Rooney is in conversation with Karolina Waclawiak, author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms and THE INVADERS.

Kenji C. Liu and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Kenji C. Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. In Monsters I Have Been, Liu also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today’s dominant hypermasculinity. By challenging perceived gender norms with his playful, yet poignant, new form, the reader is directed toward a wider, more inclusive definition ofwhat it means to be a "man."

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.

These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

Michael DeForge, "LEAVING RICHARD'S VALLEY"

When a group of outcasts have to leave the valley, how will they survive the toxicity of the big city?

Richard is a benevolent but tough leader. He oversees everything that happens in the valley, and everyone loves him for it. When Lyle the Raccoon becomes sick, his friends—Omar the Spider, Neville the Dog, and Ellie Squirrel—take matters into their own hands, breaking Richard’s strict rules. Caroline Frog rats them out to Richard and they are immediately exiled from the only world they’ve ever known.

Michael DeForge’s Leaving Richard’s Valley expands from a bizarre hero’s quest into something more. As this ragtag group makes their way out of the valley, and then out of the park and into the big city, we see them coming to terms with different kinds of community: noise-rockers, gentrification protesters, squatters, and more. DeForge is idiosyncratically funny but also deeply insightful about community, cults of personality, and the condo-ization of cities. These eye-catching and sometimes absurd comics coalesce into a book that questions who our cities are for and how we make community in a capitalist society.

Six Years of Unnamed Press w/ Mukherjee, Nemett, & Decker

Join us for a celebration of Los Angeles's own Unnamed Press featuring their two most recent releases: The Body Myth by Rheea Mukherjee and We Can Save Us All by Adam Nemett. 

Mukherjee and Nemett are in conversation with actress and director Josephine Decker.

G. Willow Wilson, "THE BIRD KING"

It’s 1491 and a party representing the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrives to negotiate the terms of the sultan’s surrender, but Hassan has a secret—he can make maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality with his pen and paper. His magical gift, which has proven useful to the sultan’s armies in wartime and entertained a bored Fatima who has never stepped foot outside the palace walls, could now be seen as sorcery and a threat to the Christian Spanish rule. Fatima befriends one of the women, little realizing that her new friend Luz represents the Inquisition and soon Fatima must risk everything to save Hassan, and taste the freedom she has never known.

As Fatima and Hassan flee the forces of the Inquistion in search of safe harbor, they are helped along the way by a jinn who has taken a liking to them—Vikram the Vampire, who readers may remember from Alif the Unseen.

The Bird King is an epic adventure from an essential voice in American fiction. It is a jubilant story that challenges us to consider what true love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

Aatif Rashid, "Portrait of Sebastian Khan"

For art-loving (and lady-loving) Sebastian Khan, does college really have to end?

Sebastian Khan is 380 days away from the end of college. An art history major with a fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites and a dislike of long-term commitments (romantic and otherwise), Sebastian starts dating Fatima, who’s determined to transition smoothly from campus life to a stable white-collar professional career. Sebastian’s membership in Model United Nations, though, takes him to colleges across North America, foisting upon him all manner of temptations and testing his commitment to Fatima and his readiness for adulthood.

Part satire of college life circa 2011 and part serious exploration of art’s fundamental unreality, Portrait of Sebastian Khan is a humorous coming-of-age novel about a charismatic but emotionally stunted Muslim American Don Draper, who wins as many hearts as he breaks.

Mark Doten, "TRUMP SKY ALPHA" w/ Nathan Deuel

Twice a week, the president pilots his ultraluxury airship Trump Sky Alpha between DC, NYC, and Mar-a-Lago, delivering a streaming YouTube address to the nation. In this speech he trumpets his successes and blasts his enemies, until one day his words plunge the world into nuclear war. One year later, with 90 percent of the world’s population destroyed, a journalist named Rachel has taken refuge in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone. Rachel accepts an assignment to document the final throes of humor on the internet in those moments before the war, hoping along the way to discover the final resting place of her wife and daughter.

What she uncovers in an archive of the internet’s remnants, hidden amid spiraling memes and Twitter jokes, are references to a little-known book that inspired a shadowy hacktivist group called the Aviary. Their role in the downfall of the internet, and the enigmatic presence of a figure known only as Birdcrash, take on immense and terrifying dimensions as Rachel ventures further into the ruins of the internet. Mark Doten, author of The Infernal, brilliantly details how the internet has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, laying the groundwork for the tumult of our current political moment and for the future headed our way.

Doten is in conversation with Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East.

Ali Liebegott, "THE SUMMER OF DEAD THINGS"

how does a person dislodge the scenes
that burn inside them like arsoned cars?

Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the road: Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World.

This autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Things, is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life. 

Liebegott is joined in conversation by 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.

Chris Cander, "THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO"

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates with her young family from Russia to America, at her husband's frantic insistence, and her piano is lost in the shuffle.

In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, which is complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a fire that burned their house down: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Orphaned, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who in his car-repair shop trained her to become a first-rate mechanic, much to the surprise of her subsequent customers. But this work, her true mainstay in a scattered life, is put on hold when her hand gets broken while the piano's being moved--and in sudden frustration she chooses to sell it. And what becomes crucial is who the most interested party turns out to be...

 

UC Irvine MFA Student Reading 2019

Please join us for an evening with UC Irvine MFA students Mason Boyles, Justine Yan, Katherine Damm, and Daniel Levin as they read from their work. 

Marlon James, "BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF"

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Nikki Darling, "FADE INTO YOU"

In this debut work of autofiction, high school junior Nikki Darling roams the uncanny suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. Nikki is ambivalent about her grades and even about showing up for class, instead flitting between a series of irresponsible and nominally illegal adolescent experiences. Left to her own devices by absent parents, she flings herself into punk music and counterculture, hoping to evade the intergenerational silence passed down through the women in her family. Fade Into You is a poignant reminder of how it feels to be a young girl both trapped and set free by looming future expectations, and a tribute to the discomfort and joy of growing up in the in-between—between Mexican and white, earnest and unruly, street smart and vulnerable.

Johannes Lichtman, "SUCH GOOD WORK"

The year is 2015. Jonas might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age twenty-eight, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like, visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student—and a difficult place to be a drug addict.

He goes to Malmö, a city trying to cope with the arrival of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. Driven by an existential need to “do good,” Jonas volunteers with an organization that teaches Swedish to the desperate and idling young refugees. But a friendship with one young refugee, Aziz, will force Jonas to question whether “doing good” can actually help another person.

A resplendent work of autofiction, Johannes Lichtman's Such Good Work uses dark humor and pathos to consider the complexity of being a good person in our modern world, as well as the effects of nationalism and identity politics in a time when conversations around migrant policies are vital and omnipresent.

Brontez Purnell, "THE NIGHTLIFE OF JACUZZI GASKET" w/ Beth Pickens

Whiting Award-winning author Brontez Purnell’s first children’s book tells the story of a child charged with caring for his baby brother when his mom is out at night.

In The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett, 11-year-old Jacuzzi is an introspective and imaginative child who loves taking care of his 11-month-old baby brother. When their mom goes out for a date with her boyfriend, he watches his sibling and entertains himself. Readers are taken inside Jacuzzi Gaskett’s precocious mind, where he thinks about the classmates who don’t get him, all the books that have taken him to faraway places, and “sometimes misses his dad.”

Purnell is in conversation with Beth Pickens, an artist, writer, and mother living in Brooklyn.