Skylight Books Podcast Series

Lydia Kiesling, "THE GOLDEN STATE" w/ Edan Lepucki

In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent--her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error"--Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity.

But clarity proves elusive. Over the next ten days Daphne is anxious, she behaves a little erratically, she drinks too much. She wanders the town looking for anyone and anything to punctuate the long hours alone with the baby. Among others, she meets Cindy, a neighbor who is active in a secessionist movement, and befriends the elderly Alice, who has traveled to Altavista as she approaches the end of her life. When her relationships with these women culminate in a dangerous standoff, Daphne must reconcile her inner narrative with the reality of a deeply divided world.

Kiesling is in conversation with Edan Lepucki, the bestselling author of novels California and Woman No. 17.

Peter Gadol, "THE STRANGER GAME"

The word ‘follow’ seems to have lost its meaning in the digital age. Now, when someone is following you on Instagram or Twitter, it’s hardly cause for alarm. But Peter Gadol begs an eerie question in his sixth novel, The Stranger Game: What if those ‘following’ you on social media brought back the literal meaning of the word… What if they started following you in real life?

In the age of social media, humanity is, at large, lonely. This includes Rebecca and her boyfriend, Ezra, a fan of the viral sensation “the stranger game"; The games, in which players literally follow strangers in their day-to-day lives has swept the nation and disappearances – including Ezra’s – are reported as players drift aimlessly from subject to subject. Hoping to find him, Rebecca tried the game and meets Carey. As their relationship and game play deepen, Rebecca uncovers an unsettling subculture that has infiltrated her world. Playing the stranger game may lead her closer to Ezra, but also further from the life she once lived.

Riddled with Patricia Highsmith-like anxiety and the alienation of Paul Auster, The Stranger Game is a haunting tale of literary suspense about a viral game spinning perilously – and criminally – out of control.

WNBA/LA: National Reading Group Month

WNBA/LA celebrates National Reading Group Month with a special Women in Media panel, featuring Gretchen Bonaduce (Surviving Agent Orange), Laura Dave (Hello Sunshin), and Robinne Lee (The Idea of You), with moderator Ezina Le Blanc.

Anne-Marie Kinney, "COLDWATER CANYON" w/ Anthony Miller

Shep has been dealt a bad hand in life. Halfheartedly raised by a cold grandmother and chronically ill following his deployment in Desert Storm, he self-medicates with alcohol and daydreams of salvation at the hands of women—ultimately landing on one woman in particular: Lila, the young actress he believes is his daughter despite all evidence to the contrary. As Shep navigates the mystically rendered streets and strip malls of the San Fernando Valley with his only companion, his dog Lionel, he takes increasingly desperate measures to insinuate himself into her life. Anne-Marie Kinney’s precise and considered prose examines the insistence on reshaping the past through the lens of one’s own trauma and conceived desires as a means of moving forward. Why do we so often look for solace and redemption through others, pushing ourselves to do anything for them, even when it harms everyone involved?

Kinney is in conversation with writer, critic, and independent scholar Anthony Miller.

LAMBDA Litfest: "Queer Writing"

Young queer writers yearn for queer teachers for a variety of reasons: to be seen and acknowledged, to find role models, to work in spaces that include their voices. On this panel, queer writing teachers from UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program will read excerpts from their recent work, and then discuss how queerness factors into their teaching of both straight and queer students.

The teachers included in the panel: Noel Alumit, Antonia Crane, Seth Fischer, Charles Jensen, and Mathew Rodriguez.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, "THE SHAPE OF THE RUINS"

The Shape of the Ruins is Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s highly anticipated, deeply personal masterpiece that is being heralded as the most ambitious novel of his career. For the first time Vásquez puts himself at the center of the story—the narrator is a novelist also named Juan Gabriel Vásquez—one that unspools a tangled mystery of political conspiracy, brutal assassinations, and dangerous secrets lost to memory.

Diana Arterian and Allie Rowbottom

Playing Monster :: Seiche is a book-length poem by Diana Arterian that incessantly dodges between two narratives: the speaker's childhood experiences with an abusive father and, as an adult, increasingly aggressive acts made toward her mother by strange men. It is a piece of noir poetics. It is also memoir and documentary. Through tight, spare poems, Arterian's unflinching descriptions of difficult life experiences fight aestheticization, engaging directly with the events as through the poetry of witness.

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story.

Jeanne McCulloch, "ALL HAPPY FAMILIES" w/ Laurie Winer

A lifetime in the making, All Happy Families is Jeanne McCulloch’s entry into the other side of the literary process. As a former managing editor of the Paris Review and an editor at Tin House, she’s nurtured the early careers of an all-star roster of writers including David Foster Wallace, Ann Patchett, Jeffrey Eugenides, among others. Now she is ready to share her clear-eyed account of her struggle to find her own voice and finally tell her own story. Impressionistic, lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All Happy Families is an unforgettable look at a world where all that glitters on the surface is not gold, and each unhappy family is ultimately unhappy in its own unique way.

McCulloch is in conversation Laurie Winer, founding editor of the L.A. Review of Books.

Katya Apekina, "THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH" w/ Michelle Huneven

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish is a bold epistolary novel tracking two teenage girls in the wake of their mother’s failed suicide attempt, when they are sent to live with their estranged father, a celebrated writer, in New York City. With a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of Edie and Mae as they each crave the attention of a parent they can’t—and shouldn’t—have to themselves.

Moving from the Louisiana countryside to the sidewalks of New York City, the Civil Rights era to the trendy art scene of the ’90s, Katya Apekina crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession, and in so doing heralds her arrival as a fierce and fresh new literary talent.

Apekina is joined in conversation by Michelle Huneven, author of four novels, including Blame and Off Course.

Rebecca Serle, "THE DINNER LIST" w/ Gabrielle Zevin

Pick five people - dead or alive - to have dinner with for just one night. For Sabrina Nielsen, the five people she chose years ago for such a game just happen to show up at her birthday dinner.

Sabrina’s ex-boyfriend, estranged father, best friend, favorite college professor and Audrey Heburn are all guests on The Dinner List.

Through Rebecca Serle’s enchanting writing, this delicious novel combines the whimsy of first love with an exploration into what it takes to make a relationship work. With a romance impossible to resist and a vivid group of dining guests, Serle’s novel asks what really matters when it comes to love.

Serle is joined in conversation by Gabrielle Zevin, author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Young Jane Young, as well as the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women.

Claudia Dey, "HEARTBREAKER"

Pony Darlene Fontaine is 15 years old, on the phone with her best friend watching Teen Psychic when her mother, Billie Jean Fontaine, leaves her bedroom for the first time in months. Billie Jean walks out of the front door, gets in her truck, and vanishes. The Territory, population 400, is a settlement founded decades ago by a charismatic cult leader, and it has been cut off from the world ever since. The residents of this strange town think the year is 1985. They crimp their hair, wear shoulder pads, listen to Whitesnake on their Walkmans, and have no contact with anyone from the outside world. Except for Billie Jean, the first stranger they took in as their own. And now, Pony fears, Billie Jean has become the first resident to leave.

Heartbreaker is a novel about the deeply moving relationship between a mother and a daughter—and about the dark secrets they kept from one another. When Billie Jean disappears, Pony and her father frantically try to piece together memories from the months leading up to her disappearance and make sense of her actions. The search for Billie Jean takes us on a high-voltage ride through the complex impulses of the human heart.

Told through three unforgettable points of view––Billie Jean’s daughter, her killer dog, and her mysterious friend––Claudia Day's novel is as devastating as it is touching and funny. With electrifying prose, it gradually reveals a portrait of a woman who must keep secrets and reinvent herself in order to survive, and a daughter who will do whatever it takes to untangle those mysteries to find her beloved mother.

Leah Dieterich, "VANISHING TWINS"

 

“It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?”

As long as she can remember, Leah Dieterich has had the mysterious feeling that she’s been searching for a twin—that she belongs as one of an intimate pair. It begins with friends, dance partners, and her own reflection in the mirror as she studies ballet growing up; continues with physical and emotional attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, whom she moves across the country for, and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions she can’t answer about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage.

How does a young couple make room for their individual desires, their evolving selfhoods, and their artistic ambitions while building a life together? Can they pursue other sexual partners, even live in separate cities, and keep their original passionate bond alive? Vanishing Twins looks for answers in psychology, science, pop culture, art, architecture, Greek mythology, dance, and language to create a lucid, suspenseful portrait of a woman testing the limits and fluidities of love.

Dieterich is joined in conversation by Sarah Manguso, author of seven books, including 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay.

 

David Ulin, "THE LOST ART OF READING"

The new introduction and afterword bring fresh relevance to this insightful rumination on the act of reading--as a path to critical thinking, individual and political identity, civic engagement, and resistance.

Former LA Times book critic David Ulin expands his short book The Lost Art of Reading, rich in ideas, on the consequence of reading to include the considerations of fake news, siloed information, and the connections between critical thinking as the key component of engaged citizenship and resistance. Here is the case for reading as a political act in both public and private gestures, and for the ways it enlarges the world and our frames of reference, all the while keeping us engaged.

Thomas Page McBee, "AMATEUR" w/ Ann Friedman

In Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, Thomas Page McBee, the first transgender man to ever box in Madison Square Garden, explores his relationship to violence as experienced in a man’s body, while wrestling with the larger issue of what healthy masculinity might look like in our society.

From every incident of gun violence, to every instance of publicized sexual harassment and assault, to the conversation around our most recent presidential election, it’s clear that we are at a potential turning point in our understanding of men’s roles in the world. In 2015, while training for a charity boxing match, McBee embarked on a mission to uncover how to live as a man while remaining conscious of his privilege, supportive of the women in his life, and aligned with his most authentic self. Interweaving research and analysis with the story of his training, McBee traces the relationship between masculinity and violence and explores how we can move, together, toward a healthier idea of what it means to be a man.

McBee is in conversation with Ann Friedman, a freelance journalist who writes about gender, media, technology, and culture. She also co-hosts a podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, with Aminatou Sow.

Adam Cayton-Holland, "TRAGEDY PLUS TIME"

From Adam Cayton-Holland, one of Variety’s “10 Comics to Watch,” comes a “heartfelt and brilliant” (Patton Oswalt) memoir—Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir about the author’s beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking relationship with his younger sister and the depression that took her life.

Both a moving tribute to a lost sibling and an inspiring meditation on mental illness, grief, and recovery, Tragedy Plus Time is an unsentimental, unexpectedly funny, and incredibly honest love letter to every family that has ever felt messy, complicated, or (even momentarily) magnificent. In the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Truth & Beauty, this memoir offers a tender look at the bonds that hold a family together and the difficult truth that you can’t always save the person you love.