Skylight Books Podcast Series

Tom Macher, "HALFWAY"

In his late teens Tom Macher rebelled against a world that seemed stacked against him. Raised in a broken family and estranged from an absentee father suffering with AIDS, Macher turned to alcohol to escape the painful loneliness of his reality.

Macher captures the trials of sobriety—suicide, death, recovery—and the unusual beauty that forms in the bonds of those who suffer. In visceral, striking prose, he introduces the unforgettable characters he meets along the way, from a former child actor, a young teen struggling with schizophrenia, a tough-love addiction counselor, a sex-addicted social worker, to Matt O, who became Macher’s loyal friend and wingman. Raw, disarming, frenetic, and subversive, Halfway is a brutally honest portrait of the world of down-and-out recovering alcoholics, and a story of how, in their darkest hour, these men create the bonds that form a family. 

Sara Saedi, "AMERICANIZED"

In Americanized, bright-eyed, straight-A student Sara Saedi uncovered a terrible secret at age thirteen: she was breaking the law simply by living in the United States. Only two years old when her parents fled Iran, she didn’t learn of her undocumented status until her older sister wanted to apply for an after-school job, but couldn’t because she didn’t have a Social Security number.

Fear of deportation kept Sara up at night, but it didn’t keep her from being a teenager. She desperately wanted a green card, along with clear skin, her own car, and a boyfriend. Americanized follows Sara’s progress toward getting her green card, but that’s only a portion of her experiences as an Iranian-“American” teenager. From discovering that her parents secretly divorced to facilitate her mother’s green card application to learning how to tame her unibrow, Sara pivots gracefully from the terrifying prospect that she might be kicked out of the country at any time to the almost-as- terrifying possibility that she might be the only one of her friends without a date to the prom.

Americanized combines the timely topic of immigration with a poignant and engaging voice that young readers won’t be able to put down!

Saedi is joined by Talia Gonzalez, actor and writer for television shows such as Teen Wolf and iZombie.

OBJECT LESSONS with Evan Kindley, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, and Anna Leahy

Bloomsbury's 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.

Join us for an evening with three Object Lessons authors: Evan Lindley (Questionnaire), Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (Personal Stereo) and Anna Leahy (Tumor). 

Leni Zumas, "RED CLOCKS"

Life, liberty and property: for every embryo.

This is the effect of the Personhood Amendment, passed by a new president with big ideas. Not only does the Personhood Amendment outlaw abortion (and threaten anyone involved in the act with a charge of second-degree murder), it also prohibits in vitro fertilization and adoption by unmarried persons. In Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, four women in Newville, Oregon, are left to navigate this new landscape: Ro, a biographer desperate to have a baby while writing the untold story of a female polar explorer; Susan, a mother trapped in suburbia with an extremely difficult husband; Mattie, an adopted teenager who finds herself pregnant and unwilling to allow her unborn child to wonder why it wasn’t wanted; and Gin, a forest-dwelling mender whose “witchcraft” somehow weaves its way into each woman’s life.

As the aftershocks of the Personhood Amendment wreak havoc in the small Oregon town, Gin is suddenly arrested for medical malpractice; and, in yet another echo of the past, a modern-day witch hunt ensues. As the trial begins, the town is faced with questions: What is a woman for? Who controls her body? What does it mean to become a mother? What is your place in the world if you choose not to have a child?

In a novel both vividly revolutionary and achingly familiar, Leni Zumas invites the reader to reexamine preconceived notions of power in a society where women’s bodies are controlled by the government. Through the eyes of high school teachers, stay-at-home mothers, aspiring marine biologists, and town misfits, Zumas wondrously paints the story of modern women reckoning with deeply conservative values.

Zumas is in conversation with Porochista Khakpour, author of the memoir Sick.

Sam Graham-Felsen, "GREEN"

Boston, 1992. David Greenfeld is one of the few white kids at the Martin Luther King Middle School. Everybody clowns him, girls ignore him, and his hippie parents won't even buy him a pair of Nikes, let alone transfer him to a private school. Unless he tests into the city's best public high school--which, if practice tests are any indication, isn't likely--he'll be friendless for the foreseeable future.

Nobody's more surprised than Dave when Marlon Wellings sticks up for him in the school cafeteria. Mar's a loner from the public housing project on the corner of Dave's own gentrifying block, and he confounds Dave's assumptions about black culture: He's nerdy and neurotic, a Celtics obsessive whose favorite player is the gawky, white Larry Bird. Together, the two boys are able to resist the contradictory personas forced on them by the outside world, and before long, Mar's coming over to Dave's house every afternoon to watch vintage basketball tapes and plot their hustle to Harvard. But as Dave welcomes his new best friend into his world, he realizes how little he knows about Mar's. Cracks gradually form in their relationship, and Dave starts to become aware of the breaks he's been given--and that Mar has not.

Infectiously funny about the highs and lows of adolescence, and sharply honest in the face of injustice, Sam Graham-Felsen's debut Green is a wildly original take on the struggle to rise in America.

Susanna Fogel, "NUCLEAR FAMILY"

“Your Grandma Rose Has Some Questions about Your Interracial Relationship”

So starts one of the letters in the dynamic debut novel Nuclear Family: A Tragicomic Novel in Letters by filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to Julie, a heroine we never meet, we get to know her and her increasingly unique family through their check-ins: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.

Eleanor Henderson, "THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT"

Eleanor Henderson’s bestselling debut novel Ten Thousand Saints was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. It was deemed “fierce, devoted and elegiac,” and Ann Patchett said, “Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination.” In her forthcoming novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight, Henderson boldly returns to the page with a story inspired by those she heard about the small town in South Georgia her father grew up in, and combines the emotional acuity of her earlier work with a fresh take on big, important themes.

Henderson is joined by Edan Lepucki, author of the novels California and Woman No. 17.

Matthew Zapruder, "WHY POETRY"

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry--and poetry alone--can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.

Mr. Zapruder is joined by David L. Ulin, author of the novel Ear to the Ground.

BEN LOORY READS FROM HIS NEW BOOK TALES OF FALLING AND FLYING

Ben Loory returns with a second collection of timeless tales, inviting us to enter his worlds of whimsical fantasy, deep empathy, and playful humor, in the signature voice that drew readers to his highly praised first collection. In stories that eschew literary realism, Loory's characters demonstrate richly imagined and surprising perspectives, whether they be dragons or swordsmen, star-crossed lovers or long-lost twins, restaurateurs dreaming of Paris or cephalopods fixated on space travel. In propulsive language that brilliantly showcases Loory's vast imagination, Tales of Falling and Flying expands our understanding of how fiction can work.

Appealing to the fans of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi writers like Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, and Philip Pullman, as well as contemporary literary powerhouses like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Helen Oyeyemi, Tales of Falling and Flying expands our understanding of how fiction can work and is sure to cement Loory’s reputation as one of the most innovative short-story writers working today.

Praise for Tales of Falling and Flying

“Ben Loory’s stories are little gifts, strange and moving and wonderfully human. I devoured this book in one sitting.” —Ransom Riggs, author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

“Russell Edson’s new protégé, or Steven Millhauser, distilled into tea. Meet, or re-meet Ben Loory, whose preposterous, friendly stories can’t help but charm. They are so bizarrely readable they don’t even feel like they’re made of words.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Parables, dark fables, quirky flash fictions—call them what you will, Ben Loory has perfected the form and in Tales of Falling and Flying proves once again he can disturb a little and entertain a lot. Easily read, not easily forgotten.”—Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and The Southern Reach Trilogy

“To read a Ben Loory story is to slip through a portal into an adjacent dimension. To learn—with brevity and clarity—the laws of this universe next door, new rules of logic and contradiction and truth. And, in the end, to be left with the disturbing and wondrous feeling of having never left home at all.” —Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Ben Loory is a wonder. I'd like to curl up inside his marvelous head and canoodle with a besotted squid, swallow a tiny dragon, levitate with Death and fall in love with the Eiffel Tower, and after reading these sublime stories-- slyly funny, melancholy and deeply weird-- I suppose I have, and it was fantastic.”—Elissa Schappell

“Equal parts Beckett and Twilight Zone . . . Perfect for reading on strange beaches and by oddly shaped swimming pools. Fits right in your pocket or purse for emergency doses of the charming and weird.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

Ben Loory is the author of the collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, and a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review, been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts, and performed live at WordTheatre in Los Angeles and London. A graduate of Harvard University and the American Film Institute MFA program in screenwriting, Loory lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Event date: 

Thursday, September 7, 2017 - 7:30pm

LUCY IVES READS FROM HER NOVEL IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD WITH AMINA CAIN

(Podcast editor's note: The Q&A segment for this event took place off-mic for the most part and, despite our best efforts, the audio is difficult to hear at times.)

A witty, urbane, and sometimes shocking debut novel, set in a hallowed New York museum, in which a co-worker’s disappearance and a mysterious map change a life forever

Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother–the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro–wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze. 

But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella–a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)–on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your brain and heart intact.

Praise for Impossible Views of the World

“An art historical mystery that will interest fans of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, with a narrator equal parts intellectual, ironic, and cool…Scintillating…A diversion and a pleasure, this novel leaves you feeling smarter and hipper than you were before.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Stella is like Hannah Horvath from Girls—smart, with an equal tendency toward snark and introspection—living in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The novel sends up the museum world, with pretentious art folks courting corporate dollars and the usual office politics, but maintains a sense of something larger, even magical, working in the background.”—Booklist

“The charm and energy of Impossible Views of the World rest in Ives’s uncanny eye for the subtle tells of romance, the idiosyncrasies of the NYC young, and the details of 19th-century furniture and art…A clever curatorial mystery, a love-gone-wrong rom-com or a sharp-witted story of a young New York woman, Impossible Views of the World is way more fun than a rainy afternoon in the American Objects wing of a cavernous museum.” —Shelf Awareness

“[A] smart and singular debut novel…Ives maximizes her story’s humor with subtlety; a line here and there is enough to call attention to the absurdity of, for instance, the museum’s corporate benefactor’s attempt to secure the world’s water rights. She also isn’t afraid to make her heroine unlikable, which works in the novel’s favor…odd and thoroughly satisfying.” — Publishers Weekly 

“I first knew Lucy Ives’s work as a poet, and to have her prose is a gift, too. The detailed novel she’s built with such authenticity, wit, and feeling is remarkable for its vitality, insights, and lyrical view of a changing world.” — Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of White Girls

“This book was written by a rampaging, mirthful genius. It stands before me like a runestone, magical, mysterious—an esoteric juggernaut masquerading as a ‘debut novel.’ During the days I spent reading it, I said goodbye to all else.” — Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

“There are abundant pleasures to be found in Lucy Ives’s debut novel about art curation, corporate control, and utopia (among many other subjects and digressions), but the best is the poetic, elegant intelligence of its narration, vocalized by Stella Krakus, whose every sentence wryly climbs from the ridiculous to the sublime.”  — Teddy Wayne, author of Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“Lucy Ives, a deeply smart and painstakingly elegant writer, wins the prize with this intricate, droll, stylish book—at once a mystery novel, a romantic comedy, a tricky essay on aesthetics, an exposé of art-world foibles, and a diary of emotional distress.  With sharp phrases, uncanny plot-turns, and mise-en-abymes galore, this mesmerizing tale radiates the haute irreality of Last Year at Marienbad and the dreamy claustrophobia of The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, this time for adults only.” —Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s and Other Essays

Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including The Hermit and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.

Amina Cain is the author of the short story collection Creature, out with Dorothy, a Publishing Project. Her stories and essays have appeared in BOMB, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and Full Stop, among other places. She lives in Los Angeles

Event date: 

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - 7:30pm

MCSWEENEY'S 50TH ISSUE RELEASE PARTY

Join us for release party for Issue 50 of TIMOTHY McSWEENEY’S QUARTERLY CONCERN. To celebrate our 50th issue, we’ve put together a guaranteed show stopper, with stories, essays, treatises, manifestos, letters, comics, and illustrated travel diaries from fifty different contributors. There’s stunning new work from writers who we’ve long published — Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Davis, Sherman Alexie, Etgar Keret, Sheila Heti, Diane Williams, Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, Steven Millhauser (among many others) — and fantastic new writing from authors who we’ve long admired, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Thomas McGuane, Kevin Young, and Carrie Brownstein. The physical object that will contain all this great work will be a sturdy and beautiful hardcover book— something to behold and something to keep. Plus, the dust jacket folds out into a poster by Tucker Nichols that can gaze down at you from above your breakfast nook, bathtub, gift wrapping station, or wherever you’d like to be reminded of 50 glorious issues of the McSweeney’s Quarterly.

Readers include: 
Kevin Moffett
Corinna Vallianatos
Sarah Walker
Carson Mell
Brian Evenson

 

 Event date:

Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - 7:30pm

BRANDY COLBERT READS FROM HER YA NOVEL LITTLE & LION AND STEPHANIE KUEHN READS FROM HER YA NOVEL WHEN I AM TRHOUGH WITH YOU

When Suzette comes home to Los Angeles from her boarding school in New England, she isn’t sure if she’ll ever want to go back. L.A. is where her friends and family are (along with her crush, Emil). And her stepbrother, Lionel, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, needs her emotional support.

But as she settles into her old life, Suzette finds herself falling for someone new . . . the same girl her brother is in love with. When Lionel’s disorder spirals out of control, Suzette is forced to confront her past mistakes and find a way to help her brother before he hurts himself—or worse.

When I Am Through with You (Dutton Books for Young Readers)

“This isn’t meant to be a confession. Not in any spiritual sense of the word. Yes, I’m in jail at the moment. I imagine I’ll be here for a long time, considering. But I’m not writing this down for absolution and I’m not seeking forgiveness, not even from myself. Because I’m not sorry for what I did to Rose. I’m just not. Not for any of it.”

Ben Gibson is many things, but he’s not sorry and he’s not a liar. He will tell you exactly about what happened on what started as a simple school camping trip in the mountains. About who lived and who died. About who killed and who had the best of intentions. But he’s going to tell you in his own time. Because after what happened on that mountain, time is the one thing he has plenty of.

When I Am Through With You is a gripping story of survival and the razor’s-edge difference between perfect cruelty and perfect love. 

Brandy Colbert is the author of the young adult novel Pointe, which was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, the Chicago and Los Angeles public libraries, and Bank Street, as well as a Popular Paperback by the American Library Association. Her short fiction and essays have been published in several critically acclaimed anthologies, and her next novel, Little & Lion, will be published in August 2017. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Stephanie Kuehn is the critically acclaimed author of four young adult novels, including Charm & Strange, which won the ALA's William C. Morris Award for best debut novel, and Complicit, which was named to YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list. She was also awarded the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her most recent novel, The Smaller Evil. Booklist has praised her work as "Intelligent, compulsively readable literary fiction with a dark twist." Stephanie lives in Northern California and is a post-doctoral fellow in clinical psychology.

Event date: 

Saturday, August 26, 2017 - 5:00pm

JARETT KOBEK READS FROM HIS NOVEL THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG WITH JAMES ST. JAMES

Jarett Kobek published his first novel, I Hate the Internet, last year with a small indie publisher and it immediately took on cult status. Kobek received a rave review from Dwight Garner in The New York Times, who described the novel “as a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil.” Jonathan Lethem declared Kobek “as riotous as Houellebecq,” and Bret Easton Ellis was photographed reading it in bed. Viking is thrilled to be publishing Kobek’s brilliant and epic follow-up novel, The Future Won't Be Long, a provocative, ecstatic story of friendship, sex, art, and ambition in the twilight days of New York City’s East Village (1986-1996).

The Future Won't Be Long centers on Adeline—featured years later in I Hate the Internet—a wealthy art student in New York City who chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat. The two begin a fiery friendship which propels them through a decade of New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, by the Tompkins Square Park riots, and by the rise of club kid culture. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby soon finds himself at the center of the club kid social scene, cavorting with Michael Alig and James St. James at The Tunnel, Limelight, and Alig’s infamous “Outlaw Party” at a midtown McDonald’s. As Adeline and Baby both develop into the artists they never expected to become, Kobek pays tribute to the last gasps of the gritty, drug-fueled scene of the East Village as gentrifiers begin to trickle in. Kobek, himself a graduate of NYU, writes with a native’s sensitivity to New York, especially about those who come here with hope and those who come to escape their pasts. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won't Be Long is a euphoric, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish American writer living in California. He is the author of the novel I Hate the Internet (2016) and the novella Atta (2011)

James St. James who was once dubbed a "celebutante" by Newsweek magazine, now leads a quiet, sedate existence in Los Angeles, far from the madness that he writes about. 

Event date: 

Thursday, August 17, 2017 - 7:30pm

TOM PERROTTA READS FROM HIS NEW NOVEL MRS. FLETCHER

A provocative and wildly funny look at parenthood, the empty nest, and sex in the suburbs.

Eve (the eponymous Mrs. Fletcher) is a single mother, divorced and raising her amiable but clueless son Brendan in the suburbs. When he heads off to college, they must both contend with life on their own. Eve takes a gender studies class, braves the local dating pool, and vastly expands her social–and sexual – circles. Brendan discovers that what impressed high school girls (being a jock, being popular) might not be so enticing to college women.

Along with Eve and Brendan, Perrotta introduces us to a cast of flawed but deeply sympathetic characters, many of whom are stretching themselves and enjoying it. There’s Amanda, Eve’s employee at the local senior center, beleaguered but doing her best to provide the seniors with stimulating programming (at times, a little too stimulating). There’s Margo, Eve’s transgender professor, whose dark personal history is belied by her ebullient nature. Amber, Brendan’s college girlfriend, is a softball-playing social justice warrior whose romantic impulses conflict with her politics. And then there’s Julian, a smart but troubled kid from Brendan’s class, whose life becomes entangled with both Brendan’s and Eve’s. Perrotta brings all these characters vividly to life with great generosity and compassion.

Most of all, though, Mrs. Fletcher is all about Eve. This is a coming of age novel in which the character who grows and changes is (refreshingly!) not an eighteen-year-old but a forty-six- year-old. Eve comes a long way, and her journey is a brilliant, funny story of sexual awakening in unexpected places.

Praise for Mrs. Fletcher

“From the thrill of learning of its existence, to the feverish turning of pages, to the contemplative afterglow that comes from having finished:  there’s nothing like a new Tom Perrotta novel. Mrs. Fletcher is all you dream it will be: hilarious, provocative, (a little too), relatable and every moment a joy ride.”— Maria Semple, bestselling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different

“Tom Perrotta has always been a smart, fearless writer, a wet-your- pants funny satirist who will in the very next sentence ambush you with genuine emotion.  Buckle your seat belt and surrender your dignity, because Mrs. Fletcher is a romp.”— Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofEmpire Falls

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of eight works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into critically acclaimed movies, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into an HBO series. He lives outside Boston.

Event date: 

Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - 7:30pm

LINDSAY HUNTER READS FROM HER NOVEL EAT ONLY WHEN YOU'RE HUNGRY WITH ROXANE GAY

A father searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts)

Achingly funny and full of feeling, Eat Only When You’re Hungry follows fifty-eight-year-old Greg as he searches for his son, GJ, an addict who has been missing for three weeks. Greg is bored, demoralized, obese, and as dubious of GJ’s desire to be found as he is of his own motivation to go looking. Almost on a whim, Greg embarks on a road trip to central Florida—a noble search for his son, or so he tells himself.

Greg takes us on a tour of highway and roadside, of Taco Bell, KFC, gas-station Slurpees, sticky strip-club floors, pooling sweat, candy wrappers and crumpled panes of cellophane and wrinkled plastic bags tumbling along the interstate. This is the America Greg knows, one he feels closer to than to his youthful idealism, closer even than to his younger second wife. As his journey continues, through drive-thru windows and into the living rooms of his alluring ex-wife and his distant, curmudgeonly father, Greg’s urgent search for GJ slowly recedes into the background, replaced with a painstaking, illuminating, and unavoidable look at Greg’s own mistakes—as a father, as a husband, and as a man.

Brimming with the same visceral regret and joy that leak from the fast food Greg inhales, Eat Only When You’re Hungry is a wild and biting study of addiction, perseverance, and the insurmountable struggle to change. With America’s desolate underbelly serving as her guide, Lindsay Hunter elicits a singular type of sympathy for her characters, using them to challenge our preconceived notions about addiction and to explore the innumerable ways we fail ourselves.

Praise for Eat Only When You're Hungry

"[A] commanding narrative . . . A savage tale of parenthood and squandered hope from an author whose unsparing eye never ceases to subvert the mundane." —Kirkus

"Hunter's absurd Floridian landscapes and darkly tender moments are keen and hilarious, exposing the complexities of addiction and an overweight man with a weak heart but unfailing love." —Booklist

"The frailties of the human body and the human heart are laid bare in Lindsay Hunter’s utterly superb novel Eat Only When You’re Hungry. There is real delicacy, tenderness, and intelligence with which Hunter tackles this portrait of a broken family of people who don’t realize just how broken they are until they are forced to confront the fractures between them and within themselves. With this novel, Hunter establishes herself as an unforgettable voice in American letters. Her work here, as ever, is unparalleled." —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

"This novel takes us on a road trip with an American Everyman into the heart of American hunger—for freedom, for connection, for junk food, for love. Hunter has a brilliant sense for the perfectly telling image, and her humor is so biting and smart it was almost a surprise, at the end of this engrossing book, to realize how thoroughly she had broken my heart.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

"Compassionate, claustrophobic, gut-wrenchingly observed, Eat Only When You’re Hungry probes the fine lines between hunger and addiction, addiction and desire. In perfectly nuanced prose, Lindsay Hunter observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unexpected, the unknown, the regretted, and, perhaps most important, the mundane." —Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s and the novel Ugly Girls. Originally from Florida, she now lives in Chicago with her husband, sons, and dogs.

Photo by Liliane Calfee

Roxane Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Bad Feminist; Ayiti, a multi-genre collection, the collection of stories Difficult Women and the memoir, Hunger. She is at work on a comic book in Marvel’s Black Panther series. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, the New York Times, the Guardian, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors. She splits her time between Indiana and Los Angeles. She can be found online at www.roxanegay.com and on Twitter @rgay.

Event date: 

Thursday, August 10, 2017 - 7:30pm