Skylight Books Podcast Series

Attica Locke, "HEAVEN, MY HOME"

9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes black.

Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.

An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas - and some of the era's racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy's grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.

Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.

Attica Locke proves that the acclaim and awards for Bluebird, Bluebird were justly deserved, in this thrilling new novel about crimes old and new.

Jacqueline Woodson, "RED AT THE BONE" w/ Kara Brown

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Jacqueline Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Woodson is in conversation with Kara Brown, writer, speaker and co-host of Crooked Media's pop culture podcast, Keep It!.

Annalee Newitz, "THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE" w/ Sean Carroll

In a modern-day United States just a step away from our own, time travel is possible – in fact, it has existed for as long as humanity itself. Jumping into the past is simple, and scientists say that altering the timeline is almost impossible. But Tess, an idealistic geology professor, has figured out how to use time travel to try to undo a horrible injustice in the past whose effects are still being felt in her own time. Meanwhile, in 1992, teenage riot grrl Beth’s ordinary life is about to become a tangle of toxic friendship and murder. And across the timeline, a secret war is brewing as a group of men attempt to destroy time travel. If they succeed, only a small elite will have the power to shape past, present, and future. Tess and Beth are part of this hidden war that stretches back millions of years. But with the help of unlikely allies from times past and times yet to come, they may be able to save each other—and build a different future.

The Future of Another Timeline author Annalee Newitz is in conversation with Sean Carroll, Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Carolina De Robertis, "CANTORAS"

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena--five cantoras, women who "sing"--somehow, miraculously, find one another and then, together, discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested--by their families, lovers, society, and one another--as they fight to live authentic lives. 

A genre-defining novel and Carolina De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit

Susan Steinberg, "MACHINE" w/ Sarah Manguso

Susan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers—both locals and wealthy out-of-towners—during a single summer at the shore. After a local girl drowns, the narrator tries to piece together what happened and struggles to find mooring in the aftermath. In formally daring prose, Steinberg captures the violence of desire and its reverberations. The restless rhythm of the novel propels a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel--relentless and bold--that only Susan Steinberg could have written. 

Steinberg is in conversation with Sarah Manguso, the author of seven books including Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay.

Drew Minh, "NEON EMPIRE"

Imagine a city fueled entirely by social media. Rising out of the American desert, this city is a real-world manifestation of a social media network where fame-hungry desperados compete for likes and followers. The bloodier and more daring posts pay off the most. As crime rises, no one stands to gain more than the city’s architects—and, of course, the shareholders who make the place possible. 

This multiple-POV novel follows three characters as they navigate the city’s underworld: Cedric Travers, a has-been Hollywood director; A’rore, the city’s lead social media influencer whose star is fading; and Sacha Villanova, a tech and culture reporter.

Bold, colorful, and seductive, Neon Empire is a radically inventive near-future thriller in the mold of Black Mirror or Altered Carbon.

Patrick Coleman, "THE CHURCHGOER" w/ Tod Goldberg

In Mark Haines’s former life, he was an evangelical youth pastor, a role model, and a family man—until he abandoned his wife, his daughter, and his beliefs. Now he’s marking time between sunny days surfing and dark nights working security at an industrial complex. His isolation is broken when Cindy, a charming twenty-two-year old drifter he sees hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway, hustles him for a breakfast and a place to crash—two cynical kindred spirits.

Then his co-worker is murdered in a robbery gone wrong and Cindy disappears on the same night. Haines knows he should let it go and return to his safe life of solitude. Instead, he’s driven to find out where Cindy went, under stranger and stranger circumstances. Soon Mark is chasing leads, each one taking him back into a world where his old life came crashing down—into the seedier side of southern California’s drug trade and ultimately into the secrets of an Evangelical megachurch where his past and his future are about to converge. What begins as an investigation becomes a haunting mystery and a psychological journey both for Mark, and for the elusive young stranger he won’t let get away.

Set in the early 2000s, The Churchgoer is a gripping noir, a quiet subversion of the genre, and a powerful meditation on belief, morality, and the nature of evil in contemporary life.

Author Patrick Coleman is in conversation with Ted Goldberg, author of the novel Gangster Nation.

Tupelo Hussman, "gods with a little g" w/ Jim Krusoe

A vibrant, powerful literary novel, gods with a little g is the story of Helen Dedleder, a teen trapped in politically bright red and extremely religious town, Rosary, California, with a widower father who is a true believer. Helen’s mom lost her battle with cancer when Helen was a child and her dad is mired in his grief, lost to the consolation prize of prayer, or so he seems until he finds love with the mother of the leader of Rosary’s rebels (the Dickheads), who also happens to be Helen’s secret crush. Helen tries to escape her father’s burgeoning romance and her own confusing feelings for the king of the Dickheads by focusing on her work apprenticing her aunt, the county’s lone psychic and spiritual rebel. 

When Helen begins her first real friendship with Win and Rainbolene, siblings just arrived in Rosary with an urgent desire to depart—Rain in part because she’ll finally be able to get the hormones she needs to full become herself—she starts to see a future for herself for the first time outside of the tea leaves she tries and fails to read under her aunt’s tutelage, though it may be too late. 

Set in a near version of the current political apocalypse, gods with a little g is about how being a teenager is an apocalypse all its own: there must be destruction for there to be hope. 

Author Tupelo Hussman is in conversation with Jim Krusoe, who  has published six novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions.

Jia Tolentino, "TRICK MIRROR" w/ Emma Carmichael

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die.

Tolentino is joined in conversation with writer and editor Emma Carmichael, 

J. Ryan Stradal, "THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA"

Edith Magnusson's rhubarb pies are famous in the Twin Cities--they were named the third-best in the state of Minnesota and St. Anthony-Waterside Nursing Home has quickly becomes the hottest dinner ticket in town. Still, she lays awake wondering how her life might have been different if her father hadn't left their family farm to her sister Helen, a decision that split their family in two. With the proceeds from the farm, her sister, Helen Blotz, built her husband Orval's family soda business into the top selling brewery in Minnesota. She singlehandedly created the light beer revolution and made their corporate motto ubiquitous: "Drink lots, it's Blotz." But Helen dismisses IPAs as a fad, and the Blotz fortune begins its inevitable decline. Soon, though, she finds a potential savior that's surprisingly close to home. . .

Diana Winter earns a shot at learning the beer business from the ground up just as the IPA revolution begins. The stakes couldn't be higher: just as she's launching her own brewpub, she's due to deliver a baby girl. When the unthinkable happens, it's up to Grandma Edith--and a delightfully surprising cadre of grandmother friends--to secure the next generation's chances for a better future. Can Grandma Edith's Rhubarb Pie In A Bottle Ale save Diana's fledgling brewery, and change their hearts and fortunes forever? 

The Lager Queen of Minnesota serves up a cast of lovable, quintessentially Midwestern characters eager to make their mark in a world that's often stacked against them. In this deeply affecting, humorous, emotional family saga, resolution can take generations, but when it finally comes, we're surprised, moved, and delighted.

Ruchika Tomar, "A PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS" w/ Xuan Juliana Wang

In her debut novel, A Prayer for Travelers, Ruchika Tomar melds artful prose with a haunting narrative creating an arresting and electric portrait of the dangers of girlhood in the American desert west and how small towns try–– and often fail–– to protect their own. Already hailed by Lit Hub as “an indelible portrait of love, grief, and trauma” and one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019, A Prayer for Travelers illuminates the heat and fury of girlhood and one’s own memory.

The Nevada landscape––a sun-steamed, desert West that you can practically feel blistering off the page––serves as a harsh yet glittery, gritty yet stunning backdrop for this coming-of-age saga. Cale is our guide: a young bookish loner with a voice as markedly determined as it is vulnerable. Set adrift for the first time in her life, Cale begins waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penelope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate and all-around hustler. Penny exposes Cale to the reality that exists beyond their small town and the girls become inseparable until one terrifying act of violence shatters their world. When Penny vanishes without a trace, Cale sets off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her friend.

Told in short, deftly interwoven chapters, the novel eases the story into a disorienting, devastating unraveling and seamlessly blends together a portrait of a memory under siege and a girl, unflinchingly, reclaiming herself. On the structure of the novel Tomar says, “I began thinking about the way I or my friends tell stories—elliptically, episodically. When you’re telling a story out loud it’s very hard to remember every detail in order. In particular, if you’ve ever had to tell a story of trauma, or hold one for one of your friends, you know just how ragged and disjointed that experience is. The nature of trauma and grief is fracturing.”

Tomar is in conversation with Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the debut short story collection, Home Remedies.

Chia-Chia Lin, "THE UNPASSING" w/ Jamel Brinkley

A searing debut novel that explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through an immigrant family in Alaska

In Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.

Routine takes over for the grieving family: the siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt ridden after Ruby’s death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in grave harm to a little boy. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges.

With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

Lin is in conversation with Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man: Stories.

Sehba Sarwar, "BLACK WINGS"

Spanning two continents, Sehba Sarwar's Black Wings is the story of Laila and Yasmeen, a mother and daughter, struggling to meet across the generations, cultures, and secrets that separate them. Their shared grief, as well as the common bond of unhappiness in their marriages, allows them to reconnect after seventeen years of frustration, anger and misunderstandings.

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...