Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Friday Dec 04, 2020
SKYLIT: Nana-Ama Danquah, "ACCRA NOIR" w/ Anniwaa Buachie
Friday Dec 04, 2020
Friday Dec 04, 2020
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.
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
SKYLIT: Yxta Maya Murray, "THE WORLD DOESN"T WORK THAT WAY, BUT IT COULD"
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
Thursday Sep 03, 2020
The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray’s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret.
The characters in The World Doesn't Work That Way, but it Could grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. The stories explore not only our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil, but also reveal our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.
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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.
Friday May 15, 2020
LIVE ON ZOOM: Chelsea Bieker, Aja Gabel, Nina Renata Aron
Friday May 15, 2020
Friday May 15, 2020
Join us for a Skylight virtual event! Chelsea Bieker, Aja Gabel and Nina Renata Aron will talk about their journeys to publication, the current literary landscape, and moms in all their forms.
Order Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
Order The Ensemble by Aja Gabel
Order Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls by Nina Renata Aron
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Monday May 04, 2020
Kathryn Scanlan, "THE DOMINANT ANIMAL" w/ Brian Evenson
Monday May 04, 2020
Monday May 04, 2020
In The Dominant Animal, compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased, rendering both their syntax and subjects wondrous and strange. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound creates a thrum of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters—human and animal—eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another.
With exquisite control, Kathryn Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence—and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open—rather than tie—up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says—and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.
Scanlan is in conversation with Brian Evensen, author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019).
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WRITEGIRL 4 Group Reading
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
WriteGirl is an innovative nonprofit organization that empowers teen girls through creative writing. Join us for this special chance to hear WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original poetry and prose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be surprised—you won’t want to miss it!
In WriteGirl’s new award-winning anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl, 180 teens share stories, poems, memoirs, scripts and songs about their hopes and fears, loves and losses, amigas and pan dulce, as they navigate a challenging present and uncertain future with determination and grace. Their words inspire reflection and ignite action. The book includes a Creativity Starter Kit with 15 fresh writing activities to inspire young writers. This Moment is available for purchase at Skylight Books.
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
Claire Rudy Foster, "SHINE OF THE EVER"
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
Tuesday Jan 21, 2020
By turns tender and punk-tough, Shine of the Ever is a literary mixtape of queer voices out of 1990s Portland. This collection of short stories explores what binds a community of queer and trans people as they negotiate love, screwing up, and learning to forgive themselves for being young and, sometimes, foolish.
Monday Nov 11, 2019
Jonathan Blum, "THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES"
Monday Nov 11, 2019
Monday Nov 11, 2019
The Usual Uncertainties—Jonathan Blum's highly anticipated first collection—is storytelling at its finest. In precise, elegant prose, these stories follow characters and communities often consigned to the edge of the frame: a community college dropout, a geriatric care manager, a square dance bar mitzvah, a Scrabble club, an entrepreneurial Thai immigrant, and a South Florida country club. With echoes of Leonard Michaels, Mavis Gallant, and Lore Segal, Blum explores the ways our divergent histories tether us together and at times push us completely apart. The Usual Uncertainties revels in the persistent human struggle to love with abandon and marks a radiant voice in American short fiction.
Tuesday Nov 05, 2019
Mimi Lok, "LAST OF HER NAME" w/ Amelia Gray
Tuesday Nov 05, 2019
Tuesday Nov 05, 2019
Mimi Lok's Last of Her Name is an eye-opening story collection about the intimate, interconnected lives of diasporic women and the histories they are born into. Set in a wide range of time periods and locales, including '80s UK suburbia, WWII Hong Kong and contemporary urban California, the book features an eclectic cast of outsiders: among them, an elderly housebreaker, wounded lovers and kung-fu fighting teenage girls. Last of Her Name offers a meditation on female desire and resilience, family and the nature of memory.
Lok is in conversation with Amelia Gray, author of five books, most recently Isadora.
Tuesday Aug 06, 2019
Made in L.A., Vol. 2: Chasing the Elusive Dream
Tuesday Aug 06, 2019
Tuesday Aug 06, 2019
The Made in L.A. indie author co-op presents contributors to the latest installment of their annual fiction anthology series, Made in L.A. Vol. 2: Chasing the Elusive Dream. Join a publication party with local authors who have a passion for writing about their home.
While the first volume was rooted in Los Angeles, this second volume focuses on goals, dreams, and the distant horizon. It explores the fantasies people carry with them to L.A., as well as the dreams Angelenos dream while surrounded by this vast and evolving city.
This anthology series showcases a diverse range of voices and genres. Like the City of Angels where these stories were born, nothing is off-limits. Literary or contemporary, fantasy or science fiction, each story in this volume invites you to view this urban landscape through a different lens. The evening will include discussions about what we find inspiring about Los Angeles, how our stories came about, and a behind-the-scenes peek at indie publishing and the DIY production of hyper-local literary culture.
Monday Jul 08, 2019
PEN America: Emerging Voices Meet & Greet
Monday Jul 08, 2019
Monday Jul 08, 2019
PEN America presents the 2019 Emerging Voices Fellows, alumni, and mentors in conversation on the 2020 application cycle at Skylight Books.
The evening will include summer cocktails, short readings, a fellowship overview, and audience Q&A. Featuring Judy Choi, Anthony Hoang, Fajer Alexander Khansa, T.K. Lê, Dare Williams, and Fellowship Manager Amanda Fletcher.
Monday Jun 24, 2019
Ted Chiang, "EXHALATION"
Monday Jun 24, 2019
Monday Jun 24, 2019
From the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Life and Others—the basis for the Academy Award –nominated film Arrival—comes a groundbreaking new collection of short fiction: nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories. These are tales that tackle some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only Ted Chiang could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.
Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.
Friday Jun 07, 2019
Friday Jun 07, 2019
Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is one of the most anticipated SF&F collections of recent years. Sarah Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula award wins.
The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present. The journey is the thing as Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.
Pinsker is in conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse, a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Xuan Juliana Wang, "HOME REMEDIES" w/ Justin Torres
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
With evocative writing and impressive range, Xuan Juliana Wang captures the heartbeat of this generation, the Chinese millennial, in Home Remedies. Creative, ambitious, messy and often reckless, Wang’s unforgettable characters are on a quest for every kind of freedom—artistic, familial, individual, sexual, psychological. A pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics have trained together, living and moving as one body, for half their lives, only to discover themselves through divergence. A Chinese-American student in Paris unwittingly becomes the fashion world’s next “it” girl. An immigrant father attempts to understand his fully American daughter through the logic of algorithms. A group of artists drift through Beijing in search of something—meaning, their next muse, the next thrill.
These are stories of lives on the cusp of change: people who are testing the limits of who they are, who they wish they were, and who they will one day be; in a world that is as vast and changing as their ambitions. Above all, these are sharp stories about the brand new face of Chinese youth, around the world, from an exceptionally talented literary writer.
Wang is in conversation with Justin Torres, author of We the Animals.
Monday Mar 11, 2019
UC Irvine MFA Student Reading
Monday Mar 11, 2019
Monday Mar 11, 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.
Monday Nov 05, 2018
Micah Perks, "TRUE LOVE AND OTHER DREAMS OF MIRACULOUS ESCAPE" w/ Ben Loory
Monday Nov 05, 2018
Monday Nov 05, 2018
Magical and funny, profound and seductive, the linked stories in True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape explore the life-bending power of love. In these interwoven lives, ardent desire meets a keen sense of reality deep in the heart of progressive California. When Sadie opens a funky bookstore in Santa Cruz, she is swept off her feet by Daniel, a true-blue romantic—athletic, bookish, from Santiago, Chile. Their connection is heady and erotic, and it echoes through the love lives around them: from Harry Houdini’s first encounter with the widow Winchester to the threatening intimacy between a wife and her brother to a grumpy teenager who inspires her divorced parents. Years later, when Sadie and Daniel take an overdue trip to Paris, their blended family doesn't blend so well, sending them back to rediscover their roots. In these interconnected lives, the desire for passion is as strong as the desire to escape, and the terror of claustrophobic connection competes with the deepest human yearning. An intoxicating look at the complexity and simplicity of embracing and running from love. By the award-winning author of What Becomes Us, Micah Perks.
Perks is in conversation with Ben Loory, author of the collections Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day.