Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Friday Jul 06, 2018
Tavi Gevinson, "ROOKIE ON LOVE"
Friday Jul 06, 2018
Friday Jul 06, 2018
Tavi Gevinson returns to start the New Year off right with Rookie on Love, an anthology about the heart's most powerful emotion. Featuring exclusive, never-before-seen essays, poems, comics, and interviews from contributors like Jenny Zhang, Emma Straub, Hilton Als, Janet Mock, John Green, Rainbow Rowell, Gabourey Sidibe, and many more, this collection is the perfect reflection on love in its many forms.
Friday Jun 29, 2018
Sam Graham-Felsen, "GREEN"
Friday Jun 29, 2018
Friday Jun 29, 2018
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.
Monday Jun 25, 2018
Clara Parkes, "A STASH OF ONE'S OWN"
Monday Jun 25, 2018
Monday Jun 25, 2018
A Stash of One’s Own: Knitters on Loving, Living With, and Letting Go of Yarn is an addictive-to-read anthology that celebrates yarn—specifically, the knitter’s reputation for acquiring it in large quantities and storing it away in what’s lovingly referred to as a “stash.”
The stories in Clara Parke's A Stash of One’s Own represent and provide validation for knitters’ wildly varying perspectives on yarn, from holding zero stash, to stash-busting, to stockpiling masses of it—and even including it in estate plans. These tales are for all fiber artists, spinners, dyers, crafters, crocheters, sheep farmers, shop owners, beginning knitters to yarn experts, and everyone who has ever loved a skein too hard to let it go.
Saturday Jun 02, 2018
BEN LOORY READS FROM HIS NEW BOOK TALES OF FALLING AND FLYING
Saturday Jun 02, 2018
Saturday Jun 02, 2018
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.